It’s a wry smile you can hear as the song-and the life of our ill-fated cowboy-fades out. (Though the studio version is fine, the best versions are live recordings the first is from the 1980’s Stand In the Fire tour and my favorite is from the Capitol Theater in Passaic, NJ in 1982.) But where are the other verses?” and Zevon just smiled. When Zevon handed in the finished version, Springsteen allegedly said, “It’s nice. Cushins reports that Zevon allegedly heard a rumor about an unfinished Springsteen composition-then titled “Janey Needs a Shooter”-and took it upon himself to write the music and re-write the first verse. The Bruce Springsteen-aided “Jeannie Needs a Shooter” is as sentimental as it is funny as it is dark. What we think of as soft, romance and tulle and gentle country folk can be the cruelest of all. He can’t get laid there either, it seems.Įven the album’s artwork-a room of beautiful ballet dancers warming up without paying one blink of attention to Zevon sitting on the floor on the cover, their shoes tossed on the floor next to a machine gun on the liner notes-pays homage to the brutal contrasts presented on the album. His marriage to Crystal Zevon was ending amidst his drinking (“Empty Handed Heart” references this as well) but he’s still in a dancing school, a.k.a. “Swear to God I’ll change,” Zevon pleads. 44 in a barrel of sand -splits the song into a snarl of guitars. Opening the album, the title track is as Pure Zevon as one could get: opening with a knife-sharp string fill before a burst of handclaps-made by firing a Smith & Wesson. 1…pages and pages of meticulously annotated music and a dog-eared copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine.” Snatches of that Stravinsky-inspired symphony show up as “Interlude No. Cushins writes that critic Paul Nelson recalls that during the recording of Bad Luck Streak, Zevon “tossed me a portfolio labeled “Symphony No. With three albums under his belt by this point, Zevon was confident in how he wrote his songs, unafraid to transgress beyond the boundaries of traditional rock & roll. But these themes are never compartmentalized, instead, they overlap and interplay within each other. Zevon’s fourth album is as tight as its 1978 precursor Excitable Boy (if not tighter) and stacked with the Zevon triple-hit of noir novel (this time, in the south and the west), comedic storytelling and tenderness at both the start and end of relationships. Neither is acceptable, and I often wonder what songs Zevon would have written about modern times or if, like a soothsayer, he already did. The country folks now have a word to wrap around it and have been told that it’s only right to blast it all night through their busted speakers. Child rape in dirty trailers, dog fighting rings in the hills, cheap beer and meth and the stench of dead cows rotting in the field.Īnd sure, the rich lust after their daughters, there is piss and jizz and blood on all their money and expensive furniture. But the rich polish it away, they bury it in philanthropy, on secret islands accessed by private jets. But I’ve witnessed it, over and over and over again. Sure, it sounds like an LA studio’s version of Appalachia, fed only by repeat viewings of Deliverance. “There ain’t much to country livin’ / sweat, piss, jizz and blood,” Zevon crackles in the third verse. Even now, when I spin my copy of Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School, I feel compelled to pick up the needle at track six, as though a transgression is taking place.īut it’s a song I think about a lot these days, every time I see the motley crews who rally around a racist president as lies about clean coal and blue collar work spill from his mouth, the drool-soaked crumbs of the rich oozing down into the yelling-open mouths of self-proclaimed deplorables. My dad had A Quiet Normal Life: The Best of Warren Zevon and it was on heavy rotation in the car, but he would always hit fast forward within the first brutal measure. I don’t think I heard “Play It All Night Long” in full until I was in college. Makes for a great evening.Happy 40th Anniversary to Warren Zevon’s fourth studio album Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School, originally released February 15, 1980. It's a compilation so it's not on my list, but I really enjoy listening to the deluxe version of Preludes. Really enjoyed reading everyone else's rankings. Even though all the songs from Wanted Dead or Alive are "meh", I'd rather listen to that album in it's entirety compared to Transverse City, hence my ranking.Īnd I'm surprised I'm the only one listing Excitable Boy as #1! Maybe I'm just a sucker for pop lol. For instance, 'Splendid Isolation' and 'Networking' are some of my top favorite Zevon songs, but the rest of the album annoys me. I ranked these based on how much I like it in it's entirety, rather than how many songs I like from each.
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