Jim Morrison and the Tabu

How “The End” taps into primal fear.

Jim Morrison on the Smother’s Brothers Show, 1968. The cherubic face belies Morrison’s bad boy behavior. Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

A friend mentions that he saw The Doors in concert. I saw a lot of bands in my concert-going days — and, if only I had an extra thousand, I’d still brave a stadium crowd to see the Rolling Stones. I saw a lot of bands wholesale in those all-day concerts, but I never got to see The Doors.

Oliver Stone’s movie, The Doors (1991), with Val Kilmer as the insouciant Morrison, recreates the band’s first performance of the now completed “The End” at Whiskey A Go Go, where they were the house band. The song had been part of their repertoire for a while, but what had started as Morrison’s farewell song for a girlfriend had long been evolving.

On August 21, 1966, Morrison didn’t show up for the gig. The band made do without him for the first set, but during the break they went to retrieve him from his apartment where they found him tripping on acid. Nevertheless they brought him back to Whiskey A Go Go, and in the part of the song that gave Morrison space for improvisation, he introduced a new verse:

The killer awoke before dawn
He put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he walked on down the hall
He went into the room where his sister lived, and then he
Paid a…