When the Doors first got on stage during a Thursday night set at Los Angeles’ famed Whisky A Go Go, two things were true: their frontman, Jim Morrison, was nowhere to be found, and their set list featured “The End” as, appropriately, the last song. By the band’s second set, neither appeared to be the case. The band had found Morrison in his Tropicana hotel room, mid-LSD trip. Then, they brought him back to the venue for their last set of the night.
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Once Morrison joined his bandmates on stage, he decided to do a bit of improvising on the song that was supposed to be their closer. If the rest of the band had any doubt of the potential negative response to Morrison’s spontaneous songwriting on-stage, their fears were swiftly confirmed when the venue owner came up to the green room minutes after their set ended.
Jim Morrison Improvised “The End” To Stunning Effect
Unsurprisingly, Jim Morrison’s impromptu songwriting session during “The End” wasn’t the only trouble he landed the rest of the Doors in that night. Prior to finding Morrison in his hotel room, the band members actually present at the gig—keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger, and drummer John Densmore—took to the stage for a set of instrumental blues and jazz. In the 2003 documentary Temples of Rock, Manzarek recalled, “At the end of the set, Phil Tanzini, one of the owners of the Whiskey, comes up to us and says, ‘Hey, I booked four guys. You better have Morrison here for that second set, or you guys are going to be in big trouble.”
Little did Tanzini (or the band) know that there would be big trouble without Morrison and with Morrison. When Morrison eventually arrived with the rest of the band ahead of their second set, he was mid-trip. After performing three or four songs with the band as rehearsed, Morrison told the band to start playing “The End.” Although they protested at first, they eventually gave in, bringing in the droney, vibey introduction. “The people just love it,” Manzarek recalls. “Then, the song gets soft in the middle, and Jim does an improvisation. A part John and Robbie and I had never heard before coming out of some strange a*** state.”
As the music died down and Jim Morrison’s poetry became front and center, the atmosphere in the Whisky A Go Go shifted. People quieted their conversations. Servers slowed their busy pace around the venue. Even the go-go dancers stopped dancing in their cages. Morrison certainly wasted no time capitalizing on their attention.
The Dramatic Finale That Got The Doors Fired From Whisky A Go Go
With virtually the entire Whisky A Go Go in the palm of his hand, Jim Morrison gets to the part of “The End” where he recites, ‘Father?’ ‘Yes, son?’ ‘I want to kill you.’ ‘Mother, I want to…’ Of course, on the album version, the Oedipal, four-letter “F” word the listener expects to hear is, at the very least, separated by a stanza of Come on, baby, take a chance with us. Does Morrison later devolve into a stanza of f-bombs on the record? Yes. But the effect is somewhat less jarring than what he did that night at the Whisky. On that night, he said, “Mother, I want to…” before bellowing out, “f*** you!”
“I thought, ‘Oh my God, Jim, don’t do it,’” keyboardist Ray Manzarek recalled in Temples of Rock. Once Morrison dropped his f-bomb “with all the gusto he possibly can,” Manzarek said, “John and Robbie and I assault our instruments and the frozen Whisky A Go Go comes back to life. We play the set. We get off stage, and people are just mesmerized, screaming, loving the whole thing. Except for Phil Tanzini, who rushes upstairs and says to us, ‘You, Morrison, are the filthiest guy on this planet. You can’t say that about your mother! Not on the stage of the Whisky A Go Go. You’re fired.”
Guitarist Robby Krieger then reminded Tanzini that it was a Thursday night, and the band was scheduled to play the remainder of the weekend. “‘You want us to play the weekend, or are we fired right now?’” Manzarek remembered Krieger asking Tanzini. “Phil says, ‘Uh, oh, yeah, no, you play the weekend. You’re fired on Sunday. And that was it for the Whiskey A Go Go.” The end, indeed.
Photo by Earl Leaf/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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