Warren Zevon-”You’re a Whole Different Person When You’re Scared”
As Dom Passantino pointed out, “Zevon came with more killer openings than Bobby Fischer.” Though the lyrics were co-written by a late-period whiskey (and coke and acid)-addled Hunter S. Thompson, it’s hard to argue with the efficacy of “You met her in a Turkish town/but you didn’t want to bring her here/You didn’t want her hanging around in the Kingdom of Fear/So you left her there.”The Ramada Room organs are as kitschy and soft as shag carpeting, and the lyrics mordant and perennially wicked. Were there are a Passion of the Weiss Hall of Fame, Warren Z. would be first-ballot–the only me-decade guitar troubadour who understood that you’re nobody till somebody kills you.
The only thing Zevon could’ve done to impress me more was cold-cock James Taylor or scam the Eagles on some bunk cocaine, but no one’s perfect.
Download:
MP3: Warren Zevon-”You’re a Whole Different Person When You’re Scared”
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September 16th, 2009 at 11:42 am
Too true. How Warren Zevon didn’t get lifted into the pantheon of greats while hipsters embraced Steely Dan is beyond me. Not only was he a great musician, he had most of the vices fans look for in a great musician!
September 16th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
Fantastic…
Z was simply the fucking man…his s/t is so great that he ends each side with the greatest side closer in album history (”The French Inhaler” and “Desperadoes…”) and even on his lesser albums, he’d still be good for one or two of the best songs ever written. I consider “I’m too old to die young and too young to now” to be one of the most important lyrics in my life and that’s in fucking “Bed of Coals”, a shitty song. I don’t think a day goes by when I don’t find some useful application of a modified version of “I didn’t have to come to Maui to be treated like a jerk”.
I got to meet him a bunch of times and he was way too generous with his time (although he was probably shocked to have a teenage fan in the mid-to-late 1990s. He even told me that the Norman in the final line of “French Inhaler” was Mailer, a reference to the girl he wrote it about.
If you haven’t read “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” then get on it.
September 16th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
P.S. My best friend named his pug Zevon and there’s a line in the book about someone telling WZ that he named his dog after him (not my buddy) and Z is basically like “thanks for nothing”…the guy was an amazing prick which, if he wasn’t your husband or father, adds to his awesomeness.