Hungry Like the Wolf
Warren Zevon has the blues
Riverfront Times, November 20-27, 1990
“Odd circumstances are just what people in this business have to learn to deal with.”
That’s Warren Zevon on the phone from Boulder, Colo., and he’s discussing the – indeed – odd circumstances of the current state of his career. Consider that Zevon’s latest release, Hindu Love Gods, an engaging rip through a handful of blues and folk classic, plus an oddball cover or two of latter-day rock numbers, was recorded not recently, but in 1987, during the sessions for his Sentimental Hygiene album. Further, the album is not a solo project, as is usually the case of the singer/songwriter, but rather a collaboration between him and R.E.M. members Mike Mills, Peter Buck and Bill Berry.
Consider also that Zevon is currently on tour (a Nov. 26 show is scheduled at Mississippi Nights), but he isn’t out to flog new product, nor will he even be performing with his fellow Gods. Instead, he’s backed this time out by the multi-instrumental duo of Dan Dugmore and Gurf Morlix.
And finally, after a half-dozen albums on the Asylum label, two on Virgin and the latest release on Giant, Zevon is, shall we say, “between labels” for the time being.
“But that’s nothing new, either,” he laughs.
Zevon’s current set of shows is billed as an acoustic tour “to discourage them what might yell, ‘Where’s your drummer?’” he says. “But it’s not really acoustic, either. It’s all plugged in.” Hitting the road with a skeletal backing unit as opposed to a full band offers Zevon the chance to stretch out in ways that a regular tour wouldn’t necessarily allow. “When I perform in this arrangement, it’s more like the times where I just said I wanted to go out on my own,” he says, “when I didn’t have to focus on the release of a new album – ‘focus’ meaning ‘promote,’ of course. And like the time I went out with the Patrician Homeboys (Dugmore and Timothy B. Schmit, who performed here with Zevon in 1988), we intended this time to have a looser set and a looser feel. We can change the songs and do a wider variety. It’s not that I prefer this setup to touring with a full band, but it’s kind of a luxury to be able to alternate them."
The Hindu Love Gods album came together largely as a product of happenstance. Buck, Mills and Berry served as Zevon’s core band for a number of sessions that included, at one time or another, such stellar musicians as Neil Young, Bob Dylan, David Lindley, Mike Campbell and Don Henley. “We finished the tracking,” Zevon says, “and we finished everything we set out to do a little earlier than we expected. And one day we all showed up at the studio for lunch. We were set up to record, so we started playing these songs, probably at (Zevon’s manager Andy) Slater’s suggestion. At one point, I think Mike said, ‘We’ll do it till the food arrives.’ That was going to be the working title.
“Actually,” he adds rather cryptically, ‘for me, the working title of the album was Monkey Wash, Donkey Rinse.* And when I say album, I mean tape. That was how the tape was labeled, and it was basically for us to play in our cars, you know? We never thought of it as an album.”
Though Zevon credits the genesis of the project to his manager, who also co-produced the session, he adds, “The fact is, I’ve been playing these songs for 20 years. I think this album actually began on Slater’s answering machine, when I’d call in the middle of the night and leave a Bukka White song on the machine.”
The rapid-fire nature of the Hindu Love Gods session was highly unusual for Zevon’s typically fastidious, and sometimes even obsessive, perfectionism. “It took a little adjusting to record this way,” he says. “I mean, it’s the opposite of the way I ever work in the studio. But even if you have to be tricked into being spontaneous, spontaneous is a good thing to be. If you approach this the way I tend to approach things – which is to say, I know I’m going to be doing this for a week, and I hope the 40th take sounds like a first take and that’s the one we’ll use, except if I sing a wrong note we can take a note from the 137th take – I probably wouldn’t have performed these songs like I did here. But maybe it just wouldn’t be appropriate to record them that way anyway.”
