The Doors - The End (video slideshow) HD TRUE STEREO

Originally written by Jim Morrison as a song about breaking up with girlfriend Mary Werbelow, 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. The song was recorded live in the studio with no overdubbing.

"The End" was ranked at #336 on Rolling Stone's list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time (2010).

The song's guitar solo was ranked #93 on Guitar World's '100 Greatest Guitar Solos of All Time'

In 1969, Morrison stated
" "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." "

Shortly 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).[citation needed] This is often considered a reference to the Oedipus complex. Ray Manzarek, the former keyboard player for the Doors explained: 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!

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.