“He’s the keeper of the keys…”

In our opening post this week on Warren Zevon, I was careful while interpreting the lyrics to point out that the readings were mine.  It’s not clear to me that any of Warren’s lyrics have a totally static intentional meaning.

At several points in his biography, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (well worth the money, and available on Kindle), it *is clear* that Warren often began writing a song fluidly, from his creative center – ‘listening to his muse’ as it were.  The approach seems to have worked when writing with others as well.  Even when he first had a concept about which he wanted to write, it seems the words most often spilled out of him intuitively before he applied his craftsman’s tools to edit.


A story from I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead illustrates the upshot of that.  Warren was talking to actor Michael Ironside about a scene in the movie Jo Jo Dancer that Warren found particularly intense.  He asked Michael what he was thinking as he was acting at one particular point in that scene.  Michael recalled – 

“I literally, absolutely did remember what I was thinking. It was one of those rare things. I had this fedora, this Borsalino, on, and I had this thing with hats. I always thought wearing a hat knocked my I.Q. down 30–40 percent, and I said, “I remember exactly what I was thinking. I thought, ‘I hope I look good in this hat.’” And Warren burst out laughing, walking around in circles laughing, hysterical. And I said, “What? What’s so funny?” He said, “That’s exactly how I feel when people ask me what those lyrics mean.” He said, “You know, when I write something, I’m thinking, ‘I wonder what I look like wearing this hat.’”

Michael Ironside looking good in a hat

Now, we’ve seen the same idea with some of the other contemporary artists we’ve considered in this blog – though they say it less humorously – ‘The song came through me, I don’t know what it means.’  Indeed, this may convince you that plumbing these contemporary ballads for meaning is a fool’s errand.  Perhaps.

But music isn’t acting.  The singer-songwriter may not be conscious of what’s coming through him or her in the act of creation, but s/he lives with that work of art and recreates it with every performance.  I suppose one can never go on tour, or fake it on stage to rake in the royalties.  But of all the things folks said about Warren Zevon, no one ever said his energy was fake in performance; quite the opposite, as I can attest to personally.  And many of his oldest songs stayed in his live repertoire throughout his career.

So I don’t think it’s foolish to look for something deeper in these songs, though the tools one needs are not necessarily those that folklorists use with traditional ballads.  It’s possible to access their power without dissecting the lyrics for specific meaning.  The significance comes from the way the song, lyrics and music as a whole, reflects our own depths, socially and personally.

Reflections change like everything and we need songs that speak to us repeating in our lives because we can find the meaning we need in them when we need it.  It may be in the end that, for us today at least, such is true for the traditional ballads we love as well.

The story starts here…

“He’ll rip your lungs out, Jim…”


In 1978 Warren’s third album, Excitable Boy, met with great success and many of the songs on it are those his fans will carry with them until they die.  Several of them clearly fall within the range of what we talk about in this blog. They’re our subject for the rest of this post.


The biggest hit from the album, “Werewolves of London”, was written in fun and would have been lost but for Crystal Zevon recognizing its quality and writing it down.  It’s become one of the great songs of Rock and Roll.  The stories of its creation all jibe among those involved and can be found in detail in Warren’s biography.  Roy Marinell, Warren, and Waddy Wachtel had equal parts in creating it, and Roy notes: “Werewolves” was literally a fifteen-minute song that none of us took seriously. We did it as spontaneously as could be, and look what happened.”  

They had the title, a lick from Roy, and they just let loose.

I don’t include “Werewolves” here because of its popularity, but for two other reasons.  First, it’s a perfect illustration of what I was talking about in the introduction.  The song was clearly never intended to be *meaningful*, and yet, it is.  They didn’t write it that way, it came out that way!  As well though, that meaning is right up our alley for this blog.  

For me, it’s about laughing in the face of death.  It’s about embracing that which I fear – even seeing it as attractive, with perfect hair and fine clothes.  It’s about enjoying myself in the here and now because I just don’t know what’s hanging around my kitchen door…   What does it mean to you?  I can’t know – but I bet you already love the song.  I’d be happy to hear what you find in it!

“He dug up her grave and built a cage with her bones…”

I remember the first time I heard the title track for the album “Excitable Boy”.  It both fascinated me and creeped me out.  Interestingly, I was just beginning to listen to bluegrass in earnest at the time and had been hearing traditional murder ballads like “Down in the Willow Garden” and I felt the same way about them; but I never really connected my experience of the two until later.


