The End began gradually. F. Scott met Dave Siebenheller at Duke University in September 1979, where they occasionally played music together. Scott began jamming with Ray Pettis in Maryland during the summer of 1980, and invited Ray to bring his drums to Duke one weekend that fall. All three musicians had a common interest in The Doors' music and knew how to play a lot of Doors songs, so it didn't take long for them to find common musical ground. After a single practice, the threesome played in public for the first time on October 11, 1980 in the basement of the Maxwell House dorm at Duke. An overflow crowd filled the small room and hallway leading to it, cheering enthusiastically for every song. To be sure, the band was terrible at this point, but The Doors were enjoying a big surge of popularity at the time and the one thing these guys could play pretty well was The Doors. Enough people liked what they heard to get the threesome thinking about playing together some more.

Scott and Ray became infatuated with the idea of forming a permanent band to play Doors covers and some Doors sound-alike original songs that Scott had written. The two lined up an equally delusional investor who liked their music and was willing to underwrite their efforts. They made plans to travel to California in search of musical opportunity when Scott got out of school in December, but at the critical moment this investor got into some kind of legal trouble and disappeared without funding the trip.

On the heels of this disappointment, Dave came to Maryland at New Years, and the threesome played together for several days in the basement of Ray's house. They made rough recordings of a few songs, calling themselves White Noise. During these sessions, the band established a formula: lots of Doors, some other cover songs from the sixties, and a bunch of Scott's original songs. In the spring of 1981 Scott and Ray rehearsed together with regularity, eventually deciding to give their dream of being a full-time professional band a try in the Washington DC area. They persuaded Dave to spend the summer in DC as their guitarist. Dave returned to Maryland during his spring break, and the threesome rehearsed every day, improving their overall sound and diversifying their playlist. They changed the name of the band to The End, after the Doors' classic Oedipal nightmare song. It was a somewhat catchy name that let every Doors fans know where this band was coming from.

THE SUMMER OF 1981
When Dave left school in May, the band rented a house in Silver Spring, Maryland which they called The Endquarters. They constructed a flimsy practice room in the basement of the house, where they rehearsed every day in front of a steady stream of friends, visitors, fans, and groupies. The band honed its on-stage act by playing for these people and at a series of parties. The Endquarters was every bit the den of iniquity that you might expect from a rock band's group house in 1981. Sex and drugs and rock and roll were on the menu every night. The End quickly became both the terror of the neighborhood and the envy of all the local high school kids. Here was a real rock band living the real rock band life in a house where strangers could walk in any time of the day or night. One of those local kids was Ben Pape, a teenage guitar prodigy who played in a high school band with another kid who lived two houses down the street from The Endquarters.

The Doors resurgence was in full swing, so it didn't take long for The End to get some paying gigs. The band's first club performance took place at Three Dimensions in Washington DC on June 4, 1981. On this pleasant summer evening, about 120 people walked in and paid two dollars each for the privilege of seeing The End perform live. The band was still a bit nervous and sloppy, but their material went over well with the crowd. The End's original songs were good, their Doors covers were great, and they played lots of songs that were favorites of the partying crowd. Original songs like Fred Flintztone (Is On Dope) got the crowd laughing, Light My Fire got them dancing. The End had found their niche. Scott gradually developed a believable Jim Morrison attitude as the band's singer - doing, singing, or saying anything to get people fired up - but in a musical sense a comparison to Ray Manzarek would be more accurate, since he played keyboards. Dave and Ray took less prominent roles as the band's rhythm section, but they were equally eager to interact with the crowd from stage. Basically, The End was all about having fun in that trippy, unpredictable manner of the sixties, minus any political overtones. The band attracted a lot of fans who had been a few years too young to actually experience the sixties directly and now wanted to enjoy a psychedelic echo of that glorious time. If you were 18-21 years old in the summer of 1981 and you saw The End, you probably thought they were the coolest local band in D.C.

For the rest of summer, the band performed at least once a week - and usually a lot more often - at parties, at clubs, anywhere, anytime. They filled one of DC's most popular clubs, the PsycheDelly in Bethesda. They won a battle of the bands against a long-haired metal band at the Bastille in College Park. When 3D's called them at six o'clock one Tuesday evening asking them to fill in for some other no-show band, The End was on stage by eight. They drew an audience consisting almost entirely of underage high school kids to Columbia Station in Adams-Morgan. All these clubs went out of business shortly thereafter, as did just about every other place The End ever played. Perhaps this was no coincidence.