He’s right, of course. By lining up and charging through a number of tracks like Robert Johnson’s “Walkin’ Blues” and “Travellin’ Riverside Blues,” Muddy Waters’ “I’m a Man,” Willie Dixon’s “Wang Dang Doodle” and Woody Guthrie’s “Vigilante Man,” Zevon & Co. manage to retain the simple but potent fervor of the originals while adding a sense of fun and adventure that’s actually audible in the grooves. Commenting on the spirit of the session, Zevon notes, “We just went in there and recorded til my voice was gone.”
Selection of material was dependent on what songs they all happened to know by heart, with two notable exceptions. “We’d just seen the Georgia Satellites,” Zevon says, “and I loved the song ‘Battleship Chains.’ So they showed me the lyrics to that one. And ‘Raspberry Beret’ was a kind of jokey idea. We’d been tossing around absurd covers, and came up with that. So we had to send out for a Prince songbook. It was gonna be that or [Jethro Tull’s] ‘Bungle in the Jungle,’ which was too complicated, though it has a pretty hip hook.
One of the startling aspects of the album is that, in terms of his recorded work, Zevon’s blues influences had never really been allowed to come to the fore. Yet he maintains that, “The blues were always a powerful influence on me. When I was in high school, there was a fabulous club in Los Angeles called the Ash Grove, where I saw a lot of blues acts. I saw John Hammond there all the time, but also Bukka White and Mance Lipscomb. And the house band in this club was a band called the Rising Sons. Believe it or not, this was Taj Mahal, Ry Cooder, Jesse Ed Davis and a rhythm section. It was unbelievable. I’ve actually been listening to and buying blues albums from probably my early teens.”
Though it’s hardly a fair assessment, Zevon is generally thought of as being part of the El Lay singer/songwriter contingent that is often charged with turning out little more than egocentric anthems and banal songs about lost love. And while he maintains friendships with some members of the West Coast crowd (Jackson Browne, for example, produced his first album), Zevon’s highly literate, and even literary, style clearly sets him apart from the others and points up his solid artistic credibility.
In the past, Zevon’s work has been inspired by writers as various as Ross MacDonald and Thomas McGuane (who even co-wrote a song for Zevon’s album The Envoy). Yet he says that there’s never been a direct relationship between specific books or authors and any of his songs or albums – that is, until his most recent solo release, Transverse City. “I never said, “‘I want this album or this song to feel like F. Scott Fitzgerald,’ or ‘I’m gonna give ‘em some Hemingway here.’ But in the case of Transverse City, that was specifically inspired by a number of books by (Gravity’s Rainbow author) Thomas Pynchon and (‘cyberpunk’ author) William Gibson.”
Much like the novels of Pynchon and Gibson, Zevon’s work is often relentlessly pessimistic. Yet there are always flashes of brilliant wit to offset the pervasive gloom. “I think that’s not necessarily deliberate, but yeah, that’s always been kind of the flavor of my stuff,” Zevon says. I don’t think that is something I can set out to do – to say, ‘This is gonna be dark, but funny’ – I never really think that. With Transverse City, what I thought was that Gibson was going to influence the atmosphere of the album. I don’t know if that turned out to be true. And I had sort of loftier ideas about Pynchon. I thought that his influence was going to be more structural or textural. This is a very lofty idea for something that turned out to be a rock & roll album much like the others. But given unlimited time and money, more of the album would have been like ‘Run Straight Down,’ with all the different elements occurring at once, on a lot of levels, much like the opening scene of Gravity’s Rainbow.”
Zevon’s songs are often terrifically complex, but they can sometimes strike the listener with a less-than-subtle impact. His characters, even if they’re sometimes little more than stand-ins for their often troubled creator, tend to find themselves in extreme situations – hurling themselves at walls in order to feel something, or holing up with the rich and famous at Detox Mansion. Zevon’s subject matter often leans toward the frighteningly violent, as in his definitive mercenary sing-along, “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” or toward the hopelessly grim, as in “Play It All Night Long.” Zevon explains himself thus:
“‘Play It All Night Long’ is kind of an exception for me, and I would usually go to battle for that song. I believe in that song. I’ve explained to people who were distressed by it that I actually thought the song was about courage and endurance and basic human virtues like that. I replied to an indignant letter about that song recently. Shit happens in life. Life is tough. And abuse and incest and disease – all those things happen. I thought that song was about people who went on living anyway, went on with their lives.
