Tomorrow is the deathday of Warren Zevon. Zevon died in 2003
at age 56, cut down early by inoperable cancer. Zevon, an interesting guy with
a mordant sense of humor, was placed in the unusual position of knowing his
time was up as of fall 2002. He appeared as a single guest on David Letterman’s Late Show—where he
was a frequent guest and sometime stand-in for bandleader Paul Shaffer—in October of that year knowing it was his last appearance, and released a final album, knowing full
well it was a final album. He lasted almost a year after his final public
appearance and barely a month after The Wind was released.
Today’s song is from Zevon’s breakthrough album, Excitable
Boy. It’s an album where every song is at least a minor gem and some—like the
title song, “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” “Werewolves of London” and
today’s song—are indelible bits of late Seventies rock that could have come from
only one man. Zevon was friends with writer Hunter S. Thompson, who I read a
lot, 1976-78, and today’s song always struck me as distilling some of the
essence of HST, the progenitor of Gonzo Journalism.
The album was produced by Zevon’s longtime friend and
supporter, Jackson Browne along with Waddy Wachtel, the guitarist. Browne’s not
someone you’d ever link to the epithet “balls out rocker,” and that’s
what today’s song needs to be. The recording sounds a bit polite, a bit restrained, when it really
needs to have the shit played out of it. That’s my main gripe about the song and
the album. It’s got that uninteresting clean California sound that so many
things from out that way do. It needs a bit more Jersey and New York, or even
Chicago—where Zevon’s from.
I’m not that familiar with Zevon’s subsequent work, except
here and there a song my youngest brother Eric put on tapes he made his niece
in the Nineties. Zevon, with his sense of humor and his ability to tell stories
in songs, to say nothing of his friendship with and support by Letterman, and
his collaborations with members of R.E.M., as well as Springsteen, and even
poet Paul Muldoon, is a kind of picaresque figure, the kind of person who, when
given less than a year to live and asked what he’s learned about life, says “enjoy
every sandwich.”
“Lawyers, Guns, and Money” is the lyrical expression of
someone who seems to be living in a kind of political thriller with noir
overtones. The opening is priceless: “I went home with a waitress / The way I
always do / How was I to know / She was with the Russians too.” Now, maybe a
verse like that could be thought up by other people—particularly someone who
grew up, as we all did, with paranoia about Russian spies as an expression of
constant Cold War vigilance—but how to continue it? It gets better: “I was gambling in Havana / I
took a little risk / Send lawyers, guns, and money / Dad, get me out of this.”
The call for “lawyers, guns, and money” is a kind of
catch-all for any situation that’s gotten “serious.” A way of saying that, to
wield real power and influence in the world, all you need is—no, not “love,”
you hippy!—“lawyers, guns, and money.” And that, in 1978, seemed close enough
to a realistic outlook. And if anything that’s all the more the case now.
Zevon throws in other fun bits as well: “I’m the innocent
bystander”—an “identity” or “guise” often affected by the real perpetrator, and
“I’m down on my luck”—which recalls to me (and probably to him) the character
in Bugs Bunny cartoons, made to look like Humphrey Bogart, who claims to be “a
fellow American down on his luck.” Then there’s that killer last verse which
even got on the radio despite including one of the words George Carlin says you
can’t say on the radio:
Now I’m hiding in
Honduras
I'm a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns and
money
The shit has hit the
fan
Our man in Havana heads off to the quintessential “banana
republic”—and the ending of the song doesn’t let us know if any of that aid
ever reaches him. Which means that the last word from him may well be “the shit
has hit the fan.” It’s a very compressed tale of some kind of international ne’er-do-well
living the life while the life is taking its toll. The Russians are on to him,
so we can only assume he’s doing some of Uncle Sam’s bidding—running from
Castro’s Cuba to a place more U.S. friendly—but it’s not going well.
Zevon’s imagination tended to work with such hot-spot
situations (see “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner”) and tales with macabre-absurdist touches. His songs about love could be trenchant—“Poor Poor
Pitiful Me” or full of pop sentiment—“Tenderness on the Block”—or equally noirish
as his songs of adventure—“The French Inhaler.” In some of his later songs—like
“My Ride’s Here”—he created gunslinger situations for famous names, and explored
mortality, such as in this fitting “that’s the way it is” epitaph, from “Life'll Kill Ya”:
From the President of
the United States
To the lowliest rock
and roll star
The doctor is in and
he'll see you now
He don't care who you
are
Some get the awful,
awful diseases
Some get the knife,
some get the gun
Some get to die in
their sleep
At the age of a
hundred and one
Life'll kill ya
Life'll kill ya
That's what I said
Life'll kill ya
Then you'll be dead
Life'll find ya
Wherever you go
Requiescat in pace
That's all she wrote
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