Warren Zevon
Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School
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There's a sense of resolution. Not a solution so much as an unburdening, a reckoning with secrets that, revealed, can be swapped, like a pawn ticket, for some kind of stopgap redemption. Or a start toward it anyhow – a beginning: "Swear to God I'll change," the singer says in the title tune. No wonder Warren Zevon's dedicated this fine new album to detective novelist Ken Millar, who writes under the pen name Ross Macdonald. Zevon's first Asylum LP, Warren Zevon (1976), and 1978's Excitable Boy were filled with tension, tough romance and a wild, charging spirit that led its own mad march. When Johnny struck up the band, that's what you'd hear. Music that sounded shrewd
Read More and satirical and a little sinister, songs sung by a smiler with a knife. Stories about characters who can best be seen in the half-light. Love songs without much hope. Protagonists who've been worn out or shot down or, like that excitable boy, bent out of shape and left playing with broken toys in the attic. These compositions were notably short on half-measures: they never backed off. They sounded tough, smelled sulfurous. Once in a while, you even caught a whiff of self-immolation. This toughness of Zevon's, as well as his highly literate recklessness and affection for characters with long guns and nagging consciences, set people to thinking about his kinship with writers of fiction that has been called "hard-boiled," as if it were a quick breakfast order in a one-arm joint. Hardboiled: the word has a kind of visceral accuracy, a smart, vintage sound. And, with a few contemporary modifications, it suits Warren Zevon pretty well. When Zevon's numbers are funny, they cut like a good Philip Marlowe wisecrack, and his evocations of Los Angeles, snappy and spare and full of nightshade, are as vivid as any of Marlowe's reveries when Raymond Chandler's private eye stares out his grimy office window at Hollywood. Some of Zevon's narratives have the fleet, seemingly dispassionate tone of Dashiell Hammett, and, on Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School, the singer's account of a team of mercenaries ("Jungle Work") boasts the gunmetal gleam of Hammett's Red Harvest. The edgy self-examination of such old songs as "Mama Couldn't Be Persuaded" and "Accidentally like a Martyr," or a new one like "Empty-Handed Heart," comes straight from Ross Macdonald, who once had a character say: "My husband has been looking for his father for some time and gradually breaking up. Or maybe...he's been looking for his father in the hope that it would put him back together." There's a spiritual connection between Zevon and Macdonald–and a personal one as well–but this isn't the time or the place to go into that. For now, it's simply important to know that the ties, one way or another, are strong–a fact you'd discover just as readily by reading Macdonald's The Zebra-Striped Hearse and listening to "Wild Age," the cut that end
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