Theme Team – A Tribute to Warren Zevon

My musical tastes were largely shaped by my father, a man who reared my sister and I on Blue Oyster Cult, Black Sabbath, Men At Work, The Dire Straits, and many others. The musician that Dad and I bonded the most over in recent years was Warren Zevon. Zevon is best known for Werewolves of London and Lawyers, Guns and Money, but was a successful musician for more than 30 years before his death in 2003. To me, Zevon’s genius lies in his lyrics. He had the ability to be humorous, violent, satirical, sarcastic, obnoxious, wistful and sentimental, often combining several of those in the same song. Zevon’s songs are funny, poignant and real. My first official theme team pays homage to Warren Zevon.

Roland Thatcher – Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner

This is one of my favorite songs of all-time. I first heard it while home from college one summer when my Dad and I were listening to one of those random music stations on cable. That was so long ago we didn’t have iTunes or Amazon or other tools to immediately download the song and listen to it 1,000 times. I eventually tracked down a Zevon CD and the song became part of family lore.  Take it away, Wikipedia – “It was composed by Warren Zevon and David Lindell and was first released on his 1978 album Excitable Boy. It is the last song he ever performed in front of an audience, on the Late Show with David Letterman, before his death in 2003. Zevon met co-writer Lindell in Spain, where the latter was running a bar after a stint working as a mercenary in Africa. Always interested in the darker side of life, Zevon decided to collaborate with Lindell on a song about a mercenary. The fictional character Roland is a Norwegian who becomes embroiled in the Nigerian Civil War and Congo Crisis of the late 1960s. He earns a reputation as the greatest Thompson gunner, a reputation that attracts the attention of the CIA. Roland is betrayed and murdered by a fellow mercenary, Van Owen, who decapitates him with a burst of gunfire. Roland becomes the phantom “headless Thompson gunner” and eventually has his revenge, when he catches Van Owen in a Mombasa bar and guns him down. Afterward, he continues “wandering through the night.” Other violent conflicts of the succeeding decade are said to be haunted by Roland, including Ireland, Lebanon, Palestine, and Berkeley, California. At the end of the song, Patty Hearst, and her stint as Tania of the Symbionese Liberation Army (as memorialized by several photos published nationally of Hearst holding an automatic weapon), is attributed to her hearing “the burst of Roland’s Thompson gun” and having “bought it.” The film The Lost World: Jurassic Park has characters named Nick Van Owen and Roland Tembo, as a tribute to the song.”

John Mallinger – When Johnny Strikes Up the Band

Although I could locate nothing definitive regarding this song, one school of thought is that it’s about Johnny Carson and the Tonight Show. Before Leno and Letterman, Johnny Carson ruled the late night talk show airwaves.  He delivered night after night – “The keeper of the keys”, “Back by popular demand”. Fred de Cordova was Johnny’s long-time, unflappable producer (Freddy get ready, rock-steady). In the Excitable Boy version, Warren even exclaims “Heeeeeeere’s Johnny!”, like Ed McMahon used to do.

James Driscoll – Frank and Jesse James

From Noel Murray and Leonard Pierce’s “Talkin’ About the Man: 18 real and fictional characters in Warren Zevon songs“: “Most songs and stories about The James Gang focus on the moment when “that coward Robert Ford” gunned the outlaw Jesse James down, but Zevon goes back further, spending two of the three verses in “Frank And Jesse James” describing the boys’ days as Missouri bushwackers during The Civil War, and proposing that they went rogue by circumstance, because they chose to side with “the poor Missouri farmers” over The Union.”

Charlie Beljan – Charlie’s Medicine

“Charlie dealt in pharmaceuticals” is a marvelous way to describe your drug dealer. Again from Murray and Pierce – “Charlie may or may not be based on a real person; more likely, given the fatality-strewn drug lifestyle that Zevon and his Hollywood cronies lived during the 1970s, he was a composite. Over a bluesy tune that alternates between rough electrics and gentle acoustics, Zevon tells the story of a man who “dealt in pharmaceuticals” and who was recently murdered: “Some respectable doctor from Beverly Hills shot him through the heart.” Though he seems to regret ever getting involved with Charlie (“I gave Charlie all my money; what the hell was I thinking of?”), the narrator nonetheless shows up at his funeral at the behest of the dealer’s sister, and says, in the song’s final ambiguous twist, “I came to finish paying my bill.””

Richard H. Lee – Bill Lee

Once more from Murray and Pierce – “It’s no surprise that Zevon would lionize legendary Boston Red Sox pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee, a pitcher who became a counterculture hero for his hippie-dippy attitude during one of the Sox’s greatest eras. In this short piano ballad, Zevon gets inside the mind of Lee, standing in the middle of the diamond all alone, away from the guys in the dugout who expect him to “nod at stupid things.” The song is a salute to individualism, and to the understanding that when a group demands conformity, one man can still make his own way by controlling his own performance.”

Zevon wrote two other phenomenal songs about sports, Boom Boom Mancini and The Hockey Song (by the way that’s David Letterman saying “Hit Somebody” in the background during the chorus).