Everytime I hear that song, it means something else to me. It started out as a simple good-bye song.... Probably just to a girl, but I see how it could be a 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.---Jim Morrison, in 1969.Take it all as you will.Sometimes the pain is too much to examine, or even tolerate….That doesn't make it evil, though – or necessarily dangerous. But people fear death even more than pain. It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah – I guess it is a friend...---Jim Morrison, focusing on the line "My only friend, the end . . ."
He was giving voice in a rock 'n' roll setting to the Oedipus complex, at the time a widely discussed tendency in Freudian psychology. He wasn't saying he wanted to do that to his own mom and dad. He was re-enacting a bit of Greek drama. It was theatre!---Ray Manzarek.
At one point Jim said to me during the recording session, and he was tearful, and he shouted in the studio, 'Does anybody understand me?' And I said yes, I do, and right then and there we got into a long discussion and Jim just kept saying over and over kill the father, f--k the mother, and essentially boils down to this, kill all those things in yourself which are instilled in you and are not of yourself, they are alien concepts which are not yours, they must die. F--k the mother is very basic, and it means get back to essence, what is reality, what is, f--k the mother is very basically mother, mother-birth, real, you can touch it, it's nature, it can't lie to you. So what Jim says at the end of the Oedipus section, which is essentially the same thing that the classic says, kill the alien concepts, get back reality, the end of alien concepts, the beginning of personal concepts.---John Densmore, the Doors' drummer, in his memoir Riders on the Storm
Life hurts a lot more than death.
It should be kept in mind, too, that Jim Morrison was brought up in a psychologically abusive environment. His father, a Navy pilot and eventual rear admiral, and his mother had agreed never to spank their children but, instead, relied on ferocious military-style dressings-down, including harshly insulting beratings, that endured until the child in question was broken to tears confessing his or her failures (the Morrisons had two sons and one daughter)---even if it had only been a human mistake, as opposed to genuine misbehaviour.
Morrison broke off contact with his family (other than occasional contact with his brother) after he graduated UCLA (as a film student, two years before the Doors broke big), except for one occasion on which his father all but ordered him to give up his music career due to a "lack of talent"---at the time the Doors' first album was becoming a best-seller and "Light My Fire" was becoming the country's number one hit single---after a family member brought the Doors' debut to the elder Morrisons thinking their son was on the cover.
The earliest Doors promotion materials included a note that Jim Morrison claimed no living family. Rear Adm. Morrison himself shrugged it off by telling a reporter he took it to mean that his son was only too well aware of the parents' disapproval of the career choice "and maybe he was trying to protect us." Neither of Morrison's parents were ever known to comment about the Oedipal section of "The End," though if you're looking for any Vietnam reference in the song be advised that Rear Adm. Morrison's service including his having been the flagship commander (aboard the Bon Homme Richard, an aircraft carrier) of the 3rd Fleet Carrier Division during the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 and, upon his promotion to rear admiral, served further in the Vietnam War.
I don't know what it means on a deeper level, but on the same day his father was the keynote speaker at the ceremony decommissioning the Bon Homme Richard he once commanded, Jim Morrison died . . .
Jim said as a kid, he was traveling with his family across some stretch of hot desert when they came across a brutal fatal accident involving some Indians from a local tribe..
As they slowly drove past all the death and vehicle carnage on the hot asphalt, he felt the soul of an Indian enter his body...
Probably why he used war paint and slammed whiskey as much as he did....I think I’ll have a shot...or two.
Very interesting (104) post. Thanks.