But on stage, The End's musical formula of Doors plus Doorsy originals was working. As a threesome, the band couldn't recreate the look of The Doors, and they didn't try. But most people thought The End sounded a lot like The Doors, and - in the Jim Morrison tradition - the band would do or say anything to excite the audience. They ended one outdoor show by letting their instruments blare feedback while they jumped into a swimming pool fully clothed. Another show generated 56 noise complaints in an hour and ended with the police coming on stage to pull the plug. The entire Spotsylvania County (Virginia) police force - about 50 cops in riot gear- showed up to shut down yet another outdoor gig, which ended with seventeen people being arrested. (The End had a certain knack for attracting cops to gigs.) There was never a dull moment with The End. They could play all The Doors' songs and they took requests. Girls were in love with the ghost of Jim Morrison, and guys followed the girls. The band quickly developed a large group of dedicated fans. People were hanging around the Endquarters all the time. The band practiced or played nearly every day. There were parties. There was fun. Sex. Drugs. Rock and roll. The truth is that no one associated with The End can remember exactly what the hell happened during that infamous summer of 1981, so it must have all been pretty good.

The summer of decadence ended abruptly in September when the landlord kicked the band out of The Endquarters. The band celebrated their eviction with a blowout party, which included smashing the walls of their practice room after playing a marathon version of "When The Music's Over" as the last song of the night, and leaving an enormous pile of rubble in the driveway. They forfeited a security deposit that represented almost a month's worth of gig money. And it was worth it.

In June, the band had recorded seven songs to use as a demo tape. After recording four more songs at the end of the summer, The End packaged the original songs from both recording sessions as an album called BEGINNINGS. Although recording quality was primitive, BEGINNINGS contained several tracks that had become signature songs for The End. Suburban Life was a humorous look at the miserable lives of housewives and sounded like the Doors on speed. Businessman was a punk tempo song with the refrain "I don't want to look like a businessman, with a briefcase, necktie, no!" I'd Rather Be With You Tonight was a saccharin pop love song that was very popular with the girls. Love Me Tonight, Coming Through, Love Toy, and In The Night were highly evocative of The Doors musically, even if they were in another place lyrically. BEGINNINGS sounded like a Doors garage band trying to escape its roots. Somehow, it all worked. The band sold a lot of copies at gigs.

Dave went back to school in the fall. Over the next several months, The End played some fairly successful gigs at clubs and colleges from North Carolina to Pennsylvania. College kids loved The Doors and loved a band that embraced sex and drugs and rock and roll, begged its audience to give them some "free love," was completely approachable, and openly encouraged drug use between songs. Big crowds turned out to see them at Bucknell, Duke, Maryland, and Johns Hopkins. However, without many opportunities to practice or learn new material as a threesome, The End's shows grew stale and the quality of their performances declined. When Dave couldn't make a gig, which happened with increasing frequency, Scott and Ray would just play as a twosome. They still called themselves The End, but their playlist drifted away from the band's Doors roots. As a two-man act, they played a lot of sixties pop and new original songs. When Dave got out of school in the summer of 1982, he decided to get serious about his life and declined the opportunity to return to The End full time. His last show with the band was a sloppy and disappointing gig at a small party in Colonial Beach, Virginia on August 21, 1982. That first party-hearty incarnation of The End - the one that most of the band's original fans knew and loved - was gone. But The End was a long way from finished.

THE END AS A TWO-MAN BAND
During the summer of 1982, Scott and Ray recorded a new batch of original songs as a twosome, which they released in August under the title CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN ACID. This material had little musical connection with The Doors, nor did it sound much like classic "acid rock" as the title suggested. The whole recording was made using just keyboards, drums and vocals, and thus suffered from somewhat monotonous instrumentation. But what the album did have was a lot of damn good songs. Adam and Eve rocked as hard as anything the band ever played. Raise Your Eyes and Discarding a Paradise were softer and moodier, but universally liked by everyone who heard them. Would You Love Me and No One Can Hurt Me were complex and interesting tracks. Missing was the in-your-face exuberance of BEGINNINGS; the songs on CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN ACID were darker, more textured, and reflective. Fans of The End as a Doors-and-drugs band were surprised with the transformation - some of the new songs even had religious undertones! Nevertheless, the strength of the material on CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN ACID shined through, and the band sold plenty of copies.

