DB's Song of the Day (day 249): "LAWYERS, GUNS, AND MONEY" (1978) Warren Zevon

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

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

DB's Song of the Day (day 5):"BYE BYE LOVE" (1957) The Everly Brothers

Today’s song is in tribute to Phil Everly who died yesterday, six days short of his 75th birthday.  I have to confess that I was never a fan of the Everly Brothers—which is not to say I disliked them, just that their heyday had come and gone by the time I started listening to music in a serious, collecting fashion. My “retrospect” pretty much stopped at the British Invasion, 1964, when I was 5. Anything before that was too retro for me to get into much. And anyway, I didn’t need to listen to the Everlys that much because I got them filtered through The Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel, who leaned on them quite a bit. So hearing the Everly Brothers was always fun, and perhaps no song more than “Wake Up, Little Susie” (1957), which is probably the song I most readily associate with them. Into my teens if someone asked “who were the Everly Brothers?” I would’ve answered, “they did ‘Wake Up, Little Susie.’” That’s about all I knew for sure.

Phil and Don Everly

My choice of “Bye Bye Love” (1957) has to do with my mood, sure (this entire exercise of a “song of the day” is nothing if not based on whim), but it also has to do with the way that song has come down to me: through the very spirited cover of it on Simon & Garfunkel’s epic Bridge Over Troubled Water LP (1970)—the first version of the song I heard, and still the one I know best.  And through the use of the song, very memorably (as “Bye Bye Life”), at the close of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979). In other words, both those sources update the song into “my era,” and so I have stronger associations with this song than any other Everly Brothers hit.

Even when I first heard it, by Simon & Garfunkel, the song sounded dated but in that refreshing way in which “the Fifties” were being rehabilitated in the early Seventies. It was the first talk—in that ersatz, media buzz way—of “nostalgia” that I can remember. The Fifties were gone because the people who made the Fifties the Fifites were all middle-aged. Like the Eighties now. There’s always a tripartite division in these things: 1) the people who are influential in a given period but who grew up in a different period, with heroes long gone by the time they make the scene; 2) then the people growing up hearing the newly influential people, who will forever associate those people with the era—like the Everly Brothers for the Fifties, or The Beatles for the Sixties, or Michael Jackson for the Eighties; 3) then the people who find, as they come of age, some charm in a period they might have been alive in (as infants), or just missed: like people my age felt about the Fifties when we became teens. So, “Bye Bye Love” comes filtered to me by guys—Paul Simon, Bob Fosse—who probably went on dates to its strains, and, while it didn’t send me off to court the byways of Fifties’ pop sensations, they certainly passed along how great the song is.

“There goes my baby / With someone new / She sure looks happy / I sure am blue / She was my baby / Til he stepped in / Goodbye to romance / That might have been.” Does it get any more concise than that?  In love there’s always a winner and a loser. But, in all our fields of endeavor, there’s always “someone new”—and “she” is inevitably stepping out with “him,” to our lasting consternation. Daddies often feel this way about their daughter’s boyfriends, for instance, and certainly we—as jealous producers and or consumers of things—can feel that way when “the new kid in town” (or “on the block,” if you wish) comes along and knocks some “king” off his perch. Paul Simon put this all into a nutshell with: “every generation throws a hero up the pop charts.” And he should know.

The thing about this infectious little nugget is that, in bidding adieu to “love,” it makes the case that, as they say, “rock’n’roll can never die.” “I’m through with romance,” sure, but I’m gonna bop about it: “and here’s the reason that I’m so free / My lovin’ baby is through with me.” So…whatcha doin’ tonight?

If pop music taught us anything it was that there was always another song, another favorite, another hit, another hitmaker, another pop hero, another femme fatale, another leader of the pack to pick up where the old one left off. “Hello emptiness, I feel like I could die, bye bye, my love, goodbye.” This has to be one of the catchiest lovelorn apologias ever. It’s a gauntlet thrown, alright. Spawning who knows how many chipper, get-over-it ditties. Hey yeah, daddy-o, it’s the cat’s meow.