‘The End’ of an era foreshadowed

To mark the 50th anniversary of the rock revolution, the Sentinel is re-assessing the popular songs of the last half-century.

By WALLACE BAINE
Sentinel staff writer

For those of us who didn’t live through it, this is how we imagined the sacred ’60s ended: All those groovy and liberated Aquarians, long past trying to love the ills of the world away and blasted out of their heads on psychedelics, suddenly finding themselves sliding toward the cold abyss of nothingness.

When I first heard "The End," years after the fact, I assumed that it was the benediction for those last, ugly days of the ’60s when hope had long since soured into squandered idealism and then devolved into madness, when the sunny image of the flower child had turned into the murderous scowl of Charles Manson staring out from the cover of Life magazine.

It was, of course, nothing of the sort. This famously theatrical 11-minute nightmare was recorded and released on the Doors’ first album, back in 1967, the days of the Summer of Love and Monterey Pop when all things still seemed possible.

Far from the creepy dirge that played over the end credits of the ’60s, "The End" was an act of impressive clairvoyance, foreshadowing the squalid petering-out of the hippie era when an awakened consciousness nodded off into an acid coma, clearing the way for KC & the Sunshine Band and all the other infantile diversions of the 1970s.

Most of us rock music fans, regardless of age, went through a Jim Morrison period (remember the famous Rolling Stone cover chronicling the first wave of posthumous Morrison fascination: "He’s Hot! He’s Sexy! He’s Dead!"?). There was nothing peace-and-love about this guy. Rather, he was the Horned One, the Devil in leather pants with an inflammatory charisma that could have only come from Hell.

Veterans of the ’60s will tell you right off that Morrison embodied the dashed dreams of the era as vividly as anyone. Yeah, sure, he was the almighty Lizard King in the beginning, but he soon became little more than a belligerent drunk whose idea of political action was waving his genitalia around in public.

Back in ’67, though, Morrison was a dark new cloud rising from the Southwest. While the San Francisco scenesters were blissing out with the Dead, the Doors were being suckled on the seedy sidewalks of the Sunset Strip.

According to the lore attached to "The End," the song got the Doors fired from their main gig at the Whisky A-Go Go when the club’s owner lost his cool after Morrison first launched into the song’s Oedipal sequence ("The killer awoke before dawn/ he puts his boots on ... "), though the audiences were absolutely floored by the performance.

I’ve often tried to imagine that moment. With "I’m a Believer" and "Happy Together" blaring from car radios, Morrison and the Doors climbed on stage at the Whisky and took rock ’n’ roll into the dangerous neighborhoods of the Collective Unconscious.

With its churchy organ swells, its snaky guitar lines, its druggy, hypnotic rhythm and Morrison’s willful smashing of the taboos of polite society, "The End" speaks of the Unspeakable. It looks into the Void and contemplates taking the leap.

Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain/ And all the children are insane. With that line, Morrison sweeps aside the Kennedy-era optimism of the times, suggesting that there’s nothing left but the freak-out before the Last Days. And the song’s most chilling line positions Morrison as the pied piper of the Apocalypse, calling America’s children to gather at continent’s end to follow him into oblivion: The West is the best/ Get here and we’ll do the rest.

The X Factor in "The End" was, of course, LSD of which Morrison was especially fond at the time the Doors’ debut disc was recorded. "The End" remains the most prominent example of acid’s influence on popular music (and popular culture), an influence that no one seems too eager to deal with, even today, almost 40 years later.

As someone who came of age after the spirit of the ’60s had faded, I’ve always gotten the impression that something terrible happened back then that no one who was there quite understands or is willing to talk about. No, not the assassinations or Vietnam or Kent State or any of that business, but something deeper and altogether more sobering.

It’s something, I think, that’s still causing ripples. I think of all the baby boomers who were pot-smoking free-lovers back in those days who’ve done a political 180 to become born-again conservatives, as if they were scared straight by something horrible they’ve vowed never to speak of again, as if they were one acid trip away from falling in with the Manson Family.

Francis Ford Coppola had the right idea when he forever linked "The End" to his film "Apocalypse Now." There was something momentous about that song that suggests a kind of spiritual dread that in normal times we’re able to keep safely buried in the recesses of our animal brains.

Thanks Jim, but if it’s all the same with you, we prefer that Door remain closed.

Write to us about your favorite songs from the last 50 years at wbaine@santacruzsentinel.com.

You can find this story online at:
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2004/April/22/style/stories/03style.htm