From the self-titled debut album "The End" was first released on January 4, 1967. The song was recorded live in the studio with no overdubbing.
The Doors developed this song during live performances at the Whisky a Go Go, a Los Angeles club where they were the house band in 1966. They had to play two sets a night, so they were forced to extend their songs in order to fill the sets. This gave them a chance to experiment with their songs.
"The End" began as Jim Morrison's farewell to Mary Werbelow, his girlfriend who followed him from Florida to Los Angeles. It developed into an 11-minute epic.
Morrison sang this live as "F--k the mother," rather than "Screw the mother." At the time, the band couldn't cross what their engineer Bruce Botnick called "the f--k barrier," so they sanitized the lyric on the album. When Botnick remixed the album for a 1999 reissue, however, he put Morrison's "f--k"s back in, which is how the song was intended.
This was famously used in the movie Apocalypse Now over scenes from the Vietnam War. Director Francis Ford Coppola had it remixed to include the line "F--k the mother."