“On the other hand, ‘Roland’ – the lyrics for that were written by an old friend of mine that I met in Spain in the early ‘70s. And I think that song kind of set a tone for my career. I think that you can become stereotyped by your own acquiescence. You know, ‘You were good in that action picture, we have another action picture for you.’ ‘OK.’ But ‘Roland’ was written primarily by this guy who had been a mercenary, and it was written in an environment that was, not exactly violent, but it was in Franco’s Spain. This guy owned a bar and I would sing Irish songs in there, and we used to get regular visits from the Guardia Seville, Franco’s soldiers, who’d point their machine guns at us. They’d spirit me out the back, ‘cause I didn’t have the equivalent of a green card. They were exciting times.”
The various elements of his work – the literary aspects, the violence and even cinematic techniques – often got Zevon compared to such disparate artists as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sam Peckinpah. “Somone asked me what I thought about being compared to Peckinpah,” Zevon says, “because it was obvious that he was so violent and I was so violent. I replied that what I saw in Sam Peckinpah movies was just one of those rare directors who was really happy, really elated to have a camera. Really putting excitement into every frame. And I said, ‘I don’t see the violence as the predominant thing as much as the joy.’ I don’t know. The guy used to direct Gunsmoke in the ‘50s. Maybe that’s just the tradition he know – Westerns and modern-day Westerns.
“But then the funny thing is, people compare me to him, or they compare me to Fitzgerald, which is very, very, flattering in both cases, of course. But that’s funny because Fitzgerald writes about rich people to whom nothing much really ever happens. You know, rich people with pretty insulated lives, to whom alcoholism and adultery are the most violent things that ever happen. But I guess those are among the most violent things that can happen to anybody. Nevertheless, I thought it was a strange contrast.”
Yet another aspect of Zevon’s career has only recently begun. In 1989, he wrote a song to be used in the 1989 Alan Rudolph film Love at Large. He was also tapped to contribute to the score of the NBC miniseries Drug Wars. Zevon was intrigued by the work.
“Writing a song for somebody else should be quite difficult, but I wrote the song for Love at Large right away, and he liked it right away,” he says. “But he’s probably a pretty exceptional director to work with in terms of shrugging and saying, ‘Do whatever you want.’”
Zevon, though, clearly relished using his classical chops (yet another mostly unrevealed side to his work) for the Drug Wars project. “I did the, like, classical music stuff. I wasn’t the one who did the Latin-type music, or the synth-type music. I was fortunate to get the job of doing mostly sort of Shostakovich-like ‘March of the DEA’ kind of stuff.
“It was the most exhilarating kind of writing experience I’ve ever had. People ask me if it was inhibiting or something like that, to have to fit seven seconds of music between this hit and that gesture, and I said it was extremely liberating. For one thing, it has aspects of, like, a computer game. It also has aspects of songwriting, with the lyrics already acted out in front of you. But it was wonderful fun, and it was very rewarding. Songwriting is very hit-or-miss. You feel that, well, if nothing comes out in spring, you’re not going to write anything til summer, if then. But this kind of work I could do for 12 straight hours and get maybe 12 minutes of music.”
Regarding his current tour and his upcoming show here, Zevon says that he’s still not tired of playing his “hits,” such as they are, but he does have to mix things up a bit in order to keep things interesting. “‘Roland’ is always interesting to play,” he says. “In the last few years, I’ve added those kind of improvisatory sections, and that’s a lot of fun for me. It means that every night I don’t know what I’m gonna play and it’ll be different all the time. I’m going to be playing some kind of weird shit and people will seem to be enjoying it. I’m thinking, 25 years later and I’m playing my version of Bartok, and all these people are listening. And they came to hear rock & roll. So that’s very satisfying.”
