We agreed that the lyrics do not seem entirely consistent, perhaps by corruption, but there are strong hints of what we would nowadays call alcohol abuse:

• The narrator, though not yet really poor, has lost credit, which means s/he has lost social respectability
• Under these circumstances, s/he should have sorrows, of which s/he "drives away" only the awareness, by getting drunk.

The bottle, even if shared with friends in the plural (as some versions state), can be refilled from a barrel, or there may be one after the other.