In the 1980s, I went through my first Doors phase. Read every book and even bought an album called An American Prayer, full of Jim Morrison’s poems. I saw the Oliver Stone movie and many of the documentaries at the time. They came back in popularity big time in the 1980s with Morrison making the Rolling Stone cover with the headline “He’s Hot, He’s Sexy, and He’s Dead.” At the time…I thought…well, that is disturbing sounding.
When The Doors released their debut album, The Doors, in 1967, most listeners expected songs written by Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger, and John Densmore. But tucked into the record was something unusual, “Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar).” It wasn’t written by the band at all. The song came from German theater, written by Bertolt Brecht with music by Kurt Weill for the 1927 stage production Little Mahagonny, later used in the opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.
They discovered the song through Manzarek, who had studied theater and classical music. The band kept the original English lyrics but changed the arrangement. Instead of an orchestra, they built it around Manzarek’s carnival organ. It stood out on the album, but it fit the band’s taste for the theatrical.
Manzarek’s keyboard carries the melody while Krieger adds small guitar lines. It circles around the refrain, “Show me the way to the next whiskey bar,” until it feels like something being shouted across a room. The structure is simple, but the mood is uneasy because of Manzarek and Morrison. You can hear a slight German polka sound in this.
The album peaked at #2 on the Billboard Album Charts, #42 in Canada, and #43 in the UK in 1967.
Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)
Well show me the wayTo the next whiskey barOh don’t ask whyOh don’t ask why
Show me the wayTo the next whiskey barOh don’t ask whyOh don’t ask why
For if we don’t findThe next whiskey barI tell you we must dieI tell you we must dieI tell you, I tell youI tell you we must die
Oh moon of AlabamaWe now, must say goodbyeWe’ve lost, our good old MamaAnd must have whiskeyOh, you know why
Oh, moon of AlabamaWe now must say goodbyeWe’ve lost, our good old MamaAnd must have whiskeyOh, you know why
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