“‘Werewolves’ is fun to start, but if I can improvise a little with it, and say that the werewolf is looking for Cecil Taylor and play some bad jazz for a little while, that keeps me going for a tour.”
Zevon’s next album will be a reunion of sorts, with storied session man Waddy Wachtel producing and playing lead guitar. In addition, Zevon, Wachtel and LeRoy Marinell, who co-wrote “Excitable Boy” and “Werewolves” will be working together again.
Sounds like a howling good time.
* A title you will now recognize as being used for a song on 1995's "Mutineer."
Sidebar: A Zevon Bestiary
Warren Zevon (Asylum, 1976): Zevon’s auspicious major-label debut, produced by Jackson Browne, contains a number of songs that are, unfortunately, known primarily by way of Linda Ronstadt’s comparatively anemic cover versions. But the original “Poor Poor Pitiful Me,” which is featured here, can’t be touched; nor can “Carmelita,” a startlingly matter-of-fact tale of drug addiction. There’s also “Mohammed’s Radio,” which asked the musical question, “Don’t it make you wanna rock and roll all night long?” It does.
Excitable Boy (Asylum, 1978): This one reaches higher than the first effort, but it doesn’t score as consistently. It does, however, contain three of Zevon’s signature tunes: the mercenary anthem “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” plus the manic title track and the perennial favorite “Werewolves of London.”
Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School (Asylum, 1980): A hilarious cover of Ernie K. doe’s “A Certain Girl” and the self-deprecating “Gorilla, You’re a Desperado” help make Bad Luck Streak a winner. So does “Jeannie Needs a Shooter,” which Zevon co-wrote with Bruce Springsteen. Note: “Play It All Night Long” is perhaps the only rock song to contain the word “brucellosis” (no relation to the Boss).
Stand in the Fire (Asylum, 1980): A no-frills, go-for-the-jugular concert recording. One of the essential live albums of the ‘80s.
A Quiet, Normal Life: The Best of Warren Zevon (Asylum, 1986): Most of the essential stuff is here: “Roland,” “Werewolves,” “Poor Poor Pitiful Me.” But even with 14 tracks, it slights a lot of great material. And the expurgated version of “Lawyers, Guns and Money,” which omits the verse containing the line “the shit has hit the fan,” presumably to get it played on the radio, is unforgivable.
Sentimental Hygiene (Virgin, 1987): Probably Zevon’s most fully realized work, this one takes on the biz (“Even a Dog Can Shake Hands”), therapy freaks (“Detox Mansion”) and even the singer’s own tortured past (“Bad Karma,” “Trouble Waiting to Happen”). There’s also a paean to the working man (“The Factory”), plus an oddball funk number (“Leave My Monkey Alone”) thrown in for good measure.
Transverse City (Virgin, 1989): A nightmarish future-tense vision in which “life is cheap and death is free,” inspired by the novels of Thomas Pynchon and William Gibson. Like those writers, Zevon cuts the seemingly unrelenting pessimism of the work with flashes of biting, acerbic wit. Entropy, gridlock and chemical poisoning are the operative forces here, but when we get tired of hearing about it, Zevon points out that, hey, we can always head down to the mall, or, like Michael Jackson, rent out Disneyland.
Hindu Love Gods (Giant, 1990): If the idea of four excitable (but decidedly white) boys like Zevon, Mike Mills, Peter Buck and Bill Berry – the latter three of R.E.M. fame – ripping through 37 minutes of blues and folk classics like “Wang Dang Doodle,” “Crosscut Saw,” “Junko Partner” and “Vigilante Man” sounds like a real hoot, that’s because it is. Born of a loose jam session held back in ’87, Hindu Love Gods is a spirited reconstitution of the elements that made up rock’s primordial soup. Plus the covers of more recent songs like Prince’s “Raspberry Beret” and the Georgia Satellites’ “Battleship Chains” are drop-dead awesome. And funny, too.
