The End - The Doors

The End is the Doors song that I cannot stop listening to. Maybe I’m sadomasochistic for torturing myself with eleven minutes of agony set to music but I love the song and find it lyrically and musically touching every time. I have a soft spot for the history of the fifties and sixties, and an extra soft spot for cowboys and the dying dream of the lawless West. These interests have lead me to many interesting pieces of literature, songs, and other counter-culture but one of the most impactful texts of all has been Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. I see a clear connection between the themes of the infamous novel and Morrison’s melancholic song. To me, The End is a song about the loss of the frontier and the frontier spirit of hope. Dreams of the West feature wide-open spaces in the promised land, but what has been promised? We want for and wait for an elusive “something” for an entire journey, and when we get to the destination, we don’t know what to make of it. We feel fundamentally disillusioned. Though The End was released in 1967, three years prior to the Grateful Dead’s Truckin’, it feels like this is Morrison’s twisted rebuttal to everything the Dead or the Pranksters stood for. And Jim was no Learyite either, this is the psychedelic rock and roll of sex and death, not Keyesian playfulness nor Learyite enlightenment. Here, the journeyer is in the back seat of the bus, not in control of himself nor the vehicle, merely a passenger and a voyeur through a dark passage. For such a person, their only friend is the end. Of course, all of this has still yet to tie in the Oedipus myth, which darkly permeates the song with an allusion to classical times as a sullen reminder that feelings of darkness and delusion are innately human and inseparable from our existence and psyche. For Morrison, to be dark is to be deep, one is either born into the light or the poetic night. This strange darkness is what I love most about the Doors, I find their lighter songs fun, but less memorable or impactful.