Bad Example, a top-five Zevon effort.) But still today, the entry point into Zevon’s career is “Werewolves of London”, which will cause misleading expectations for anyone looking to get into his body of work. (In my humble opinion, too many people continue to sleep on 1991’s Mr. His final three albums, which scholar George Plasketes groups together with the title “Deteriorata” in his monograph Warren Zevon: Desperado of Los Angeles, culminated in the release of The Wind and his passing and finally led to a long overdue critical re-evaluation of his work.

Excitable Boy’s successor, Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School, has its own bumpy moments, but it also showcases Zevon’s desire to merge his singer-songwriter style with the classical composition he grew up studying.Īs is the case with many artists, the biggest public appreciation of Zevon’s career did not coincide with his strongest material. The self-titled album may lack the sensational subject matter of “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” or the comic novelty of “Werewolves of London”, but it has to its credit the baroque piano figure in opener “The French Inhaler” and the masterful “Desperadoes Under the Eaves”, arguably Zevon’s crowning achievement in songwriting.

Still, the ups and downs of Excitable Boy are a marked departure from the near-flawless Warren Zevon two years before it. The surreal image of a werewolf drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic’s may be the product of an endless fount of vodka, but it’s nonetheless brilliant and endlessly quotable in its own right. He called “Werewolves of London” a “dumb song for smart people,” a fair label given that most novelty songs don’t contain such a profundity of cultural references. Still, Zevon’s fluff songs have their merits. Like Zevon himself, Excitable Boy has a tempestuous personality, veering from brilliance to material that is more a product of its time than it is of Zevon’s creativity. The tender “Accidentally Like a Martyr” joins “Hasten Down the Wind” and “Empty-Handed Heart” in the surprisingly deep list of sentimental Zevon songs, yet it rather abruptly segues into the throwaway disco of “Nighttime in the Switching Yard”. “Johnny Strikes Up the Band” opens up the album pleasantly but inoffensively and is then followed by the black comedy of the dazzling “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner”. But Excitable Boy contains the sharpest contrasts between peak and weird Zevon. My Ride’s Here features an earnest but silly Dave Letterman cameo on the hockey tune “Hit Somebody!”. Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School (1980) has the goofy “Gorilla, You’re a Desperado”.

It’s an understandable place to begin one’s experience with him, but in many ways it’s also the wrong one.Įxcitable Boy isn’t the only Zevon album to contain its share of oddball moments. For all of the genius in Excitable Boy, the album also distorts the rich trove of songs in Zevon’s discography. At his very best, he contends with the greats in the singer-songwriter mold, a fact acknowledged by the wide range of tributes to him after his passing in 2003, with the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, and Bob Dylan playing his songs in their live shows. Zevon, however, was much more than death’s jester. Sure, it’s got a catchy chord progression, and the deliciously dark line “Little old lady got mutilated late last night” might be the best use of consonance in a pop song ever put to tape. After hearing the news of JFK’s assassination over his high school loudspeakers, Zevon looked to his friends and said in a JFK accent, “Jackie, I’ve got this real bad pain in my head.” The headless ghost mercenaries, werewolves, and criminals of Excitable Boy sprung forth from that quip.Įxcitable Boy remains the primary gateway into Zevon’s music for new listeners, due primarily to “Werewolves of London”, a charming novelty song that wouldn’t rank among his 20 best tunes. One choice quotation, featured in the oral biography of Zevon compiled by his first wife, Crystal, entitled I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, serves as an early sign of where he would go as a songwriter. But Zevon’s taste for the macabre predated Excitable Boy. Some of these eccentric creations can be chalked up to late nights afloat in alcohol: Zevon’s good friend Billy Bob Thornton describes “Werewolves of London” as being written on “a sea of vodka” in the VH1 documentary on the making of Zevon’s final album, 2003’s The Wind. The record, Zevon’s lone unqualified public smash, most famously featured a headless Thompson gunner and a werewolf with a taste for chow mein. Anyone who knew Warren Zevon prior to 1978, the year his breakthrough third album, Excitable Boy, was released, could tell that he was bound to put out a record like it.

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