The End also quickly developed a new fan base in its reincarnation as a two-man band. Without a regular guitar player, The End stopped playing clubs and just played parties, but they played lots of them. There wasn't much money in it and everything was very informal, but that actually worked to the band's advantage. The End could instantly change what they were doing to suit whatever the audience wanted to hear. One night they might play for a Doors crowd, while the next night they might highlight pop songs by groups like The Kinks or The Beatles. At these less formal gigs, the band also had the luxury of trying some crazy things for fun, like playing marathon versions of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida or making an entire set out of a ten-song Doors medley. The End must have set some kind of record at Hood College on November 13, 1982 when they played a 40 minute rendition of Light My Fire. And the crowd danced from start to finish.

So people still liked The End in 1982, and they sounded about as good as a two-man band can sound. But there were some definite limitations. Scott's keyboards weren't the same as a guitar, so the songs the band covered sometimes didn't sound like their original versions. Furthermore, The End's newer original songs weren't as instantly accessible as the band's early original songs, and the older fans weren't familiar with them. Another interesting trend was the band's willingness to play with any guest musician who wanted to jam with them at a gig. These guest musicians might or might not have any real talent, and sometimes the guests didn't even know how to play The End's songs. So the results were wildly divergent. The End might play blues songs all night when there was a talented harp player in the house, or they might wander haphazardly through a bunch of mediocre sixties pop songs with a guest guitarist who wasn't quite sure of anything. It just depended on who was there, and what people wanted to hear. Of course, The End could still play The Doors to connect with their primary audience. But the band really had no clear identity at this point, and anyone who saw The End play in 1982 never quite knew what they were going to get.

THE END WITH BEN
One guest musician who stayed in close touch was Ben Pape, who at age 17 was already an obviously talented guitarist. In December 1982, Scott invited Ben to record some new songs with The End, and he immediately injected new life into the band. The resulting recording, eventually named STRIKE THREE, suffered from below-par original material but sounded more professional than either of the first two albums, with Ben providing some much-needed depth and texture. The overall tone was much brighter than on CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN ACID, and some of the songs were pretty good, especially Memory's Destruction and Let Me Be Your Slave. But STRIKE THREE was stylistically disjointed, its songs tended to be a bit longer than necessary, and the whole package lacked the vitality of The End's early phase. The End was no longer a garage band vigorously playing The Doors; it had become a more technically proficient band with no particular focus. Although a favorable review of STRIKE THREE was published in the April 1983 edition of DC Underground, the band never really played any of these songs live, and very few copies of STRIKE THREE were sold. Many fans of The End didn't even know that the band had made this recording.

With Ben added to the lineup, The End sounded more complete. They still played The Doors as hot as ever, but Ben's presence and high skill level allowed the band to add a wider variety of cover songs and diversify their original material. Ben even sang solid backing vocals. Unfortunately, not many people got to hear this reinvented third version of The End because the band played just two gigs with Ben on guitar before splitting up in April 1983. Ray and Scott had been playing together continuously for over three years, but at this point in their musical and life development, Scott was more compatible with Ben than Ray. While Scott and Ben wanted to experiment with new material and evolve musically, Ray remained enamored with the sex and drugs and rock and roll lifestyle of the band's early phase, living "like a maggot" as he described it himself several years later. The band simply drifted apart, everyone agreeing that this was the end of The End. However, as we now know, The End was a band that simply could not die.

AFTER THE END
Over the next two years, Ben and Scott made two recordings together using the band name USA. The music of USA was beyond cutting edge - Scott and Ben leaped from the sixties to the nineties stylistically - and had much more of a punk influence than the psychedelic music of The End. Ray went the other direction, drumming for a fifties cover group called the J. B. Chance Band. Just by chance, Ray called Scott one day in October 1984 to suggest a one-time The End reunion. Ray had grown tired of playing fifties songs, which are not terribly interesting for a drummer. Scott and Ben were up for it, and the threesome got together to play one gig at a Halloween party in Rockville, Maryland. This show was videotaped, and if anyone has the video, please let us know - it's the only vintage video footage of The End in existence, and we'd love to get a copy! The audio tape from this gig reveals the band playing extended jams on a variety of old songs. It shows that The End had evolved from being a barely-competent garage band playing sloppy but enthusiastic versions of Doors songs in Ray's basement into a much more professional band playing The Doors and much more at a party. But then everyone went their separate way and the band members completely lost touch with each other. For nearly two decades, that 1984 Halloween party looked like the last-ever performance by The End.

