One long take in the dark at Sunset Sound
In August 1966, The Doors were barred from the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip. They had been the house band. One night Jim Morrison pushed “The End,” a song they had been stretching in the set, into a spoken scene in which a son threatens his father and desires his mother. The club fired them. A few days later they were at Sunset Sound Recorders in Hollywood, making the first album for Elektra.
Paul A. Rothchild produced. Bruce Botnick engineered. “The End” was cut with the studio lights down. Rothchild later said Morrison sang it straight through and that nobody in the room wanted to talk when the take finished. The track runs 11 minutes and 41 seconds. It is not a single. It closes the album The Doors, released on 4 January 1967. After “Light My Fire” became a hit that summer, the album rose to No. 2 on the Billboard 200.
There is no bass guitar. Ray Manzarek plays organ with his right hand and a Fender Rhodes piano bass with his left, which is how the band worked on stage. Robby Krieger opens on guitar with a slow, Spanish-tinged line, then answers Morrison in short phrases. John Densmore keeps the drums quiet for a long time, then hits harder when the spoken section arrives. Morrison had described the song, in interviews around 1969, as a goodbye that started simple: the end of one love, or of childhood, before it grew into the longer piece.
It started as a simple goodbye, the end of one romance and the beginning of another. Then it got longer, and it got stranger.
(Jim Morrison, on “The End,” late 1960s interviews)
Jac Holzman had signed the band to Elektra after seeing them in Los Angeles. The debut was made quickly in that August 1966 block at Sunset Sound, with the same four players and no extra singer. Elektra did not shorten “The End” for radio the way they shortened “Light My Fire” into a single of under three minutes. The long track stayed on the album and in the live show, including the Hollywood Bowl concert on 5 July 1968, where they played it without adding a bass player. Listeners who only knew the hit single met a different Doors song here: quiet at the start, and built around a story Morrison would not tidy up.
In 1979 Francis Ford Coppola used the recording over the opening of Apocalypse Now. The film did not commission a new version. It used the 1966 take, which is why so many people now hear helicopters and jungle with a song that was recorded in a Hollywood studio two years before the Tet Offensive was nightly news, and thirteen years before the movie. The performance that still defines it is the one Rothchild rolled in the dark at Sunset Sound.
Rita | 13 October 2026
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Cool. Now I want the deep cuts around The End too. Coffee got cold while I finished the article. Acceptable.
Hélène | 14 October 2026
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Cool. Now I want the deep cuts around The End too. I told my coworker and they shrugged. Their loss.
Mike B. | 14 October 2026
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Still puts The End on whenever I need a reset. Never gets old.
Priya | 15 October 2026
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Opened the article, heard the riff in my head before the embed loaded. Classic. Sharing this in the group chat. Expect chaos.
Paulo | 16 October 2026
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Solid chronicle. I forgot how sharp The Doors sounded on this one. Also the comments section on old forums was wild about this.