Warren Zevon has the blues
Riverfront Times, November 20-27, 1990
“Odd circumstances are just what people in this business have to learn to deal with.”
That’s Warren Zevon on the phone from Boulder, Colo., and he’s discussing the – indeed – odd circumstances of the current state of his career. Consider that Zevon’s latest release, Hindu Love Gods, an engaging rip through a handful of blues and folk classic, plus an oddball cover or two of latter-day rock numbers, was recorded not recently, but in 1987, during the sessions for his Sentimental Hygiene album. Further, the album is not a solo project, as is usually the case of the singer/songwriter, but rather a collaboration between him and R.E.M. members Mike Mills, Peter Buck and Bill Berry.
Consider also that Zevon is currently on tour (a Nov. 26 show is scheduled at Mississippi Nights), but he isn’t out to flog new product, nor will he even be performing with his fellow Gods. Instead, he’s backed this time out by the multi-instrumental duo of Dan Dugmore and Gurf Morlix.
And finally, after a half-dozen albums on the Asylum label, two on Virgin and the latest release on Giant, Zevon is, shall we say, “between labels” for the time being.
“But that’s nothing new, either,” he laughs.
Zevon’s current set of shows is billed as an acoustic tour “to discourage them what might yell, ‘Where’s your drummer?’” he says. “But it’s not really acoustic, either. It’s all plugged in.” Hitting the road with a skeletal backing unit as opposed to a full band offers Zevon the chance to stretch out in ways that a regular tour wouldn’t necessarily allow. “When I perform in this arrangement, it’s more like the times where I just said I wanted to go out on my own,” he says, “when I didn’t have to focus on the release of a new album – ‘focus’ meaning ‘promote,’ of course. And like the time I went out with the Patrician Homeboys (Dugmore and Timothy B. Schmit, who performed here with Zevon in 1988), we intended this time to have a looser set and a looser feel. We can change the songs and do a wider variety. It’s not that I prefer this setup to touring with a full band, but it’s kind of a luxury to be able to alternate them."
The Hindu Love Gods album came together largely as a product of happenstance. Buck, Mills and Berry served as Zevon’s core band for a number of sessions that included, at one time or another, such stellar musicians as Neil Young, Bob Dylan, David Lindley, Mike Campbell and Don Henley. “We finished the tracking,” Zevon says, “and we finished everything we set out to do a little earlier than we expected. And one day we all showed up at the studio for lunch. We were set up to record, so we started playing these songs, probably at (Zevon’s manager Andy) Slater’s suggestion. At one point, I think Mike said, ‘We’ll do it till the food arrives.’ That was going to be the working title.
“Actually,” he adds rather cryptically, ‘for me, the working title of the album was Monkey Wash, Donkey Rinse.* And when I say album, I mean tape. That was how the tape was labeled, and it was basically for us to play in our cars, you know? We never thought of it as an album.”
Though Zevon credits the genesis of the project to his manager, who also co-produced the session, he adds, “The fact is, I’ve been playing these songs for 20 years. I think this album actually began on Slater’s answering machine, when I’d call in the middle of the night and leave a Bukka White song on the machine.”
The rapid-fire nature of the Hindu Love Gods session was highly unusual for Zevon’s typically fastidious, and sometimes even obsessive, perfectionism. “It took a little adjusting to record this way,” he says. “I mean, it’s the opposite of the way I ever work in the studio. But even if you have to be tricked into being spontaneous, spontaneous is a good thing to be. If you approach this the way I tend to approach things – which is to say, I know I’m going to be doing this for a week, and I hope the 40th take sounds like a first take and that’s the one we’ll use, except if I sing a wrong note we can take a note from the 137th take – I probably wouldn’t have performed these songs like I did here. But maybe it just wouldn’t be appropriate to record them that way anyway.”
