Thursday, July 29, 2004

The Doors- The End

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end

Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I'll never look into your eyes...again

Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free
Desperately in need...of some...stranger's hand
In a...desperate land

Lost in a Roman...wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain, yeah

There's danger on the edge of town
Ride the King's highway, baby
Weird scenes inside the gold mine
Ride the highway west, baby

Ride the snake, ride the snake
To the lake, the ancient lake, baby
The snake is long, seven miles
Ride the snake...he's old, and his skin is cold

The west is the best
The west is the best
Get here, and we'll do the rest

The blue bus is callin' us
The blue bus is callin' us
Driver, where you taken' us

The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he walked on down the hall
He went into the room where his sister lived, and...then he
Paid a visit to his brother, and then he
He walked on down the hall, and
And he came to a door...and he looked inside
Father, yes son, I want to kill you
Mother...I want to...fuck you

C'mon baby, take a chance with us
C'mon baby, take a chance with us
C'mon baby, take a chance with us
And meet me at the back of the blue bus
Doin' a blue rock
On a blue bus
Doin' a blue rock
C'mon, yeah

Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end

It hurts to set you free
But you'll never follow me
The end of laughter and soft lies
The end of nights we tried to die

This is the end

---

This phenomenal work of entrancing sound, chilling imagery and Oedipal fury began as something much less formidable - a lover's goodbye sung over some hypnotically pretty chords. But during their long nights at the London Fog and then the Whisky in the summer of 1966, The End became one of the songs they would stretch out in all directions with free-form improvisation.

As the musical scope increased, Jim started incorporating more enigmatic lyrics from his Venice notebooks, and began to use the band's shifting, dramatic musical interplay as a back-drop for his own free-form flights of poetry.

The Strip began to buzz with talk of the Doors' unfettered, wildly entertaining shows at the Whisky, when Jac Holzman first saw the band. He was not immediately impressed, but something drew him back night after night, until on the fourth night, he approached the band with a recording offer.

Two nights after the Doors were signed to Elektra, they had another show at the Whisky - their first as the hot new band with a brand new record deal. Jim never showed. At the conclusion of the first set, Ray and John walked over to Jim's hotel room.

At first, they thought Jim wasn't there, but then heard some shuffling around, and demanded that he open the door. Allegedly, Jim opened the door and greeted them with the words 'ten thousand mics' - meaning presumably, that he had ingested roughly 40 times the "average" LSD dose.

Ray and John helped Jim get dressed, which proved no easy task, but finally he was trundled into a car and taken over to the Whisky.

Jim had a rough time getting through most of the set that night, but when they reached The End, he was suddenly in synch, proceeding to give one of the most riveting performances of his career.

When he came to the extended middle section, he performed the eerie Oedipal drama which would become the song's hallmark for the first time. The nearly silent crowd watched intently as Jim built to his crescendo.

Avid rock fan Paul Body had been catching the Doors at the Whisky all summer, and he was there that night. He remembers: "When Morrison said 'Father? Yes son, I want to kill you. Mother? I want to. . .fuck you!!' my buddy and I looked at each other and asked 'Did he say what we think he said?'" Body remembers that the crowd didn't quite know what to make of the performance. "Quite a few people just couldn't believe he'd really said it, and others just tried to pretend it wasn't a big deal. The teenybopper scene had faded out, Dylan was on the charts, and I guess some people thought the next logical step was 'Mother, I want to fuck you.'"

This logic obviously escaped Whisky owner Elmer Valentine, who promptly fired the Doors after the show.

While Morrison may have created the Oedipal section of The End on stage that night at the Whisky, the myth of Oedipus (who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother, and when made aware of that fact, ashamedly plucked his own eyes out), there are earlier indications of Jim's fascination with the myth.

In the winter of 1965, Judy Raphael was a UCLA film student and friend of Ray Manzarek. She was trying to get a term paper finished one night when she had a visit from Ray, Jim and another UCLA buddy, John Debella. "They'd all been drinking at the Lucky U and Jim had gotten himself all doped up on someone's asthma medication. My paper was supposed to be about the history of documentary film, and all Jim kept saying was 'I think it should be about Oedipus - Kill the father. Fuck the mother.' He went off on that until I made them take him away."

After the Whisky show, the Doors continued to play The End with the Oedipal section, and it never lost any of its power to shock and transform the listeners.

Many of the phrases and images in The End remain as enigmatic as when Jim first sang them, but Los Angeles native, poet, journalist and record producer Harvey Kubernick can shed some light on one piece of the puzzle. Kubernick doesn't know where the "ancient lake" is, or what the "seven mile snake" looks like, but he does know about "the blue bus".

"Back then, we all had a sense of regional pride when we heard Jim Morrison say 'Meet me at the back of the blue bus.' We knew that the blue bus was the bus that went down Pico Boulevard - the bus that took us to the beach for a quarter. I believe it was the number 7. As young fans of the Doors music, we didn't talk too much about Freud or Oedipus, but we got very excited every time Jim mentioned that blue bus."

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