My Life In The Cutout Bins: Warren Zevon/Warren Zevon

Warren Zevon's self-titled, second-but-really-kinda-debut album is frequently touted nowadays as a bona fide masterpiece of songwriting, yet there it was one day in the cutout bins at Sound Warehouse. The album didn't sell all that well, but it put everyone in L.A. and the rest of the music biz as well on notice that Warren Zevon was a cat to be reckoned with.

Of course, he had been hanging around the music biz for a decade, drinking and partying and making himself known to a variety of folks who had migrated to L.A. on the basis of the country rock singer/songwriter movement that was centered there in the late sixties and early seventies. In many ways Warren Zevon was a last gasp, an attempt to gain the recognition that he deserved but which, for several reasons--some within his control, some not--had not come his way.

During his period of exile, Warren found work backing other artists. He toured with the Everly Brothers, no longer the hit making young darlings of a decade before, but rather a couple of dispirited, alcohol-addled, argumentative brothers whose emotional relationship was far from their familiar warm, close harmonies. The tour had similar dynamics to Zevon's upbringing in a household of bickering parents, an environment that may have helped set him up for future alcoholism. Mom and Dad/Phil and Don, are fighting again.

But he was also writing songs, and part of the secret of Warren Zevon is that he had a drawerful of quality songs to turn to. Not only that, but he'd had time to buff and hone them until they shone like diamonds.

Zevon had kind of kissed the music business goodbye, moving with his wife Crystal to Spain, where they lived in Stitges and Zevon played country and western music at an Irish bar called The Dubliner. The idyll lasted only three months before Warren's friend Jackson Brown sent him a postcard encouraging him to come back to L.A. Brown had convinced David Geffen, owner of the Asylum label where Brown recorded, to give Zevon a shot at making  a record. The songwriter had reservations about going back given the lifestyle he had led there. He and Crystal had married the year prior, and before they left Los Angeles he had written the song "Backs Turned Looking Down the Path." It is an optimistic song, an uncharacteristically tender song that stands out on Warren Zevon like a sore thumb.

Bassist Marty David and drummer Gary Mallaber lay down a solid beat that is further enhanced by Lindsey Buckingham's percussive chords on acoustic guitar. Jackson Brown plays slide guitar and sings harmony on the song's chorus:

People always ask me why, what's the matter with me

Nothing matters when I'm with my baby

With my back turned, looking down the path

Having your back turned refers to a change in life, a change in course, and it also conjures the image of standing at the altar and getting married. Crystal and Warren were married in '74 and divorced in '79. In between came Warren Zevon and Excitable Boy and the fame that came with the enormous hit song "Werewolves of London." Rock and roll stardom was toxic for Warren Zevon, and he responded by sinking deeply into his alcoholism.

The City of Los Angeles plays a large part on Warren Zevon, and it played an outsize role in the artist's life as well. L.A. was part of what he'd been running from by leaving for Spain. His life in L.A. was full of friends who drank and did drugs, lovers who lived hard, whose faces "looked like something/Death brought with him in his suitcase." L.A. gave him his fortune and fame, but it took back his career and his marriage.

The song I just quoted is "The French Inhaler," a dramatic piece that is a kind of mirror image of Elton John's "Candle In the Wind," because it skewers its (real life) subject (look it up, but it's not central to this piece) rather than lionizing her. The subject of his tribute "just can't concentrate/and you always show up late" just like Marilyn Monroe during part of her career, but the most telling lines of the song speak to the author's part in this relationship:

You said you were an actress

Yes, I believe you are

I thought you'd be a star

So I drank up all the money,

Yes, I drank up all the money,

With these phonies in this Hollywood bar,

These friends of mine in this Hollywood bar

In the song's final section Zevon manages to conflate the song's subject with the Marilyn Monroe of Norman Mailer's shady 1973 'biography.' I'm operating sheerly on memory here, which I've neither the time nor inclination to fact check, but I recall Mailer talking about Marilyn learning how to french inhale. If not, there's still the lines 'he stamped and mailed her,' which sounds a lot like 'Mailer'd her' and, most damning of all, 'Goodbye, Norman.'

"The French Inhaler" is one of the songs on the album that Zevon treats to a lavish arrangement, with strings he arranged himself. Even with the Jackson Brown production and backing vocals from Glen Frey and Don Henley, the song doesn't sound like most of Southern California's softer rock groups. For one thing, it has an odd structure that makes it seem like a movie or a novel rather than a popular song. It uses the pleasantness of the warmth generated by the musicians and background vocals and the strings to hide the black-hearted pain and hate at its core. Zevon adds to it with his piano work, playing a mannered classical introduction that is echoed at the song's conclusion.

Let's take a moment to talk about something. By the time that I picked up this album in the bins, Warren Zevon had become a star, having released the followup record, Excitable Boy. Like many folks I was pretty excited about Excitable, loving songs like 'Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,' 'Lawyers, Guns, and Money,' and enjoying some of the secondary ones, like 'Accidentally Like a Martyr' and 'Veracruz.' 'Werewolves of London' was a goof, but it was a good one with an incredibly catchy piano riff (just ask Kid Rock) and it showcased his trademark dark sense of humor as well. My sixteen year old self enjoyed singing along with the lines 'little old lady got mutilated late last night' perhaps more than I should have.

So Warren Zevon came as a bit of a revelation. Because I think that, when I sat down and listened to it, I had a gut feeling that it was the better album. I may not have admitted it then, or even had the language to create an argument in its favor, but the songs on Warren Zevon just felt meatier. I was already familiar with three of the songs from Linda Ronstadt's covers--"Hasten Down the Wind" the title track of her seventh album, and both "Carmelita" and "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" on the album Simple Dreams. She also covered "Mohammad's Radio" on Living In the USA, but I heard Warren's recording of that one first.  "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" was the kind of rocking material that producer Peter Asher was always encouraging Linda to record. I never liked "Hasten Down the Wind" and it seemed odd to me that she chose it as the album title as well. It just seemed like an overwrought song, and the "She's so many women" chorus always reminded me of a Summer's Eve commercial.

"Mohammad's Radio" was another matter. Opening side two of Warren Zevon, it is something of a reset. The song has a gospel lilt to it, and it is one of a group of rock songs that celebrate the radio and its ability to connect with people as a mystic, spiritual experience: Van Morrison's "Caravan" and "Wavelength," The Modern Lovers' "Roadrunner," Golden Earring's "Radar Love" and so on. Mohammad's radio could be a talk show, or a pirate transmission. It could be shortwave radio. It's not clear  if he represents the empire or the insurgency, or what he is transmitting, but it is affecting people's lives: "In walks the village idiot, and his face is all aglow/'Cause he's been up all night listening to Mohammad's radio."

"Carmelita" is a song of self comfort, the chorus almost a prayer. Again the listener connects through the radio, reminded of home in Ensenada and the loved one left behind. Wrapping himself in the memory of love, the heroin-addicted narrator/singer seeks protection against the harsh reality of the world and the dark thoughts of suicide that swirl around like hornets. It is sad and impossible not to think that Warren Zevon understood this place of desperation that threatens life itself very deeply.

"Desperados Under the Eaves" ends the album, and it is perhaps Zevon's most celebrated song. Written in the late sixties, it's an account of a down and out Zevon ditching out of a low rent motel because he can't pay the bill. It's worth noting that regardless of his situation here, he is apparently nowhere near rock bottom. In a move familiar to many old vaudevillians, carneys, and actors, Zevon exits through the window into an alleyway where he is picked up by a friend and whisked away. It's a plot point worthy of one of Zevon's favorite writers, Ross McDonald.

But none of that is in the song, exactly. It's more of an internal dialogue by Zevon about his situation, coming to terms with the fact that his life is, in this moment, down to running out on the bill at a cheap hotel. When he sings:

Still waking up in the mornings with shaking hands

And I'm trying to find a girl who understands me

But except in dreams you're never really free

Don't the sun look angry at me

he sounds exactly like his buddy Jackson Browne. His narrator could be Browne's Pretender who is worn down and no longer the 'happy idiot' content to 'struggle for the legal tender.' Instead he's always recovering from a bender, and that girl who understands him is a pipe dream, because he doesn't really understand himself. And like any junky or addict, he makes it personal--'don't the sun look angry at me.'

"Desperados Under the Eaves" was one of the songs that David Geffen heard, and it was instrumental, together with Browne's urging, in convincing the executive to sign Warren. The songwriter benefited twice from his misdeed: once when he skipped out on his bill at the Hollywood Hawaiian, the other when he got a recording contract on the strength of his song about it. What kind of karma is that?

The most impressive way in which the song conveys its meaning, its sense of time and place and history, is through the music. First there is a string arrangement, signalling that this is a major song. The introduction played by the string section is the same as the solo piano introductory figure that begins the album, on the song "Frank and Jesse James." It ties things together nicely and I'm sure it's a reference to the 'desperadoes' of the title, likening Zevon skipping out on his hotel bill as akin to the frontier antics of the James gang. Only problem with that is that Zevon's lyrics, painting Frank and Jesse as a Robin Hood-style gang of thieves, refusing to let 'the man' keep them down, when in fact they were viscous anti-abolitionists during the Civil War, and afterward were inspired in their criminal acts by regional insurgencies of ex-Confederates. But musically, it sets us up for the final act in the play that Zevon has been presenting, of the beautiful, the damned, and the broken.

Zevon plays solid, blocky singer-songwriter piano, the strings play, and the rhythm section locks into tempo. The song opens and closes with Warren, sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel, listening to the hum of the air conditioner. According to Crystal, he started writing the song as he sat there listening to the air conditioner, then finished it shortly after they had moved in together. At the end of the song, Zevon sinks into merely humming along with the strings as an imitation of that sound, until breaking out in the final repeated chant of 'Look away down Gower Avenue' sung by a chorus that includes Browne, Jorge Calderon, J.D. Souther, and Carl Wilson, who is credited as having arranged the harmonies.

The effect of this ending, musically, is to mythologize the event in question as well as participating in the mythologizing of the counterculture and of L.A. itself. It leads back, again, to Zevon's historically inaccurate opening song, perhaps suggesting that the people need their myths, their opiates, be they chemical, psychological, or spiritual.

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