“The End” by The Doors

"The End" closes the Doors' debut album, released January 4, 1967, and it's nearly 12 minutes of slow-burning dread. Jim Morrison started it as a breakup song about his ex-girlfriend Mary Werbelow, but months of performances at the Whisky a Go Go stretched it into something much longer and much stranger.

The band plays it like a ritual. Robby Krieger's guitar drones and bends like a raga, Ray Manzarek's keyboards hang in the air like incense smoke, and John Densmore's drums tap and hiss and then build to a frenzy, while Morrison moves from a murmur to a scream and back. The writing is credited to all four of them, and you can hear why: it feels less composed than conjured, onstage, in front of a room.

Paul A. Rothchild produced it and Bruce Botnick engineered and mixed on Elektra, capturing it without taming it. Rolling Stone ranked it 336th among the greatest songs of all time in 2010, and Guitar World counted Krieger's solo 93rd among the best ever played.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.