Of the four musicians who were core members of The End, only two played music regularly during the ensuing decades. Ben was by far the most distinguished of the group. After college, he joined a punk band called Scream which developed a solid following in the late eighties. (Another member of Scream was Dave Grohl, who became the drummer for Nirvana and later founded the Foo Fighters.) Ben moved to California and left Scream to play bass with The Four Horsemen, a band that also enjoyed some commercial success at the national level, though not nearly on the scale of Nirvana. Ben eventually returned to D.C. in 1994 to form and lead his own band, Girl Drink Drunk. Ben is still very active in music, playing upright bass for several swing bands and touring Europe and Japan in 2001 with Burning Airlines, a DC-based post-punk band. F. Scott continued to live in the D.C. area, writing and recording songs prolifically, though he didn't return to live performing until 1989, first as part of a two-man act, then with a very mediocre cover band called the Scape Goats. But in the nineties, he struck gold with The Shrunken Headbangers, a band he describes as "the National Enquirer of music." The Shrunken Headbangers more or less achieved everything Scott ever wanted to get out of his musical career, though the Headbangers' music was not nearly as good as that of The End. Scott and Ben regained contact in the mid-nineties. Ben recorded several guitar tracks for The Shrunken Headbangers, and he and Scott have been sporadically recording a third disk under the USA moniker - at the leisurely rate of about one track a year - which should be completed in 2007. When he's not playing or recording music, Scott works in mortgage finance. Ray continued to drum with J.B. Chance for several years after The End and even played tympani briefly with the Sarasota (Florida) Opera orchestra, but like Scott he never enjoyed anything in music as much as playing with The End. So Ray basically stopped playing music in the late eighties. After a life-changing truck accident, Ray went to chef school and ran a series of restaurant kitchens. For a while, Ray supervised a training program for troubled youths (how appropriate!), but most of Ray's jobs were as head chef for a series of resturants on the Maryland eastern shore. Ray even ran his own place in Salisbury, called Deli Master's. But Ray can still cook on the drums. Dave largely abandoned music after The End, though he did play for a couple of years in the late eighties with a band called The Yuppie Dix, a group that actually played their gigs while dressed in business suits. Dave became a businessman with a briefcase, necktie, no! Dave currently lives in New Jersey and does computer work for a major bank in New York.

THE END... AGAIN!
In 1999 Scott contacted Dave for the first time in years to discuss giving their old band a web presence, and the two of them put together this site. After reminiscing about their musical past for a while, they finally tracked down Ray and began to talk about getting The End back together again. In anticipation of a reunion, Scott remastered some of The End's old studio recordings using modern equipment and professional studio techniques. The resulting package was released by Brain Damage Records as a CD titled FINAL JUDGMENT: THE BEST OF THE END. Digital remastering in stereo produced a disk that sounds far better than any of The End's old tapes. Professional sound quality and the fact that FINAL JUDGMENT contains much of the band's best vintage material means that this is the definitive collection for anyone who is a fan of The End's early days.

The End's much-anticipated 20-year reunion was held in Mardella Springs, Maryland on August 11, 2001 at an invited guests-only album release party for FINAL JUDGMENT. As a thunderstorm raged outside, The End was resurrected in an apocalyptic flashback. With lightning bolts crackling and rain pouring down in torrents, the old guys proved that they could still crank out the Doors as loud as ever. One guest said "It was just like 1981 all over again, except that I didn't have to go back to the dorm afterwards." Click here for pictures from this event. A year later (on September 14, 2002), The End played their second reunion performance of the new millenium. Both Dave and Ben were unavailable, so Scott and Ray played a two-man show featuring their playlist circa 1982. This gig marked the live debut of some of brand new material, such as the song Out Of All Control, a reminiscence about the band's insane life in the summer of 1981. Several of the band's longtime fans were reunited with the band for this colorful show.