He’s right, of course. By lining up and charging through a number of tracks like Robert Johnson’s “Walkin’ Blues” and “Travellin’ Riverside Blues,” Muddy Waters’ “I’m a Man,” Willie Dixon’s “Wang Dang Doodle” and Woody Guthrie’s “Vigilante Man,” Zevon & Co. manage to retain the simple but potent fervor of the originals while adding a sense of fun and adventure that’s actually audible in the grooves. Commenting on the spirit of the session, Zevon notes, “We just went in there and recorded til my voice was gone.”
Selection of material was dependent on what songs they all happened to know by heart, with two notable exceptions. “We’d just seen the Georgia Satellites,” Zevon says, “and I loved the song ‘Battleship Chains.’ So they showed me the lyrics to that one. And ‘Raspberry Beret’ was a kind of jokey idea. We’d been tossing around absurd covers, and came up with that. So we had to send out for a Prince songbook. It was gonna be that or [Jethro Tull’s] ‘Bungle in the Jungle,’ which was too complicated, though it has a pretty hip hook.
One of the startling aspects of the album is that, in terms of his recorded work, Zevon’s blues influences had never really been allowed to come to the fore. Yet he maintains that, “The blues were always a powerful influence on me. When I was in high school, there was a fabulous club in Los Angeles called the Ash Grove, where I saw a lot of blues acts. I saw John Hammond there all the time, but also Bukka White and Mance Lipscomb. And the house band in this club was a band called the Rising Sons. Believe it or not, this was Taj Mahal, Ry Cooder, Jesse Ed Davis and a rhythm section. It was unbelievable. I’ve actually been listening to and buying blues albums from probably my early teens.”
Though it’s hardly a fair assessment, Zevon is generally thought of as being part of the El Lay singer/songwriter contingent that is often charged with turning out little more than egocentric anthems and banal songs about lost love. And while he maintains friendships with some members of the West Coast crowd (Jackson Browne, for example, produced his first album), Zevon’s highly literate, and even literary, style clearly sets him apart from the others and points up his solid artistic credibility.
In the past, Zevon’s work has been inspired by writers as various as Ross MacDonald and Thomas McGuane (who even co-wrote a song for Zevon’s album The Envoy). Yet he says that there’s never been a direct relationship between specific books or authors and any of his songs or albums – that is, until his most recent solo release, Transverse City. “I never said, “‘I want this album or this song to feel like F. Scott Fitzgerald,’ or ‘I’m gonna give ‘em some Hemingway here.’ But in the case of Transverse City, that was specifically inspired by a number of books by (Gravity’s Rainbow author) Thomas Pynchon and (‘cyberpunk’ author) William Gibson.”
Much like the novels of Pynchon and Gibson, Zevon’s work is often relentlessly pessimistic. Yet there are always flashes of brilliant wit to offset the pervasive gloom. “I think that’s not necessarily deliberate, but yeah, that’s always been kind of the flavor of my stuff,” Zevon says. I don’t think that is something I can set out to do – to say, ‘This is gonna be dark, but funny’ – I never really think that. With Transverse City, what I thought was that Gibson was going to influence the atmosphere of the album. I don’t know if that turned out to be true. And I had sort of loftier ideas about Pynchon. I thought that his influence was going to be more structural or textural. This is a very lofty idea for something that turned out to be a rock & roll album much like the others. But given unlimited time and money, more of the album would have been like ‘Run Straight Down,’ with all the different elements occurring at once, on a lot of levels, much like the opening scene of Gravity’s Rainbow.”
Zevon’s songs are often terrifically complex, but they can sometimes strike the listener with a less-than-subtle impact. His characters, even if they’re sometimes little more than stand-ins for their often troubled creator, tend to find themselves in extreme situations – hurling themselves at walls in order to feel something, or holing up with the rich and famous at Detox Mansion. Zevon’s subject matter often leans toward the frighteningly violent, as in his definitive mercenary sing-along, “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” or toward the hopelessly grim, as in “Play It All Night Long.” Zevon explains himself thus:
“‘Play It All Night Long’ is kind of an exception for me, and I would usually go to battle for that song. I believe in that song. I’ve explained to people who were distressed by it that I actually thought the song was about courage and endurance and basic human virtues like that. I replied to an indignant letter about that song recently. Shit happens in life. Life is tough. And abuse and incest and disease – all those things happen. I thought that song was about people who went on living anyway, went on with their lives.
