My take on "The End" by the Doors

"The End" is one of the most famous songs ever, but I think there is more to it than most people guess.

There is the infamous moment in the song where Jim Morrison repeats the f-word several times and the music simulates sexual intercourse. But who is the sexual intercourse with?

Well, there is the line "Father, I want to kill you. Mother, I want to ...". It is not told what he wants, but we can guess.

The next line is interesting though: "Come on, baby, take a chance with us", which is repeated twice and then followed by "And meet me at the back of the blue bus doin' a blue rug, on a blue bus, doin' a come on yeah".

Now who is saying this? The father? Certainly not. So it is the mother. She meets him at the back of the blue bus where they have sexual intercourse.

So my take is: This song is not just about wishing to have sex with the mother, it actually happens

that's really funny 

 

To convince his mother to willingly have sex with him.

Reading about this piece of music, and how much trouble it got the band into on the book "No One Here Gets Out Alive" ... I am not sure that this is an Oedipal thing, although it could be knowing how literary and educated members of The Doors were, and being in a well known school that only accepts the better students around!

The thing that makes this song important for me, is not the string of thoughts that we see here ... it is that the band got thrown out of the Whiskey, and basically "fired" for extending and doing this song ... and I honestly think that this was an analogy for folks to get behind the band, not the Whiskey or anything else ... in that this was the event that got noticed in all the rock press and immediately the band shot out to be known for its incredible stuff, and specially this piece, although according to the book there were many versions and some were longer and had more poetry right in the middle of it.

I don't know for sure that the lyrics of this song were/should be taken literally. Jim did not have a good time with his dad according to the book, but when his father was given a massive this and that, and there was a party, Jim's mother asked him to shave and cut his hair and Jim said no, and never went or showed up. The book suggests it was the last time he talked to his mother. Even though the book makes it clear that her husband becoming a big name in the military world, had a total opposite in the son in the rock world ... but the father had already "disowned" his son!

So, in the personal sense, the lyrics are on par with the reality except that I see one thing that might be weird ... the opposite of death is life, and we symbolize life with sex ... thus the two opposites in this example, and I am not sure that there was any kind of feeling in the song about the idea that we suggest here. 

But I tend to hold to the thought that the lyrics were made that way to get attention, and to rip apart the folks that were owning the clubs and specially the turkey at the Whiskey, who ended up taking quite a beating when The Doors made it huge, right on his doorstep and he could not see it! 

But the fact of the matter was, that it was Jim's presentation of the words that got the audience so into the whole thing that you could hear a pin drop!

I don't think that we will find a single band these days that can even hold a match to this kind of attention and performance. Mostly, these days, the rock fans, do not appreciate the importance of words and how they are used, because they want their thrash, solo and scream ... and nothing else. But in those days, when The Doors played, many of us, were stone quiet ... it was like going to church, I guess you could say!