Marilyn Manson has been waiting his whole life to bellow, “Father! I want to keelll you!” He gets to live out all of his Jim Morrison fantasies on a new cover of the Doors’ menacing meditation, “The End,” which he seems to be releasing as a standalone 12-inch picture disc just for the hell of it.
He gets so into it, in fact, that when he gets to the patricidal part of the band’s oedipal odyssey, he gets hung up on second half of the story: Where Jim Morrison once sang, “Mother, I want to … ” before screaming (and singing “fuck, fuck, fuck,” in the original, uncensored version), Manson takes it another step, singing “motherfucker” over and over again. The vinyl will be available March 6th, but the song is streaming now.
Manson’s cover, of course, is darker and more purposely nightmarish than the Doors’ original. It’s not quite heavy metal — it still has a chilly, dessert-rock vibe to it — but when it peaks, it turns loud and staticky, reflecting Manson’s gnashed-teeth delivery of lyrics like, “All the children are insane/waiting for the summer rain.” If the Doors version was acid rock, Manson’s is PCP rock.
A lot of the credit to the song’s mood goes to producer Shooter Jennings. Manson said in an interview with Revolver that the song informed the work on his upcoming album. “Shooter and I also did a cover of ‘The End’ by the Doors, for a new miniseries of The Stand by Stephen King, which I’m also going to be acting in,” Manson said. “I think that sort of kick-started our process for the album and started us exploring different things.”
Popular on Rollingstone
Manson hasn’t released any other details about his upcoming LP, but he did recently put out a creepy cover of the traditional song “God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” which he had cut with producer Tyler Bates. That song has also been covered by Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Odetta and others.
“The End” is not the first time Manson covered the Doors. At the Sunset Strip Music Festival in 2012, he did a number of the band’s songs, including “Love Me Two Times,” “People Are Strange” and “Five to One,” in tribute to the group. And at a 2016 Amoeba Music in-store, he tackled “Not To Touch the Earth” with help from Johnny Depp on guitar.
Manson will be on tour next year as the main support for Ozzy Osbourne on the Prince of Darkness’ No More Tours 2 tour. It kicks off on May 27th in Atlanta and runs through the end of July. When Osbourne announced Manson as his guest on the tour, he said this in a statement: “Marilyn is killer live. He’s so fucking out there, and if I think that, then look out, we’re all fucked.”