'The End' is a song by The Doors. Originally a song Jim Morrison wrote about breaking up with a long time girlfriend, it evolved through months of performances at Los Angeles' Whisky a Go Go into a nearly 12-minute opus on their self-titled album. The band would perform the song to close their last set. It was first released in January 1967. MusicRobby Krieger's slinky, haunting guitar lines over D drone in DADGAD tuning using a harmonic minor scale recall Indian drone and raga-based music, as has often been noted, and the rolling and dramatic crescendoes of John Densmore's drums recall Indian tabla rhythms.
Oct 11, 2019 These songs are part of a long and rich tradition of strike songs celebrating the brilliance and power of the trade union movement. In American Labor Songs of the Nineteenth Century, labor historian Philip Foner collected hundreds of such songs, from slave spirituals, to songs meant to open Knights of Labor meetings, to the 1883 classic.
The music as a whole, though, does not sound entirely or even particularly 'Indian'. The sharp, ringing edge of the guitar recalls the 50s rock and roll style, while the fingerpicking attack may derive equally from the flamenco guitar style Krieger had studied as a youth and from folk music. Ray Manzarek's organ is used sparingly to provide an inconspicuous bass line (I-V-I-V-I-V) and fills. One may find a strong similarity to Chopin's 'Funeral March' theme and also to Sandy Bull's guitar instrumental 'Blend' - but this may be more to do with the quality of the melodic minor scale than with any specific influence.Structurally, the song rises to three separate mini-crescendoes separated by slower sections of half-spoken, half-sung lyrics before building to an enormous psychedelic crescendo right after Jim Morrison sings the 'meet me at the back of the blue bus' verse.
Previously, the song had been weaving along on its melodies to an encounter with the ruling powers of the mind, the controlling 'father' structure and the longed-for 'mother', or freedom. The final crescendo represents either an attempt to break through to that freedom, or more likely, an Oedipal sexual climax. The sexual representation seems more likely given the similar crescendo apex very much along the lines of Ravel's 'Bolero'. Afterward, 'The End' departs on a wistful note when Morrison sings, '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.' Bleed 2006 buick cooling system.
In the context of Morrison's first interpretation quoted above, this lyric and the associated music that softly reiterates themes from the opening may mean that the comfort of childhood will be sacrificed for freedom. LyricsShortly past the mid-point of the nearly 12-minute long album version, the song suddenly enters a spoken-word section with the words, 'The killer awoke before dawn ' That section of the song reaches a dramatic climax with the lines, 'Father/ Yes son?/ I want to kill you/ Mother, I want to (fuck you),' (with the last two words screamed out unintelligibly). This is often considered a reference to Sophocles' Oedipus the King, a production of which Jim Morrison had worked on while at Florida State University.Said Morrison in 1969, '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.' Producer Paul Rothchild said in an interview that he believed the song to be an inside trip, and that 'kill the father' means destroying everything hierarchical, controlling, and restrictive in one's psyche, while 'fuck the mother' means embracing everything that is expansive, flowing, and alive in the psyche. Ray Manzarek, the former keyboard player for the Doors spoke about it defensively saying,“ 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! ”Morrison may have been influenced by the Jungian concepts of individuation and archetypes, and was certainly influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of going beyond the limited types of human beings that hitherto existed by loving Dionysian vitality and life ('the mother') while rejecting Apollonian systems and traditions ('the father').The lyrical reference to 'the Blue Bus' has been variously conjectured to refer to either Indian mystic Meher Baba's 'Blue Bus' tours of the 1930s or to Santa Monica's 'Big Blue Bus' public bus lines. The link to Meher Baba seems unlikely given the dark and nihilistic tone of the song, with its references to insanity, patricide and incest, concepts alien to the life and outlook of Meher Baba. A reference to a bus line is a somewhat better possibility, but probably the most likely conjecture is that Morrison was referring to the drug numorphan (oxymorphone), an opioid substitute for morphine, which in the drug culture at the time was often referred to as 'The Blue Bus' (it was available in blue 10mg instant-release tabs). Because of its highly euphoric effect Numorphan was very popular with the drug using community before it was withdrawn from the market in the 1970's. Given Morrison's well-known affinity for drug and alcohol use, and the overall 'otherworldly' tenor of the song, this seems a more likely probability.
The inspiring image would be that of being together with one's lover in the altered, dreamy state of consciousness induced after taking the powerful opiate-like drug. Similarly, the line 'the blue bus is calling us' likely refers to the addictive attraction of oxymorphone that develops in abusers of the drug, and 'driver where you takin' us' would refer, again, to the dreamy, exploratory, unpredictable state of altered consciousness experienced while under the influence of the drug.Another explanation for 'the Blue Bus' phrase would be as a reference to the blue buses that, in the United States, military inductees boarded for transport to basic training during the era of the Vietnam War, when the song was written. Morrison may have intended it to be an anti-Vietnam anthem. Morrison's father was an admiral in the U.S. Navy and as a 'navy brat', he was familiar with military life; no doubt he saw many 'blue buses' in his youth.aThe following are phrases from 'The End' that may help put the phrase 'the Blue Bus' in context. The phrase 'The west is the best, The west is the best, Get here, and we'll do the rest' could summon images of troops preparing for transport to Vietnam to fight in the proxy 'West vs. Communist' cold war.
Other phrases that could be seen as military allusions include 'Lost in a Romanwilderness of pain' and 'The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on; He took a face from the ancient gallery.' This may be the image of a soldier dressing to do battle in modern times, with an allusion toward a Roman infantryman.
The phrase could also be an image of a Greek actor putting on a mask to perform in a play, except prior language implies a Roman allusion rather than one of an ancient Greek. Much of the brutal context of the song, implying random acts of killing, may make more sense in the context of war rather than in a drug trip gone bad, or the carefully prescribed plot of a Greek tragedy (cf.
Further, the song begins and ends similarly: '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.' . Usage in film and televisionThe Apocalypse Now Sequence'The End' was most famously used as a framing device for Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now, in which its dark, poetic passage marked the film's descent into the surreal.
The sound of helicopter rotors from the beginning of the film are often included in recordings of the song.