Warren Zevon's Excitable Boy is the best American rock & roll album since Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run (1975), Neil Young's Zuma (1976) and Jackson Browne's The Pretender (1976). If there's not enough firepower in that statement, let's cock the hammer on another. Thus far, the Seventies have introduced three major American rock & roll artists—Browne in 1972, Springsteen in 1973 and Zevon—and I have every confidence the music of all three will be even better in the future.
Oddly enough, Zevon, the apparent newcomer, preceded both Browne and Springsteen into the studio. His first record, an exercise in self-produced self-induced psychedelia called Wanted Dead or Alive (Imperial, 1970), went deservedly unnoticed, and it wasn't until 1976, when his career seemed all but dead, that he got another shot (largely through Browne's persistence), this time with Asylum. On Warren Zevon, his aim was truer but he hit perhaps too many targets, and there was some confusion whether he was just another sensitive (albeit unusually tough) singer songwriter or a Magnum-cum-laude rock & roller who ate gunpowder for breakfast. His first tour answered that question, and the new LP blasts the bull's-eye into smithereens.
When Warren Zevon sits down at the piano and throws back his head and sings on Excitable Boy, he's like Sam Peckinpah trying to work out the obsessions in something like Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. While one hand steadily applies the Apollonian technique and obvious control of the classical artist (Zevon also writes symphonies and string quartets), the other is compulsively jerking the trigger with Dionysian delirium. Though clearly no dumdum, Zevon, like Peckinpah, sometimes refuses to rely upon academic intelligence and pragmatic perspective to pull him through. An intuitive artist, he's often both smart and crazy enough to shoot first at the most explosive subjects, then figure out the ramifications of whatever the hell he's bloodied later ("Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner," "Excitable Boy," "Werewolves of London," "Lawyers, Guns and Money"). This is a dangerous way to work—it isn't nice, and not everybody gets it—but you can claim some spectacular trophies when you're sufficiently reckless to risk safari on the dark side of the moon, where the gleam of the lion may look like the leer of the lamb.
Not that Zevon is particularly metaphysical, at least not in the expected manner. While he writes very good lyrics ("Veracruz"), he writes great music. Mostly, his songs are purely physical, but in the same ways that Clint Eastwood—in, say, Dirty Harry—is purely physical. Almost without exception, Zevon's rock & roll songs command and demand your attention through the sheer strength of their creator's personality; they're not necessarily profound (though they can be), but they hit with such primary impact you don't have to think twice about them. In movies, there's a saying that when a director dies, he becomes a photographer. Well, when a rock & roller dies, he writes hooks and succumbs to other similarly decadent devices. On Excitable Boy, Warren Zevon's self-confidence and craftsmanship are so inherently forceful he's able to bypass self-consciousness and secondary concerns altogether. These songs stand up and look you right in the eye. They're so damned good no one could miss them.
Like Wanted Dead or Alive and Warren Zevon, Excitable Boy shares a passion for larger-than-life historical figures (or those who would emulate them), elemental forces and codes of behavior often associated with courage and honor. But Zevon's would-be heroes ("Should have done, should have done, we all sigh") sometimes unwittingly shoot for the moon when it's reflected in a puddle of water under their tangled feet. Like the characters in Graham Greene's The Comedians, they're so tragicomically confused about glory they don't know up from down, quandary from quarry, but they do know they're either running after or running away from something big—and, in their zeal and commitment, that's all that matters. There's not much irony here, but a lot of heart. When the picaresque protagonist of "Lawyers, Guns and Money" sings:
Now I'm biding in Honduras
I'm a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns and money
The shit has hit the fan,
he's not surrendering; he's just acknowledging he's ****ed up the quest again and now needs power to fight power.
When Warren Zevon needs more power on this album, all he has to do is snap his fingers. For, if Excitable Boy is clearly a singular triumph, it is also a collective one. Brassy as Zevon is, he's given comparable backing by the rhythm sections of three superlative rock & roll bands (Linda Ronstadt's, the Section, Fleetwood Mac), exceptionally crisp and complementary production by Jackson Browne and guitarist Waddy Wachtel, and the kind of sound quality (by Gred Ladanyi, who engineered Browne's Running on Empty) that most musicians would kill for. Musically, Zevon's stalwart singing and rigorous, razor-sharp piano playing hold down the fort, while Wachtel, who brandishes an armory of guitars, takes the high ground with such audacity he nearly steals the action at times. On "Johnny Strikes Up the Band" (like the second LP's "Mohammed's Radio," a "tribute to rock & roll"), Wachtel simply picks up the song and carries it away, giving it back only for the vibrant vocals.
Though it's not exactly confined to quarters here, Zevon's anarchic obsession will never get time off for good behavior either. His heroes are too excitable ("Well, he went down to dinner in his Sunday best ...And he rubbed the pot roast all over his chest") and generally find themselves in situations as absurd as those in Norman Mailer's An American Dream, which "Lawyers, Guns and Money" resembles:
Well, I went home with the waitress
The way I always do
How was I to know
She was with the Russians, too?
"Caught between the rock and the hard place," Zevon's "innocent bystander" shouts sendups that make sense and statements that don't. "Werewolves of London" is one of those indescribable, half-sung/half-spoken, stupid/profound anthems that captures something of a city and a time. With Wachtel's guitar prowling through the rolling fog like Jack the Ripper, Zevon reduces the whole world to a mythic howl, and you feel exhilarated. "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner," cowritten by ex-soldier of fortune David Lindell in Spain, is an ersatz Irish ballad about betrayal, revenge and death in Africa ("They can still see his headless body stalking through the night In the muzzle flash of Roland's Thompson gun") that somehow winds up with Patty Hearst in Berkeley. The title song sounds both harmless and bouncy until you listen to the lyrics, which could have been scrawled in blood by Anthony Perkins in Psycho.
It would be a mistake to define Zevon solely by his outré limits, however. He's a son, a husband and a father, and this cycle is seldom slighted in his work (e.g., "A Bullet for Ramona," "Mama Couldn't Be Persuaded" and "Backs Turned Looking down the Path" on previous records). Here, "Veracruz" functions as a haunting synthesis of history and honor, codes and obsessions. Like Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, it's a dream about exiles acting with integrity when their entire way of life is dying, but it's also about families in peril, mourning old dreams while moving inevitably toward new ones.
"Tenderness on the Block," written with Jackson Browne and reminiscent of Browne's "The Only Child" and "Daddy's Tune," projects and reflects upon a happy and satisfying father/daughter relationship, but "Accidentally like a Martyr" is a hard-as-nails love song about a love that's been irredeemably lost. Rarely has a remembrance been so sad and glorious, so lovely and forlorn. For some reason, the chorus made me think of Lew Archer, the private detective created by Zevon's friend, mystery writer Ross Macdonald. In The Doomsters, Macdonald wrote:
For once in my life I had nothing and wanted nothing. Then the thought of Sue fell through me like a feather in a vacuum. My mind picked it up and ran with it and took flight. I wondered where she was, what she was doing, whether she'd aged much as she lay in ambush in time, or changed the color of her bright head.
Pictured on the inner sleeve of this album is Zevon's 44-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver resting on a dinner plate filled with his wife's cooking. The photograph is titled "Willy on the Plate," and it tells the whole story. Warren Zevon wants it all—and, on Excitable Boy, that's exactly what he gets.
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