Warren Zevon sings of spies, ghosts and lost lovers
A few years back, just before his career heated up and Warren Zevon started turning out some of the spookiest, saddest and most startling songs in pop music, he was jamming at a friend's house and wondering why no one would let him play lead guitar.
"Well," teased his pal, Bassist LeRoy Marinell, "you get good ideas. But then you get too excited."
"Yeah," said Warren Zevon. "I'm an excitable boy."
He kept that exchange in mind.
Excitable Boy is the title of Zevon's new record, his second in as many years. It continues further along into the neon netherworld explored in his first major album. Zevon sings songs of madness and delight, all about spies and mercenaries, traitors and lost lovers, spooks, werewolves and other halfway creatures of the night. Quite characteristically, his "excitable boy" shows up in the title cut (co-written with Marinell) transformed into a raging madman, whose exploits are chronicled with sardonic relish.
Well, he went down to dinner
in his Sunday best Excitable boy, they all said And he rubbed the pot roast
all over his chest Excitable boy, they all said
This wrought-up lad moves on to higher, wider-ranging transgressions—from biting an usherette on the leg to raping and killing "little Suzie," his date at the junior prom. Yet each exploit is explained and excused by the same hard-rocking ironic chorus: "Well, he's just an excitable boy."
Zevon is about equal parts berserk satirist and strung-out romantic. He can write desolating love songs with racked refrains like, "We made mad love/ Shadow love/ Random love/ And abandoned love/
Accidentally like a martyr/ The hurt gets worse and the heart gets harder." Perhaps most conspicuously, he is a superb storyteller, running true to the tough, hard-eyed tradition that embraces both writers like Raymond Chandler and film makers like Sam Peckinpah. One of the most commanding, demanding of Excitable Boy's nine songs is Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner, a harsh, haunted, hard-as-bedrock chronicle of a Norwegian mercenary soldier whose head is blown off by a turncoat CIA operative named Van Owen. Roland's ghost hunts
Van Owen to a Mombasa barroom, blasts his body "from there to Johannesburg," then goes "wandering through the night":
Now it's ten years later but he still
keeps up the fight In Ireland, in Lebanon, in
Palestine and Berkeley Patty Hearst heard the burst of
Roland's Thompson gun And bought it
Lyrics like that, tied to strong melodies that can be either stringently lush or stingingly harsh—real whiplash rock 'n' roll—make Zevon wonderfully weird and wholly unique.