The Heavy Metal Rocker Jim Morrison Directly Quoted for “Roadhouse Blues”

From childhood trauma-inspired poetry to early 20th-century operas, the Doors have no small shortage of interesting lyrical inspiration—including the time Jim Morrison directly quoted a heavy metal rocker for the third verse of “Roadhouse Blues.” The 1970 track’s driving guitar riffs and boisterous vocals make it a quintessentially rock and roll song, and where better to get inspiration than the Godfather of Shock Rock?

Though interestingly, it would seem that Morrison was the one who shocked his fellow rock and roller, not the other way around.

The Heavy Metal Rocker Jim Morrison Quoted for “Roadhouse Blues”

Jim Morrison’s reputation for spontaneous and dangerous antics affected more than his drug use and on-stage persona. He was equally as impulsive with his songwriting, according to Alice Cooper. During an episode of Planet Rock, Cooper remembered a seemingly mundane morning when he and Morrison were hanging out. “We were sitting there drinking, and Jim comes in, and he flops down,” Cooper said (via Uncut).

“He said, ‘So, what’s up, man?’” Cooper added in a separate interview. “I replied, ‘Oh, I don’t know, man. I woke up this morning and got myself a beer.” Shortly after, Morrison and the band began rehearsing “Roadhouse Blues.” In the third verse, Morrison begins, Well, I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer. The future’s uncertain and the end is always near.

Cooper immediately perked up, telling Uncut, “They go in, and they’re doing the song, and the next thing I hear is, ‘woke up this morning, and I got myself a beer.’ I went, ‘I just said that a second ago!’ He was very spontaneous in the way things were written.”

Remembering Their Rock and Roll Friendship

The Doors frontman’s tragically premature death in 1971 and Alice Cooper’s decades-long career tend to separate the two bands within the musical zeitgeist, but in the earliest days of Alice Cooper’s career, the two bands were actually quite close. Frontman Alice Cooper talked about the band’s early transition from Arizona to Los Angeles, where they didn’t know anybody. “One night, we played some tiny place, and the wife of one of the Doors happened to be there,” he recalled (via Louder Sound).

“She told her husband that we were pretty cool and different from anyone else, so then the Doors came to see us and kinda took us under their wings from then on,” he continued. “That was really sweet of them. I think they liked that we had this nefarious reputation and were seen as a bit ‘out there.’ We got to know them properly when we played shows with them. They were the nicest guys. With Jim, there was no real way of being his best friend, but we had a bond in that we were both lead singers, and we got along well because he was a drinker and I was a drinker.”

“I never got him sober,” the rock and roller remembered via Far Out Magazine. “But then, neither was I, so we were fine together.” Cooper paid homage to his late friend—and the song he helped inspire—during his set at Coopstock 2 in 2022, where he performed his rendition of the Doors’ “Roadhouse Blues.”

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