warren zevon | Every Moment Has A Song

Songs You May Have Missed #767

05 Mar 2025 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in Songs You May Have Missed Tags: splendid isolation, warren zevon

Warren Zevon: “Splendid Isolation” (1989)

Michael Jackson in Disneyland
Don’t have to share it with nobody else
Lock the gates, Goofy, take my hand
And lead me through the world of self

Following 1987’s return to top form with the great Sentimental Hygiene album, the Excitable Boy unleashed the less commercial–and less commercially successful–Transverse City LP.

“Splendid Isolation” was actually one of the more cheerful tunes on a bleak, at times dystopian, rumination on cultural collapse at the end of the Reagan era.

Although I must say I much prefer the more playful, poppier Sentimental Hygiene, Transverse City in retrospect is certainly one of the most ambitious, uncompromising, and ultimately overlooked albums of Zevon’s catalog.

Behind Warren Zevon’s ‘The Hula-Hula Boys’

02 Jul 2023 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags: the hula hula boys, warren zevon

(via Beat) by Walter Rhein

I knew something was wrong from the moment he spoke. In fact, there had been a lingering wrongness for some time.

“C’mon son, let’s go on a trip,” Dad said.

He’d just taken my brother on a trip, and my sister. Now it was my turn. This struck me as unusual behavior, but what choice did I have in the matter?

“Okay,” I said, and we got on a plane and got off in Maine where we rented a car.

“What should we do?” Dad said as he started to drive. He fiddled with the radio. But before I could answer, he slammed his hands against the dashboard. “There’s no good radio stations in this state. Let’s go get a cassette.”

He started driving around looking for a record store. Dad was always a fanatic about music. He had a whole room dedicated to vinyl records. When CDs came out he had to replace them all. I don’t know what he does now, maybe he’s got a mainframe in his basement.

We found a little hole-in-the-wall place that claimed to be a record store even though it only had a selection of about thirteen cassettes. Dad looked through them, his face tight with fury. He could be scary when he got angry. I began to grow concerned, but the darkness cleared and he brightened up.

“Here we go, Warren Zevon!”

‘The soul of L.A.’: 20 years after his death, the stars are aligning for Warren Zevon

05 Feb 2023 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags: warren zevon

The late singer-songwriter Warren Zevon, whom Billy Joel, among others, successfully promoted for induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. (Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images)

(via Los Angeles Times) BY MIKAEL WOOD

Shooter Jennings knew “Carmelita.” He knew “Lawyers, Guns and Money.” And of course he knew “Werewolves of London,” Warren Zevon’s 1978 rock hit about a “hairy-handed gent” on the prowl for “a big dish of beef chow mein.”

“It’s kind of the low-hanging fruit” of Zevon’s catalog, Jennings says of “Werewolves,” which after scraping the top 20 of Billboard’s Hot 100 went on to reach new audiences in the late 2000s when Kid Rock borrowed its strutting groove for his song “All Summer Long.”

But until three or four years ago, Jennings — the Los Angeles-based musician and Grammy-winning producer whose father is the late outlaw-country pioneer Waylon Jennings — had never dug deeply into Zevon’s work. That’s when a friend pushed him to check out “Desperados Under the Eaves,” the gut punch of a closer from Zevon’s self-titled 1976 LP in which the booze-soaked narrator contemplates his sorry situation from an air-conditioned room at the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel…

The Secret Inspiration Behind Warren Zevon’s ‘Werewolves of London’

09 Nov 2022 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags: warren zevon, werewolves of london

How ‘a dumb song for smart people’ became an unlikely hit

(via Cuepoint) by George Plasketes

From his 1978 album Excitable Boy, Warren Zevon’s terror trilogy — a ghostly, ghastly three-song sequence brimming with abandoned amusement — was comprised of “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” “Excitable Boy,” and “Werewolves of London.” The latter was another “literally 15-minute song” that none of its co-writers — Zevon, LeRoy Marinell, and Waddy Wachtel — took seriously. The spontaneous composition, referred to by Zevon as “a dumb song for smart people,” defied the conventional attributes of songwriting such as labor, craft, and agonizing.

The idea originated with Phil Everly who, after watching the movie Werewolf of London (1935) on late-night television, suggested to Zevon that he adapt the title for a song and dance craze. When Wachtel heard the idea, he mimicked a wailing wolf — “Aahoooh” — which became part of the howling chorus. The trio frivolously alternated verses, beginning with what may be one of the all-time opening lines: “I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand/Walking down the streets of Soho in the rain.” The romp is comic noir, featuring a stylish werewolf on his way to Lee Ho Fooks for a “big dish of beef chow mein” and another “drinking a piña colada at Trader Vic’s.”