If you had bro­ken up with your col­lege boyfriend and he told you that he writ­ten an 11-minute song about you while on enough LSD to kill a horse, would you want to hear it? Or would you block his num­ber on your phone?

Or maybe because said boyfriend is Jim Mor­ri­son and the band is the Doors and the song is “The End,” we’ll let it slide, because whether or not you think Jim’s lyrics are super deep or super­cil­ious, the groove is unde­ni­able, four small fur­ry musi­cians gath­ered togeth­er in a stu­dio and groov­ing on a raga, con­jur­ing up East­ern mys­ti­cism with West­ern instru­ments.

In Polyphonic’s explain­er video on “The End,” he pulls apart The Doors’ mag­num opus, the clos­er to its 1967 debut album, ana­lyz­ing the song in real time as it unspools. (There’s a few moments where Poly­phon­ic and Mor­ri­son are vocal­iz­ing at the same time—we rec­om­mend turn­ing on cap­tions).

The girl­friend in ques­tion was Mary Wer­be­low, Morrison’s steady in the ear­ly ‘60s before he chose the path of putting his poet­ry to music. The Werbelow/Morrison cou­ple had to die for the Doors to be born, in a sense, and Mor­ri­son start­ed the lyrics as a good­bye song, a stan­dard pop trope at the time. (There’s a very touch­ing, rare inter­view with Wer­be­low here). But Mor­ri­son took it in anoth­er direc­tion, we could say.

“The End” might be the first musi­cal exam­ple of the Psy­chotron­ic Breakup genre. Defined by Noah Segan and Adam Egypt Mor­timer when talk­ing about film, the Psy­chotron­ic Breakup genre “uses dream imagery, para­nor­mal ideas, or the hor­ror genre to express the emo­tion­al dra­ma of heart­break.” Segan and Mortimer’s def­i­n­i­tion deals only with film, but Mor­ri­son does the same thing with song, a lit­tle over ten years before the films they dis­cuss. “The End” is a breakup song that breaks down the psy­che like LSD, send­ing the injured par­ty back to basics, and into a uni­verse of arche­types. Things are dying. Things are being reborn. There’s a blue bus which is call­ing us, and that is either a ref­er­ence to the Solar Boat in Egypt­ian mythol­o­gy or a ref­er­ence to the San­ta Mon­i­ca bus sys­tem (accord­ing to one wag in the com­ments). Or hey, maybe it is both, because Mor­ri­son is tap­ping into some­thing here, much like James Joyce cre­at­ed lay­ers of myth with­in the quo­tid­i­an. (Mor­ri­son achieves this by walk­ing back­wards into it, how­ev­er.)

Poly­phon­ic gets into the song’s Oedi­pal Cliff Notes sec­tion, describ­ing how it all came flum­ing out of Mor­ri­son on stage, the band hav­ing dragged him to a gig at the Whiskey a Go-Go after he con­sumed “10,000 mikes” (i.e. 10,000 micro­grams, about ten full dos­es) of LSD. A few days lat­er the “kill your teach­ers, kill your par­ents” riff was com­mit­ted to tape, this time also on LSD.

For all its pre­tense the song still works. And though Mor­ri­son nev­er did rec­on­cile with his girl­friend, the song did find its soul mate when Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la used “The End” as the open­ing to Apoc­a­lypse Now, anoth­er work of art that drained the life force from its cre­ator. There are no real cov­er ver­sions of “The End,” and there are no films past Coppola’s that can use it with­out irony. It exists like a totem, to be found and puz­zled over.

