by If I told you to think of Jim Morrison, a mix of The Doors, tragedy, and hedonism may come to mind, but a forgotten German opera is less likely to strike your neurons.
Yet, from his young grave, Morrison still finds ways to surprise us. The familiar bars of ‘Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)‘ are endowed with that classic Doors-esque sound of all psychedelic organ-driven rock, but did you know that the song isn’t actually theirs?
The track, on which Morrison can be heard singing “Well show me the way to the next whisky bar”, originates from a controversial 1930 German operetta called the Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. The song was written the year before by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, where the theatrics of the first half of the jangle might give away the fact that it’s perfect for a costume-clad ensemble stomping merrily across a stage.
The Doors released the song in 1967 on their self-titled album, when Morrison was only 23 years old, with most of the album recorded when he was 22. How weird to hear his warbled voice begging for whisky, whisky all the time, a phrase he’d certainly revisit later in his short life when alcoholism had its way with him.
The bizarre opera can be summed up in one simple equation: Consumerism meets hedonism and satisfaction at any price. In the show, three criminals on the run come across Mahagonny, a city of gold, where there are no rules and everything is permitted. But who will make it out alive? All of a sudden, we might not be in the misty air of a twee German village but in the suffocating mess of a backstage room, where everything, and anything, is possible. Only, there’s no going back.
It’s these themes that Morrison would pick up on later, with this crazy lawlessness leading him to say, romantic and dramatic as ever, “There are no laws, there are no rules, just grab your friend and love him”. Or take his famous black-outs, where he plunged himself deep into the end of debauchery and came back up for air less and less, increasingly dissatisfied.
“I believe in a long, prolonged, derangement of the senses in order to obtain the unknown,” he once said, poignantly and like those in the opera, he indulged and never really returned home, to the point he may as well have been in the audience, whistling along to the show tunes.
Morrison’s intention with the song, and its ubiquitous nature, rang true for many other artists. It has since been covered by others, including David Bowie, Nina Simone, and Marilyn Manson. While none could quite nail the foreboding darkness at its heart as well as the tragic hero of Morrison like the man himself, and it was a crown he had to give his life for.
In 2000, the surviving members of the Doors taped a VH1 Storytellers episode with Ian Astbury filling in for Morrison on this track. Despite the all-too-familiar tale of the tall price of bacchanalia, it’s a cover that they aren’t willing to forget, perhaps because the message holds its importance today, and perhaps, if Morrison were still around, it’s a song he’d forever want to reprise.
