Written by In the summer of 1965, art student Mary Werbelow broke off her long-term relationship with her heartbroken boyfriend Jim Morrison. The pair had met on a beach in Clearwater, Florida three summers earlier, and when Morrison moved across the country to study film at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1964, Werbelow drove to The Golden State to be with him. Unfortunately, in the summer of 1965, another chance encounter on a beach would serve as a catalyst for the young lovers to part.
Ray Manzarek was another UCLA film school graduate in Morrison’s year group, and “40 days and 40 nights after we said our goodbyes after graduation” as he recalled in a 2013 interview with NPR, he struck up a conversation with his college acquaintance on Venice Beach. When Manzarek asked what Morrison has been up to since finishing college, he received the reply, “consuming a bit of LSD and writing songs”. Within an hour, the pair had decided to form a band, and even settled on a name for their new venture, The Doors.
That same summer, Werbelow, “a fox” in Manzarek’s memory, won the title of ‘Gazzari’s Go-Go Girl of 1965’ at the popular Sunset Strip nightclub, and began dreaming of making a career for herself in show business. Morrison wasn’t encouraging of his girlfriend’s new ambitions, and urged her to focus instead on her painting: in response, not unreasonably, Werbelow suggested that perhaps Morrison should focus on his studies, and should sign uo for a Master’s degree rather than wasting his time on his new band. This unwanted career advice didn’t go down well with Morrision, and soon enough, the pair’s three-year romance came to an end.
Within days, in rehearsals with his new band – featuring Ray Manzarek on keys, Robbie Krieger on guitar, and John Densmore on drums – Morrison began work on a good-bye song to his first true love. His initial lyrics were tender, heartfelt and sweet, if tinged with sadness.
“This is the end, beautiful friend,” he sang. “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.”
Originally, as Ray Manzarek recalls, The End was a simple two-and-a-half-minute love song. But when the band began playing live shows in local clubs, where they were contracted to play four or five 45-minute sets per night, the arrangement would stretch out, and Morrison began improvising poetry over the extended instrumental sections. One night, onstage at the Whisky A Go Go club on Sunset Boulevard, the singer broke into a new lyrical stream – “The killer awoke before dawn… ” which no-one in the band had heard before.
“And he comes to a room with his mother and father,” Manzarek recalled in an interview conducted for the Classic Albums series, reflecting on Morrison’s new spiel, “and he says, ‘Father? Yes son?I want to kill you. Mother…’ – and we know what’s coming, that he’s going to do Oedipus Rex. And sure enough, at the stage of the Whisky A Go Go, and the owners are going to freak, he says, ‘Mother, I want to…’ the F word… ‘all night long, baby!‘”
“We got fired,” Manzarek continued. “The owner of the Whisky came upstairs after that, and said, ‘That’s it, you dirty, filthy… ‘ He started swearing like a drunken sailor… just screaming at us. ‘You’re fired! You’re fired! Don’t ever come back to the Whisky A Go Go! You can’t say that about your mother!'”
It’s sufficiently complex and universal in its imagery that it could be almost anything
Jim Morrison
“When we recorded that song, Jim was on a huge dose of acid,” the keyboardist later told Vulture, thinking back on the day the song, now more than 11 minutes long, was committed to tape at Sunset Sound studios in Hollywood in August 1966.
According to legend, as Mick Wall recalled in a Classic Rock feature about the making of the record, during the recording of The End, at the height of his theatrical frenzy, Morrison spotted that engineer Bruce Botnick was watching a baseball game on TV, and promptly smashed it up before hurling it through the control room window. This, it transpires, was something of an exaggeration.
“It did not explode,” Botnick told Wall. “It did not catch on fire. He did not pick it up and throw it through the glass as Ray Manzarek said that he did. None of that happened. But he knocked it off and yes it went on the floor, and the tape continued. In between takes I walked out into the studio and got it and turned it off. And then we did a second take.”
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Whatever the facts, the mythology around the song soon began to take on a life of its own.
“To tell you the truth,” Morrison told Rolling Stone magazine in 1969, “every time I hear that song, it means something else to me. I really don’t know what I was trying to say. It just started out as a simple goodbye song. Probably just to a girl, but I could see how it could be goodbye to a kind of childhood. I really don’t know. I think it’s sufficiently complex and universal in its imagery that it could be almost anything you want it to be.”
In the same interview, Morrison recalled meeting a young woman who had been committed to the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute after a heavy drug trip, who told him that The End was “really a favorite of a lot of kids in her ward”.
He continued, “At first I thought: Oh, man… and this was after I talked with her for a while, saying it could mean a lot of things, kind of a maze or a puzzle to think about, everybody should relate it to their own situation. I didn’t realize people took songs so seriously and it made me wonder whether I ought to consider the consequences. That’s kind of ridiculous, because I do it myself; you don’t think of the consequences and you can’t.”
As a postscript, 10 years later, Francis Ford Coppola would famously use The End at the beginning of his Vietnam War-era masterpiece Apocalypse Now. Why? Apparently simply because the idea of having The End at the start of the movie amused him.
Perhaps it would have tickled Morrison too.