We know much more about the genesis of “Excitable Boy” than we do about any traditional ballad.  Crystal Zevon and Roy Marinell tell the story in I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead.   Crystal had cooked herself and Warren a pot roast in their apartment.  Warren, delighted with the flavor, jumped up on the table, ripped his shirt open and rubbed some of the roast all over his chest.  A few nights later while the two of them were having pot roast at Roy’s, Roy mentioned that Warren tended to get too excited playing lead guitar.  Warren said “I’m just an excitable boy.”  As Roy reported in the biography:

“We looked at each other, and that was it. Fifteen minutes later, that one was written. That bit about how he built a cage with her bones, the critics made all kinds of assumptions about the significance of the song, about how it was like Charlie Manson, who said, “Don’t let me out.”…Well, where that verse comes from is when I was a young boy in Illinois, around the schoolyard some kid would say, “Eat shit.” Your response would be, “What’ll I do with your bones?” And his response would be, “Build a cage for your mother.” It had nothing to do with any of this social significance. It was this goofy kid thing, and I told the story to Warren and he laughed and we put that in the song. But, you know, it also gave me a perspective as to what critics don’t know…it turns out they didn’t know nothin’ about what I was saying, so they probably don’t know nothin’ about what anybody else is saying either.”

Does knowing the story make the song less powerful?  Not to me.  Certainly the humor of the whole thing matters in making the song work – Little Susie doesn’t wake up.  But I still see it as a meaningful reflection of our society, perhaps now more than ever.  The image of building a cage with bones very much strikes the same part of me as does the fiddle made of bones in “The Dreadful Wind and Rain“.  

Relax, it’s Disney…

There is no magic as in the old ballad, but then again, we live in a world most of us perceive as stripped of magic.  And there’s more than humor.  Doesn’t the faux naive tolerance for the violence of the ‘excitable boy’ in the chorus strike you as haunting in this post-Columbine country, especially this summer?  Well, listen and let me know if you want…

“They can still see his headless body stalking through the night…”

“Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” also ranks among Zevon’s most popular songs, though for entirely different reasons than “Werewolves.”  While at first glance they have a certain ‘horror movie’ tone in common, “Roland” is a proper ballad – albeit a weird one – with some grounding in reality.

What did she buy?

During the summer of 1975, Warren and his wife Crystal moved to Sitges, Spain.  Warren ended up working at a pub called The Dubliner, and befriended its owner David Lindell, an ex-mercenary whose business card touted skills such as “revolutions started”, “uprisings quelled”, “tigers tamed”, etc.  He had some stories to share, and before long and in one afternoon he and Warren had written a classic which critic Dave Marsh of Rolling Stone called “a modern Ichabod-Crane-as mercenary-guerilla story that is one of Excitable Boy‘s best songs.”


Interestingly with regards to our theme of ‘making meaning’, Warren in 1994 in his diary noted a quote from a fan that was SWAT team negotiator and had invited him to come out target shooting one day – “Roland strikes a chord with every man of arms.”  He knew from experience that this was true.  Indeed, earlier in his career in 1983, Warren wrote about a Special Forces officer and some comrades who had made their way backstage at a show in Texas to discuss the song with him.  Warren wouldn’t discuss the song but talked with the men and, eventually, the officer gave Warren his Green Beret pin.  Warren was deeply honored.

I am no man of arms, but I love the song.  The history isn’t perfect, though in broad strokes it’s accurate enough.  But it’s the magic that makes the song – Ichabod Crane indeed!  And I remember long ago puzzling about that last awesome line – “Patty Hearst heard the burst of Roland’s Thompson Gun and bought it!”  Rather than go in to my interpretation, I’d be curious to know what any of you think and discuss it  with you in comments below or on our Facebook page!

“Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” – Warren Zevon (Spotify)  Live Version 1993 (Spotify) Lyrics

Coda

I can’t possibly say all I want to here, so I’ll write once more this week to get at some of the ballads from Warren’s later career.  There’s more to say about even this one album, but I trust if you don’t know it and you like what I’ve shown you, you’ll seek it out yourself.  Or if you want to keep the discussion going below, feel free!

I’ll close though with one more song, another classic, from Excitable Boy in which no one is murdered – but it certainly seems like it’s not beyond the realm of possibility.  Enjoy!

“Lawyers, Guns, and Money” – Warren Zevon (Spotify)    Live Version 1993 (Spotify)    Lyrics