Warren Zevon's first Asylum album is a contemporary comedy-western about Los Angeles. In images that are often mordantly funny and detailed right down to specific place-names, Zevon compiles a surrealistic vision of Hollywood that is one part Howard Hawks to three parts Nathanael West. Albums with a Hollywood-western theme aren't new. But all the others have been made by die-hard romantics—the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell. In refreshing contrast, Zevon works almost exclusively with irony and satire. The appearance of an L.A. singer/songwriter who dares to puncture the seriousness of the romantics but who is also musically sophisticated enough to work in their idiom is long overdue.
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A competent pianist and guitarist and a fine composer, Zevon's songs run the gamut from acoustic folk to hard rock. His best tunes even manage to use the romantic harmonies of Browne's and the Eagles' ballads to evoke pathos and humor simultaneously.
The album's first song, "Frank and Jesse James," portrays those outlaws as alienated political exiles who fought on the wrong side in the Civil War and were forever "misunderstood." In "Mama Couldn't Be Persuaded," a young man tells the story of his mother, who defied her own good sense, as well as her parents' wishes, to marry a compulsive gambler. Zevon views these reckless characters as ancestral archetypes for the self-destructive, self-deluded fantasists and vagrants who determine the ethos of modern L.A. Appropriately, both songs are quasitraditional folk ballads, unlike anything else on the album.
Zevon's imitation Americana is provocative and well made and his contemporary social probes combine Shampoo's knowing hipness with an aesthetic view of the grotesque that's closer to Fellini than Warren Beatty. A rocker called "Poor Poor Pitiful Me," while humorously spoofing suicidal despair, likens sex-for-sport to brutal fights for survival ("She really worked me over good/She was just like Jesse James"). At the end, it introduces sadomasochism in a gleefully casual manner. In contrast, "The French Inhaler" is less ironic. The story of the sexual exploitation of a dumb starlet, the song ends with a jab at Norman Mailer for his literary exploitation of Marilyn Monroe.
"Mohammed's Radio," which sounds a lot like Jackson Browne's "The Late Show," has magnificent surrealistic lyrics reminiscent of middle-period Dylan. Here, the image of "Mohammed's Radio" is an apt and ultimately mysterious metaphor for spiritual release in a city where "everybody's restless and they've got no place to go."
"Carmelita," the album's comic gem, tells of two losers ("The county won't give me no more methadone/And they cut off your welfare check") strung out on L.A.'s fringes. With its tacky semiflamenco guitar and sweet-sad hook copped from Commander Cody's "Seeds and Stems (Again)," the song makes tragedy from farce and vice versa.
"Join Me in L.A.," a sleazy rock dirge, and "Desperad