The old analog master tapes containing The End's original studio recordings were in very poor condition - one of the tapes actually disintegrated while it was being transferred to digital media during the remastering for FINAL JUDGMENT. The End couldn't just let their music disappear this way, so the band decided to re-record this "lost" material. In July 2001, The End began making their first new studio recordings since 1983. Over the next two years, the band went on to record enough brand new original songs and covers to make an all-new studio album. In 2003, Brain Damage Records released The End's new studio recordings as a CD titled FLASHBACK. This album featured the band's most explicitly psychedelic recorded material ever. Opening with the Doors-like track Out Of All Control, FLASHBACK proceeded through several covers of hippie hits from the sixties and early seventies, such as the Velvet Underground's Venus In Furs and an unusual soft arrangement of the Grace Slick/Jefferson Airplane hit Somebody to Love. A new original song called The Scorpion was The End's over-the-top musical representation of a bad acid trip. FLASHBACK also included the first-ever studio recording of their longtime live audience favorite Fred Flintzone (Is On Dope). The album wrapped up with some completely new recordings of the old original songs from 1981 that had been lost during remastering for FINAL JUDGMENT. The End recorded FLASHBACK using all digital technology, giving the album excellent CD-quality sound, but the band stayed true to their sixties roots by avoiding the use of modern instrumentation. The result was a marvelous blend of old and new, a CD that belongs in the collection of every fan of The End... or of sixties psychedelia in general.

In their slowly-evolving comeback, The End now had two CDs out and had performed two successful reunion shows. Expectations grew for The End to return on a more permanent basis. In 2003, Ben returned to his roots as the full-time guitar player for The End. The 21st-century incarnation of The End had a more refined professional sound than the eighties versions of the band, and their live shows featured lots of sound and light effects. The End didn't play live nearly as often, but when they did they embraced their psychedelic music roots. The End could still rock as hard as any band in the land and play The Doors like no one else. In 2003 The End began rehearsing regularly, eventually embarking on a sporadic tour to celebrate the release of FLASHBACK. Their November 8, 2003 gig at an outdoor party on a farm in western Maryland was ended early after two visits from the local cops. If you're keeping score, this was at least the seventh time that a The End show was interrupted by a police presence. It was also proof that, even in this new millenium, The End still had their ability to recreate not only the sounds but also the atmosphere of the sixties! In 2004 and 2005 the band continued to play at small parties, where they emphasized music of the psychedelic era by playing long instrumental jams and including songs by groups like Pink Floyd and Jefferson Airplane.

Live appearances by this new edition of The End were infrequent - just 2-3 per year - but that didn't prevent The End from writing and recording some completely new original songs. This material was released in September 2005 as a CD titled PSYCHEDELICIOUS, The End's final studio recording. All three members of the band agreed that PSYCHEDELICIOUS contained the best original music that The End had ever created. The CD opened with a series of psychedelic pop songs Purple Voice, I Saw My Face, and Love Brigade - all highly reminiscent of the late sixties pop radio. This was followed by a hard-rocking track called Missing, and three long psychedelic jams, each in many different styles. Edges and The Graveyard were multi-part psychedelic songs, separated by a 20-minute instrumental jam with eight different segments, the first of which was called Pleasant Dreams, a title that nicely describes the entire track. PSYCHEDELICIOUS was more of an homage to Pink Floyd than to The Doors, and the CD really showcased The End's musicianship. Every fan of The End will definitely want to have this CD in his or her collection!

Distance made things difficult for the 21st century version of The End. Ray lived two hours away from Scott and Ben, so rehearsals and gigs were hard to schedule and required a lot of advance planning. Scott planned to move to Arizona in 2006, too far away for The End to remain viable as a band. So 2006 found The End on its farewell tour, playing a final round of shows on the Maryland eastern shore and the Washington DC area. The End's final live appearance with Ben, Ray and Scott together ended up being a small party at Scott's Silver Spring (Maryland) house. At the time, everyone thought that this really would be the last-ever live appearance of The End, but a year later Ray drove out to Arizona and he and Scott took advantage of the opportunity to play one more show as a twosome for a western audience that had never seen The End before. Though very hastily organized, things went well, and since we all know better than to speak of the "final" or "last" show for The End who knows what the future may hold?

The amps have fallen silent, but The End's music lives on through three wonderful studio CDs, several vintage tapes (which will soon be remastered for CD), and countless live recordings. All of The End's commercially available recordings can be obtained from Brain Damage Records (www.braindamagerecords.net). The End rocks on.