Jim Morrison was born on this day in 1943. Here are the Doors performing a song very few best-selling rock bands would have tackled: Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “Alabama Song,” from The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, an operatic parable of capitalism as an American Wild West town where “everything is permitted save one thing: having no money.”

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Ed Kilgore is a political columnist for New York and managing editor at the Democratic Strategist website. He was a contributing writer at the Washington Monthly from January 2012 until November 2015, and was the principal contributor to the Political Animal blog.