Another thought: In Arsenic and Old Lace, Dr. Einstein is an alcoholic plastic surgeon of some repute and (I’m willing to guess), like many physicians of that bygone age, was hooked on harder stuff.
The whole song screams “drug culture” to me.
Old old thread but I think we are on the wrong thread here. The Java Jive is a place, a coffee pot shaped coffeee house built in the twenties and reputed to have been a speakeasy.
It still exists. You can find it on google earth and go visit in street view.
Think prohibition slang when trying to translate the lyrics. Probably explains why the singer likes both coffee and tea, any old booze.
Snug in a jug - in his cups - mildly inebriated? Could be referring to jugs though - woman’s breasts 
Zat bootle - bootleg. Etc…
Not sure about the onion but perhaps java was dark rum or the like.
I thought “a raw one” referred to raw chopped beef on bread, or what my German grandmother called Gehacktesfleisch. It was always served with raw onion, on New Year’s Day. It was a traditional cure for a hangover, a condition from which my grandmother was not always exempt.
It is referred to in the novel The Thin Man, by Dashiell Hammett.
Regards,
Shodan
Here’s an article about the Java Jive.
It was in Tacoma, WA, though, a bit off the beaten path. Was it “world famous?” Yeah, just like every diner’s hamburger is the “world’s greatest.” It wasn’t even nationally famous. I did a search on Newspaper Archive and found no hits for the phrase Java Jive from 1920 through 1939. In 1940 all the hits are to the song. That’s because while Java Jive the building went up in 1927, “Java Jive” the song appeared in 1940, which meant that Prohibition was a dead issue from the past.
I don’t see anything in those lyrics that indicate code for booze. The fifth verse, the one the OP leaves out, is even more explicitly about coffee.
No question that many hip songs from the era did slide references to booze and drugs (and sex) into the lyrics in disguised form so that they wouldn’t be censored. I’m not seeing it here.
No filter required.
I remember the monthly Scout meetings in small-town MN - coffee boiled in large coffee pots with an egg added. I don’t remember the shell being thrown in, though. My mom said the egg was supposed gather up the coffee grounds, IIRC.
OK so I got it wrong, the Java Jive as in the place was renamed after the song was a hit. “Jive” is slang (not a beat). Tea was slang for weed. Cabbage and green is money, nickel note a five dollar bill…were getting there! Onion is still a mystery, roll of bank notes??
Anyone got a granny who was a flapper? Go ask.
Shoot me the pot, the pot is where you keep your stash.
A slice of onion, a cut of cocaine.
A raw one, good or awesome.
Not keen on buying a bean, as in flipin’ the bean?
beans = amphetamine
bean= hot girl
make your own mind up 
OK I am going to butt out after this but…
Some authors on the net reckon java as slang for coffee did not enter the mainstream until the 60’s or at least the 50’s.
Java can also mean “cool”
Java Jive = Hep Talk = Cool Slang ?
A peculator is a bong which is also the last line of the lyrics.
Ok ok I really will leave it alone it now.
I just want to point out that this song is from the early 1940s, when Prohibition was long gone. I think it’s just a novelty song about how much the guy loves coffee.
From etymonline.com:
And we know it was in use :
[URL=“Yahoo Search - Web Search”]before 1940{/url]
The rest of your interpretations are, say, colorful. But not accurate.
I first read about eggshells–just the shells–in coffee in a John Steinbeck book (Travels with Charlie?), tried it, and have drunk my coffee that way ever since. Save them, dry them out overnight, crush them up, and put them in the grounds; they do absorb a lot of the acids.
I first heard the song Java Jive when I was a freshman in college. I was in a swing choir (The Amazin’ Blues at University of Michigan) that did a bunch of Manhattan Transfer arrangements and JJ was among them. A line always confused me: “I’m not keen about a bean unless it is a cheery chili bean.” I thought: wait, wait, we’re talking about coffee here. How did chili get thrown into the mix? This last Saturday night I was listening to KUOW’s The Swing Years and the Ink Spots came on (as they so often do) singing Java Jive. And this time - although I’ve heard the song 15,000,000 times before - I distinctly heard him sing “… unless it is a Ciribiribin.” And I thought: THAT MAKES SENSE! Ciribiribin was recorded just a year before the Ink Spots released Java Jive (by Harry James, both in an orchestra-only version and in a vocal version with Frank Sinatra) so it seems they were making a not to a very popular song.
A study of period slang suggests strongly that the song ‘Java Jive’ is not about coffee. Rather, the speaker is using coffee talk (‘java jive’) to discuss his personal recreational use of controlled substances.
The speaker (a ‘cabbage head’) likes to blend (‘home cookin’) a variety of controlled substances (‘cabbage’) with his marijuana (‘greens’). Specifically, the speaker enjoys mixing the dust from pills (‘coffee beans’) with his marijuana (‘tea’, ‘pot’, ‘moto’). When he inhales (‘draw one’ ‘sweet and hot’) the resulting blend (‘java’) gives him a high (‘jive’) that keeps him dancing (‘cutting a rug’) until he’s thrown in jail (‘snug in the jug’).
The speaker prefers amphetamine pills (‘cheery beans’) that give him a dopamine rush. He is not as interested in pills (‘not keen about a bean’) that have other effects. He likes a pill (‘chilly bean’) that blends well with pot in a chillum (also chilam, chiillim, bong, pipe).
