Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School (1980) has the goofy “Gorilla, You’re a Desperado”. It’s an understandable place to begin one’s experience with him, but in many ways it’s also the wrong one.Įxcitable Boy isn’t the only Zevon album to contain its share of oddball moments.
For all of the genius in Excitable Boy, the album also distorts the rich trove of songs in Zevon’s discography. At his very best, he contends with the greats in the singer-songwriter mold, a fact acknowledged by the wide range of tributes to him after his passing in 2003, with the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, and Bob Dylan playing his songs in their live shows. Zevon, however, was much more than death’s jester. Sure, it’s got a catchy chord progression, and the deliciously dark line “Little old lady got mutilated late last night” might be the best use of consonance in a pop song ever put to tape. After hearing the news of JFK’s assassination over his high school loudspeakers, Zevon looked to his friends and said in a JFK accent, “Jackie, I’ve got this real bad pain in my head.” The headless ghost mercenaries, werewolves, and criminals of Excitable Boy sprung forth from that quip.Įxcitable Boy remains the primary gateway into Zevon’s music for new listeners, due primarily to “Werewolves of London”, a charming novelty song that wouldn’t rank among his 20 best tunes. One choice quotation, featured in the oral biography of Zevon compiled by his first wife, Crystal, entitled I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, serves as an early sign of where he would go as a songwriter. But Zevon’s taste for the macabre predated Excitable Boy. Some of these eccentric creations can be chalked up to late nights afloat in alcohol: Zevon’s good friend Billy Bob Thornton describes “Werewolves of London” as being written on “a sea of vodka” in the VH1 documentary on the making of Zevon’s final album, 2003’s The Wind. The record, Zevon’s lone unqualified public smash, most famously featured a headless Thompson gunner and a werewolf with a taste for chow mein. Anyone who knew Warren Zevon prior to 1978, the year his breakthrough third album, Excitable Boy, was released, could tell that he was bound to put out a record like it.
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