“On the other hand, ‘Roland’ – the lyrics for that were written by an old friend of mine that I met in Spain in the early ‘70s. And I think that song kind of set a tone for my career. I think that you can become stereotyped by your own acquiescence. You know, ‘You were good in that action picture, we have another action picture for you.’ ‘OK.’ But ‘Roland’ was written primarily by this guy who had been a mercenary, and it was written in an environment that was, not exactly violent, but it was in Franco’s Spain. This guy owned a bar and I would sing Irish songs in there, and we used to get regular visits from the Guardia Seville, Franco’s soldiers, who’d point their machine guns at us. They’d spirit me out the back, ‘cause I didn’t have the equivalent of a green card. They were exciting times.”
The various elements of his work – the literary aspects, the violence and even cinematic techniques – often got Zevon compared to such disparate artists as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sam Peckinpah. “Somone asked me what I thought about being compared to Peckinpah,” Zevon says, “because it was obvious that he was so violent and I was so violent. I replied that what I saw in Sam Peckinpah movies was just one of those rare directors who was really happy, really elated to have a camera. Really putting excitement into every frame. And I said, ‘I don’t see the violence as the predominant thing as much as the joy.’ I don’t know. The guy used to direct Gunsmoke in the ‘50s. Maybe that’s just the tradition he know – Westerns and modern-day Westerns.
“But then the funny thing is, people compare me to him, or they compare me to Fitzgerald, which is very, very, flattering in both cases, of course. But that’s funny because Fitzgerald writes about rich people to whom nothing much really ever happens. You know, rich people with pretty insulated lives, to whom alcoholism and adultery are the most violent things that ever happen. But I guess those are among the most violent things that can happen to anybody. Nevertheless, I thought it was a strange contrast.”
Yet another aspect of Zevon’s career has only recently begun. In 1989, he wrote a song to be used in the 1989 Alan Rudolph film Love at Large. He was also tapped to contribute to the score of the NBC miniseries Drug Wars. Zevon was intrigued by the work.
“Writing a song for somebody else should be quite difficult, but I wrote the song for Love at Large right away, and he liked it right away,” he says. “But he’s probably a pretty exceptional director to work with in terms of shrugging and saying, ‘Do whatever you want.’”
Zevon, though, clearly relished using his classical chops (yet another mostly unrevealed side to his work) for the Drug Wars project. “I did the, like, classical music stuff. I wasn’t the one who did the Latin-type music, or the synth-type music. I was fortunate to get the job of doing mostly sort of Shostakovich-like ‘March of the DEA’ kind of stuff.
“It was the most exhilarating kind of writing experience I’ve ever had. People ask me if it was inhibiting or something like that, to have to fit seven seconds of music between this hit and that gesture, and I said it was extremely liberating. For one thing, it has aspects of, like, a computer game. It also has aspects of songwriting, with the lyrics already acted out in front of you. But it was wonderful fun, and it was very rewarding. Songwriting is very hit-or-miss. You feel that, well, if nothing comes out in spring, you’re not going to write anything til summer, if then. But this kind of work I could do for 12 straight hours and get maybe 12 minutes of music.”
Regarding his current tour and his upcoming show here, Zevon says that he’s still not tired of playing his “hits,” such as they are, but he does have to mix things up a bit in order to keep things interesting. “‘Roland’ is always interesting to play,” he says. “In the last few years, I’ve added those kind of improvisatory sections, and that’s a lot of fun for me. It means that every night I don’t know what I’m gonna play and it’ll be different all the time. I’m going to be playing some kind of weird shit and people will seem to be enjoying it. I’m thinking, 25 years later and I’m playing my version of Bartok, and all these people are listening. And they came to hear rock & roll. So that’s very satisfying.”