‘Whoops, Mister Moto, I’m a coffee pot’ is, on the surface, a reference to pop culture: Peter Lorre films. At that surface level the line is incoherent. Everything falls into place if we interpret it as drug slang:
Whoops, Mr Moto!
(Whoops, Mr Marijuana Supplier!)
I’m a coffee pot!
(I blend pills/beans with my pot!)
Shoot me the pot
(Give me the marijuana)
and I’ll pour me a shot
(I’ll pour in my special ingredients)
As with other cryptic songs, from ‘Follow the Drinking Gourd’ to ‘Proud Mary’ and ‘Poker Face’, the surface meaning of the words is what gets the lyrics past censors and makes the song acceptable to a general audience. The words make a kind of sense on a surface level as long as the listener isn’t paying much attention. Attentive listeners find quickly, though, that the literal surface meanings have trouble adding up to anything coherent. The difficulties point to code–slang–as key in understanding the song.
The lead singer in the 1940 Ink Spots recording of ‘Java Jive’ uses a character voice. The character portrayed is clearly on something that packs a bigger chemical kick than caffeine.
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Only the lyricist can say for sure what he had in mind, and he is not here to ask. But we have references for the slang vocabulary as I’ve shown it. A good interpretation is one that brings all details together in a coherent way.
Popular songs are works in which professionals have invested money at every point for creation, publishing, recording, and licensing. Anyone who tells you on an answer site that industry professionals routinely risk their money and careers on lyrics that ‘don’t mean anything’ because ‘they are just fun words to say’ is faking it. The person doesn’t know.
Prohibition was well over by the time ‘Java Jive’ was composed in 1939/1940. By 1960 a number of Prohibition-era terms that originally alluded to alcohol (‘stoned’ ‘high’ etc.) had been re-adapted for that era’s controlled substances. The song ‘Java Jive’ appears at a transition point in that process. What appears at first to be diner slang or Prohibition slang in the song isn’t, quite.
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Description of slang terms does not imply endorsement of any illegal activity, by me or by the managers of this board.
It all falls into place.
Except…
Do you have any hard evidence that all these terms were in use by 1939? What are your sources? You don’t bother to give even one.
Ooh! Ooh! Now do Four Brothers!
We know that 1938 marks the first year ‘pot’ is documented as a slang term for marijuana (M-W).
Merriam-Webster Pot Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
Dictionary.com POT Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com
The term is thought to come from the Mexican Spanish word ‘potiguaya’, a contraction for ‘potación de guaya’ (‘drink of grief’ / ‘potion of grief’). This is wine or brandy in which marijuana buds have been steeped. At the time the word ‘pot’ entered English slang, it referred to marijuana that one mixed into other things.
Mexican Spanish slang also gave us ‘moto’ as a term for the same plant.
The song’s date is compatible with the suggestion that its lyrics refer to controlled substances. It would not be difficult for jazz musicians to riff on a word like ‘pot’ and make it sound to outsiders as if they were talking about coffee.
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As for the other terms, anyone can run Internet searches on words and phrases you find in the song. See which approach makes the lyrics ‘all fall into place.’ (For this task you may want to use a search engine that doesn’t track you, such as DuckDuckGo.)
Type any one of these terms…
‘slang’ ‘Prohibition slang’ ‘drug slang’ ‘diner slang’
… followed by any term you’re curious about. Maybe:
‘moto’ ‘bean’ ‘coffee bean’ ‘cabbage’ ‘morning shot’ ‘pot’ ‘tea’ ‘jive’ ‘home cooking’ ‘greens’, ‘boffo’, etc
See which category of slang helps you most–especially with Mister Moto. You will probably find that this site shows up remarkably often:
The site, NoSlang, lists drug terms. It’s intended to help parents and health professionals. It’s comprehensive in scope and much of the slang it lists (‘Mickey Finn’) is hardly new.
See how many obscure words in ‘Java Jive’ show up on that list. You’ll be there a while. After that, check what you find there against what you find elsewhere.
You’ll find the diner slang sites aren’t very helpful… Oops! Mister Moto and the pot again!
http://slang-terms.addictions.org/index/Marijuana/Mota~moto+(Spanish)
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But isn’t it a stretch to suggest a connection between drug experimentation and coffee? 1940 was such an ‘innocent’ era, after all.
Uh… not so much.
Use of the word ‘hophead’ in reference to a drug addict is documented in 1911 (Merriam-Webster). Some people were taking plenty of something even during the days of the Wright brothers. The sample sentence from M-W:
<in the early 20th century hopheads were people one expected to find only in the netherworld of jazz>
What world does ‘Java Jive’ hail from?
The bass singer for the Ink Spots turned 18 in Chicago in 1923. How ‘innocent’ an environment did he find when he started his career?
As soon as WW2 ended the Beats discovered a drug-and-coffeehouse culture already in place and waiting for them. Several Kerouac novels, including ‘On the Road’, concern events in the 1940s.
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My interpretation could still be off the mark. In the absence of the songwriter telling us exactly what he had in mind, we can only explore (now dated) slang and see what we find. It’s worth bearing in mind that drug slang gives double meanings to many common words–‘dog food’, ‘candy’, etc.
Still, anywhere you have cryptic lines in a song you have a loose thread. It doesn’t do to shrug and lazily say ‘Maybe it doesn’t mean anything.’ Slang is not scat singing. People use slang to say something.
If you’re curious, pull on the loose threads. See what unravels.
I still think he really likes coffee.
In fewer words, you have nothing.
That’s exactly why serious word scholars don’t play these games.