DoM’s Latest Mashup: Roadhouse Genie

Regular readers of this blog know that I am a fan of French mashup artist DoM, who often combines Bowie songs with seemingly unrelated pieces of music. These combos often seem like they shouldn’t work, but in the hands of DoM, they always do (he doesn’t just do Bowie mashups, but for obvious reasons, those are the ones I share on this blog).

This latest mashup combines Bowie’s “The Jene Genie” with the Doors’ “Roadhouse Blues.” Both are blues-based, so this mashup might have been a long time coming. The resulting song speaks for itself, and I don’t have much to add about it per se, but I will add a few notes about Bowie and the Doors.

Bowie was not afraid to cover major acts, especially from bands who rose to prominence in the 1960s such as the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Who, and Kinks. I have long thought of the Doors to be in that conversation. Bowie didn’t cover a Doors song per se, but they both covered “Alabama Song,” which originated in 1930 from an opera called The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and was written by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht (I got that from Nicholas Pegg’s Complete David Bowie, which corrected my misperception that the song originated from The Threepenny Opera). I personally don’t especially like either the Doors or Bowie’s version of this song, but I tend to associate it more with the Doors than Bowie, so it is kind of Bowie doing a Doors cover.

There are a few other strange, tangential connections:

– Bowie also appeared in a BBC production of Brecht’s Baal, in which he sings more songs of a similar style as “Alabama Song.”

– Weill’s wife, Lotte Lenya, famously performed “Alabama Song,” I think before either the Doors or Bowie. I mostly know of Lenya from her portrayal as Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love. In the novel that the movie was based on, the character was introduced in a chapter titled “La Tricoteuse,” which is a reference to the French women who knitted by the guillotines. The only other use of the term I am familiar with, outside actual discussions of the French Revolution, is in Bowie’s “Sweet Thing/Candidate” suite, which includes the line, “Someone scrawled on the wall, ‘I smell the blood of les tricoteuses.’”

– Bowie had said that he had seen The Doors at a venue called the Roundhouse, and that his favorite Doors song was “Love Street.”

OK, all that is far afield from DoM’s mashup! But check it out.