Oddly enough, Zevon, the apparent newcomer, preceded both Browne and Springsteen into the studio. His first record, an exercise in self-produced self-induced psychedelia called
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Wanted Dead or Alive (Imperial, 1970), went deservedly unnoticed, and it wasn't until 1976, when his career seemed all but dead, that he got another shot (largely through Browne's persistence), this time with Asylum. On
Warren Zevon, his aim was truer but he hit perhaps too many targets, and there was some confusion whether he was just another sensitive (albeit unusually tough) singer songwriter or a Magnum-cum-laude rock & roller who ate gunpowder for breakfast. His first tour answered
that question, and the new LP blasts the bull's-eye into smithereens.
When Warren Zevon sits down at the piano and throws back his head and sings on Excitable Boy, he's like Sam Peckinpah trying to work out the obsessions in something like Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. While one hand steadily applies the Apollonian technique and obvious control of the classical artist (Zevon also writes symphonies and string quartets), the other is compulsively jerking the trigger with Dionysian delirium. Though clearly no dumdum, Zevon, like Peckinpah, sometimes refuses to rely upon academic intelligence and pragmatic perspective to pull him through. An intuitive artist, he's often both smart and crazy enough to shoot first at the most explosive subjects, then figure out the ramifications of whatever the hell he's bloodied later ("Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner," "Excitable Boy," "Werewolves of London," "Lawyers, Guns and Money"). This is a dangerous way to work—it isn't nice, and not everybody gets it—but you can claim some spectacular trophies when you're sufficiently reckless to risk safari on the dark side of the moon, where the gleam of the lion may look like the leer of the lamb.
Not that Zevon is particularly metaphysical, at least not in the expected manner. While he writes very good lyrics ("Veracruz"), he writes great music. Mostly, his songs are purely physical, but in the same ways that Clint Eastwood—in, say, Dirty Harry—is purely physical. Almost without exception, Zevon's rock & roll songs command and demand your attention through the sheer strength of their creator's personality; they're not necessarily profound (though they can be), but they hit with such primary impact you don't hav