“‘Werewolves’ is fun to start, but if I can improvise a little with it, and say that the werewolf is looking for Cecil Taylor and play some bad jazz for a little while, that keeps me going for a tour.”
Zevon’s next album will be a reunion of sorts, with storied session man Waddy Wachtel producing and playing lead guitar. In addition, Zevon, Wachtel and LeRoy Marinell, who co-wrote “Excitable Boy” and “Werewolves” will be working together again.
Sounds like a howling good time.
* A title you will now recognize as being used for a song on 1995's "Mutineer."
Sidebar: A Zevon Bestiary
Warren Zevon (Asylum, 1976): Zevon’s auspicious major-label debut, produced by Jackson Browne, contains a number of songs that are, unfortunately, known primarily by way of Linda Ronstadt’s comparatively anemic cover versions. But the original “Poor Poor Pitiful Me,” which is featured here, can’t be touched; nor can “Carmelita,” a startlingly matter-of-fact tale of drug addiction. There’s also “Mohammed’s Radio,” which asked the musical question, “Don’t it make you wanna rock and roll all night long?” It does.
Excitable Boy (Asylum, 1978): This one reaches higher than the first effort, but it doesn’t score as consistently. It does, however, contain three of Zevon’s signature tunes: the mercenary anthem “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” plus the manic title track and the perennial favorite “Werewolves of London.”
Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School (Asylum, 1980): A hilarious cover of Ernie K. doe’s “A Certain Girl” and the self-deprecating “Gorilla, You’re a Desperado” help make Bad Luck Streak a winner. So does “Jeannie Needs a Shooter,” which Zevon co-wrote with Bruce Springsteen. Note: “Play It All Night Long” is perhaps the only rock song to contain the word “brucellosis” (no relation to the Boss).
Stand in the Fire (Asylum, 1980): A no-frills, go-for-the-jugular concert recording. One of the essential live albums of the ‘80s.
A Quiet, Normal Life: The Best of Warren Zevon (Asylum, 1986): Most of the essential stuff is here: “Roland,” “Werewolves,” “Poor Poor Pitiful Me.” But even with 14 tracks, it slights a lot of great material. And the expurgated version of “Lawyers, Guns and Money,” which omits the verse containing the line “the shit has hit the fan,” presumably to get it played on the radio, is unforgivable.
Sentimental Hygiene (Virgin, 1987): Probably Zevon’s most fully realized work, this one takes on the biz (“Even a Dog Can Shake Hands”), therapy freaks (“Detox Mansion”) and even the singer’s own tortured past (“Bad Karma,” “Trouble Waiting to Happen”). There’s also a paean to the working man (“The Factory”), plus an oddball funk number (“Leave My Monkey Alone”) thrown in for good measure.
Transverse City (Virgin, 1989): A nightmarish future-tense vision in which “life is cheap and death is free,” inspired by the novels of Thomas Pynchon and William Gibson. Like those writers, Zevon cuts the seemingly unrelenting pessimism of the work with flashes of biting, acerbic wit. Entropy, gridlock and chemical poisoning are the operative forces here, but when we get tired of hearing about it, Zevon points out that, hey, we can always head down to the mall, or, like Michael Jackson, rent out Disneyland.
Hindu Love Gods (Giant, 1990): If the idea of four excitable (but decidedly white) boys like Zevon, Mike Mills, Peter Buck and Bill Berry – the latter three of R.E.M. fame – ripping through 37 minutes of blues and folk classics like “Wang Dang Doodle,” “Crosscut Saw,” “Junko Partner” and “Vigilante Man” sounds like a real hoot, that’s because it is. Born of a loose jam session held back in ’87, Hindu Love Gods is a spirited reconstitution of the elements that made up rock’s primordial soup. Plus the covers of more recent songs like Prince’s “Raspberry Beret” and the Georgia Satellites’ “Battleship Chains” are drop-dead awesome. And funny, too.