Jim Morrison initially wrote the lyrics about his break up with his girlfriend Mary Werbelow, but it evolved through months of performances at the Whisky a Go Go into a much longer song.
In an interview in 1969, Morrison explained about the lyrics:
Every time I hear that song, it means something else to me. I really don't know what I was trying to say. It just started out as a simple goodbye song ... Probably just to a girl, but I could see how it could be 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.
When interviewed by Lizze James, he pointed out the meaning of the verse "My only friend, the End":
Sometimes the pain is too much to examine, or even tolerate ... That doesn't make it evil, though – or necessarily dangerous. But people fear death even more than pain. It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah – I guess it is a friend.
Shortly past the midpoint of the nearly 12-minute-long album version, the song enters a spoken word section with the words, "The killer awoke before dawn/he put his boots on". That section of the song reaches a dramatic climax with the lines, "Father / Yes son? / I want to kill you / Mother, I want to ..." (with the next words screamed out unintelligibly). Morrison had worked on a student production of Oedipus Rex at Florida State University.
In John Densmore's autobiography Riders on the Storm, he recalls when Morrison explained the meaning:
At one point Jim said to me during the recording session, and he was tearful, and he shouted in the studio, 'Does anybody understand me?' And I said yes, I do, and right then and there we got into a long discussion and Jim just kept saying over and over kill the father, f#ck the mother, and essentially boils down to this, kill all those things in yourself which are instilled in you and are not of yourself, they are alien concepts which are not yours, they must die. F#ck the mother is very basic, and it means get back to essence, what is reality, what is, f#ck the mother is very basically mother, mother-birth, real, you can touch it, it's nature, it can't lie to you. So what Jim says at the end of the Oedipus section, which is essentially the same thing that the classic says, kill the alien concepts, get back reality, the end of alien concepts, the beginning of personal concepts.
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