(But because this is late cap­i­tal­ism and every­thing is ter­ri­ble, Polyphonic’s segue into a spon­sor ad at 11:46 is some­thing won­drous to behold in its per­verse beau­ty. Be warned, my only friend.)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Doors’ Ray Man­zarek Walks You Through the Writ­ing of the Band’s Icon­ic Song, “Rid­ers on the Storm”

“The Lost Paris Tapes” Pre­serves Jim Morrison’s Final Poet­ry Record­ings from 1971

A Young, Clean Cut Jim Mor­ri­son Appears in a 1962 Flori­da State Uni­ver­si­ty Pro­mo Film

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

It was sup­pos­ed­ly “the album that final­ly oblit­er­ates the thin line sep­a­rat­ing arty white pop music and deep black funk,” as David Fricke wrote on the release of Talk­ing Heads’ Speak­ing in Tongues. The praise maybe over­sells music that is more arty white pop than “deep black funk.” But there’s nev­er been any deny­ing the funk­i­ness of Talk­ing Heads, either, just as there’s nev­er been any deny­ing the soul­ful­ness of Tom Jones. Not that they’re musi­cal­ly com­pa­ra­ble artists, but both have incor­po­rat­ed Black musi­cal styles into their own idioms, win­ning respect on either side of the indus­try’s seg­re­gat­ed line for self-aware re-inter­pre­ta­tions of the blues, funk, soul, and R&B, as well as Ghan­ian high life and Niger­ian Afrobeat.

Jones’ late-career rein­ven­tion involved show­ing up on the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, cov­er­ing Prince, work­ing with Wyclef Jean, and mak­ing music one might char­ac­ter­ize as gen­er­al­ly good-humored pop that show­cased his still-got-it vocal abil­i­ties. In 1999, he took on Speak­ing in Tongues’ P‑Funk-inspired sin­gle “Burn­ing Down the House” in a cov­er that can be called a slick dance-pop inter­pre­ta­tion of an art-rock re-inter­pre­ta­tion of funk music.

Joined by the Cardi­gans, Jones belts it out with his typ­i­cal swag­ger, while Cardi­gans’ singer Nina Pers­son acts as the “foil” writes Patrick Garvin at Pop Cul­ture Exper­i­ment in a roundup of the song’s many cov­ers: “She sound­ed as monot­o­ne as he sound­ed mani­a­cal. And he sound­ed pret­ty damn mani­a­cal.”

But Jones doesn’t sound mani­a­cal like David Byrne sounds mani­a­cal. The orig­i­nal track came togeth­er from a jam ses­sion, with lyrics impro­vised by Byrne, who shout­ed ran­dom phras­es until he found those that best fit the song, chang­ing the Par­lia­ment-Funkadel­ic audi­ence chant “burn down the house!” into “burn­ing down the house,” a line which could mean any­thing at all. (At one point, he tells NPR, it changed to “Foam Rub­ber, U.S.A.”) Is it a threat? A pan­icked out­cry? A cel­e­bra­tion? A man­ic lamen­ta­tion? In Byrne’s anguished yelps one can nev­er tell.

Jones makes “burn­ing down the house” sound like a come-on, set against the ici­est of tight­ly syn­co­pat­ed arrange­ments, in the most 90s of music videos ever. (Con­trast it with the live ver­sion above, with P‑Funk’s own Bernie Wor­rell on key­boards, from Jonathan Demme’s Stop Mak­ing Sense.) Every cov­er of the song, and there are many, does its own thing. “The one con­sis­tent aspect,” Garvin writes, “is Byrne’s weird lyrics… because they don’t tell a sto­ry in a lin­ear sense, they can take on any vari­ety of mean­ings.”

Accord­ing to Byrne him­self, the song did take on added res­o­nance for him, per­fect­ly in keep­ing with the 90s rebirth of Tom Jones. “I didn’t real­ly know at the time,” he said in 1984, “but to me… it implies ecsta­t­ic rebirth or tran­scend­ing one’s own self…. In clas­sic psy­chol­o­gy, the house is the self. And burn­ing it down is destroy­ing your­self… And the assump­tion is you get reborn, like a Phoenix from the ash­es. See? It’s all there.” Indeed.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Tom Jones Per­forms “Long Time Gone” with Cros­by, Stills, Nash & Young–and Blows the Band & Audi­ence Away (1969)

Janis Joplin & Tom Jones Bring the House Down in an Unlike­ly Duet of “Raise Your Hand” (1969)

Talk­ing Heads Live in Rome, 1980: The Con­cert Film You Haven’t Seen

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness