01 - Johnny Strikes Up the Band
02 - Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner
03 - Excitable Boy
04 - Werewolves of London
05 - Accidentally Like a Martyr
My friend Jason and I, both English majors in college, have an ongoing debate about Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns and Money,” the last track on Excitable Boy. Specifically, the line “I went home with the waitress / The way I always do / How was I to know / She was with the Russians too?” We’re endlessly trying to figure out whether Zevon meant “How was I to know she was a KGB spy?” or “How was I to know she was also sleeping with a whole bunch of Russian mobsters, in addition to me?” or “How was I to know that she, like me, was also with the Russians?”
We’re never going to solve this riddle, but it’s one of about a thousand we’ll never get an answer to. It’s part of a summer ritual, a return to our college town for 24 hours to drink wine and catch up in a sort of simulacrum of our twenties. We are older now, the hopeless romance that defined us at 22 is a wistful memory. But there will always be Zevon to play; his music has been a part of us for as long as I can remember. We’ve passed his music back and forth between us; mixtapes, road trip sing-a-longs, text message quotes on our way to work.
But even before Jason, Excitable Boy was always part of my DNA. My earliest memory is watching the door on the Asylum Records label spinning around and around on my dad’s turntable in our living room. This story probably explains more about who I grew up to be than any psychiatrist or hypnotist could ever diagnose—early exposure to “Roland The Thompson Gunner” + Raymond Chandler = crime writer. This album was the first play when I created #RecordSaturday, and “Accidentally Like a Martyr” is one of the major chapter titles in my novel The Big Rewind.
“Johnny Strikes Up the Band” is my favorite Zevon tune. It’s a warm way to ease into the album and best listened to with the soft crackle of vinyl behind it. The album will get darker from here on out, but there is no way to listen to this and not feel as though it is instantly summer in the park, waiting for the local bandleader to start his set.
And then it gets weird. More than a few writers I know have expressed that they’ve always wanted to write a whole novel around “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.” It would be tough to beat the original, a moody, muted tale of betrayal, murder and mercenary ghosts, all in under four minutes. But of all the bastards who populate Zevon’s music, perhaps there is no sonofabitch more dastardly than Van Owen, who turns on our titular gunner, only to find himself stalked across continents before being done in with a shot to the back of the skull.
In addition to being the last song Zevon played live, on The Late Show With David Letterman in October 2002, it’s a favorite of screenwriter David Koepp, who named Pete Postlewaite’s and Vince Vaughn’s characters in Jurassic Park: The Lost World for the song’s two main characters.
Oppositely upbeat, the titular “Excitable Boy” is nevertheless in the same storytelling mode, gradually amping up the tension—all casually brushed off by the adults in the song—before the inevitable rape/murder of “Little Susie.” Pillowed by Jim Horn’s bright Springsteen-esque saxophone, the sardonic number separated Zevon from the pack of bland singer-songwriter contemporaries like Billy Joel and the Eagles.
“Werewolves of London” is, of course, Zevon’s most recognizable tune, to considerable detriment. It’s pulled out every Halloween, it’s ripped off by Kid Rock (in what should be considered a war crime) and it was inexplicably covered by Kids Bop, where a chorus of cheerful tots bleat about how “a little lady got mutilated late last night.” But it’s much more clever than your average novelty song, with an inescapable piano riff and a killer guitar solo by Waddy Watchell. (I have been to Lee Ho Fook's. It’s closed now, but when my now-husband and I went to London in 2005, I insisted we have dinner there. They did not, nor have they ever, had Beef Chow Mein on the menu.)
But closing out the A-side is “Accidentally Like a Martyr,” which showcases Zevon as an intimate romantic, a side that remained mostly hidden in his story-songs. The ambling, stair-climb piano that underscores, and later, closes out “Martyr” is his most beautiful, most heart-wrenching, and one that has always been hovering in the spaces between Jason and I. From: https://albumism.com/features/warren-zevon-excitable-boy-album-anniversary
