Warren Zevon: First Political Scientist in Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
Warren Zevon was (finally) given his due this weekend. Although revered as one of the most original singer/songwriters to come out of the Laurel Canyon music scene, he was famously locked out of consideration for decades, reportedly due to a long-ago battle with Rock & Roll Hall of Fame co-founder and Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner.
It is a testament to Zevon’s capacity for bad behavior that, among the hundreds of miscreants, drug abusers, and wifebeaters who have been inducted or appeared on the cover of that magazine, he somehow rose above all others in his personal excess to become a singular target of Wenner’s wrath. But now he’s in, and it seems a good time to appreciate anew an artist who helped inform the worldview of a generation of political reporters, analysts, and commentators – including my own.
As the Wenner feud attests, self-destruction was central to Zevon’s brand. His signature graphic was a grinning skull wearing his trademark glasses, smoking a cigarette. In truth, his drinking, drug use, and womanizing were well within the bounds of normal rockstar behavior. In the end, it wasn’t imbibing to excess that killed him, although it might have been smoking. He died of lung cancer in 2003 at age 56.
Zevon was part of the music scene that emerged in Southern California in the early 1970s. It was not a particularly happy time in American civic life – whatever optimism had been fostered during the 1960s had faded with Watergate, the oil crisis, and the dismal end to the Vietnam War. Popular music reflected that – Punk and Disco were still on the horizon, and teenagers at the time (including myself) tuned our FM radios to what would later become known as “soft rock.”
I was in college in the Northeast, studying international relations along with a handful of geeky young people trying to figure out how the world of politics actually worked. At the time (like now), socialism was on the march. Meanwhile, OPEC was on the rise, boat people were fleeing Vietnam, and “Made in America” was no longer the gold standard in autos or manufacturing. For that matter, the gold standard wasn’t the gold standard anymore either. U.S. politics was in an uninspiring phase.
We were a generation that still took our musical heroes seriously.
The singer/songwriters of the era wrote about politics as a particularly passive endeavor – penning relentlessly leftist odes to the fact that the hippie movement had somehow failed to deliver utopia. Think Jackson Browne’s “After the Deluge,” which painted our generation as lost, hollow, and powerless. Neil Young wrote a mournful dirge in which the word “Helpless” was repeated over and over again. Cat Stevens, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Carole King – the best and most influential writers of that particular era advised us to look inward for answers: move to Vermont, join the local food co-op, make candles.
Warren Zevon, a.k.a. “F. Scott Fitzevon,” was different. We knew that from his breakout album “Excitable Boy,” released in 1978. He had no use for trite or insipid bromides. He didn’t just write about politics. He wrote about political science – with a deep appreciation and knowledge of world affairs and a gimlet eye toward the skullduggery of international conflict and espionage.
“Lawyers, Guns and Money” is perhaps the best example of Zevon’s unique take on the world. The first couplet is as good as any opening line from a Raymond Chandler or Ian Fleming novel: “I went home with the waitress, the way I always do,” the narrator tells us. “How was I to know she was with the Russians, too?” A little gambling in Havana and lying low in Honduras follows, and the song includes a plea to the authorities back home: “Send lawyers guns and money, Dad get me out of this.”
“Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” – another stand-out on the album – is an ode to the short, fast life of mercenaries. The song centers on a weapon (the Thompson submachine gun) that was already an antique but still in use in third-world conflicts around the world. It namechecks the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Biafra (central front in Nigeria’s civil war), Patty Hearst, and, of course, the CIA.
His most famous song and only top 40 hit, “Werewolves of London,” describes a murderous character who roams the streets of Kent and Mayfair. It’s classic Zevon, in that the werewolf in question is not some foul creature of the night. He gives us instead a Bond-like jetsetter who is both well-dressed (“I’d like to meet his tailor!”) and well-coiffed (“His hair was perfect!”). Zevon’s werewolf is the kind of guy who goes out walking with the Queen and can still enjoy a pina colada at Trader Vic’s. He is at home in London as he would be in L.A., or any cosmopolitan watering hole anywhere in the world.
Zevon’s fifth studio album, “The Envoy,” was released in 1982. He dedicated it to American diplomat Philip Habib, who was called out of retirement by President Ronald Reagan to broker a ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel. The title track describes crises in the Middle East and Central America and suggests only one solution: “Send the envoy.”
Zevon’s political songs are bracing, intelligent, cynical, and funny. They also rock harder than almost anything else coming from the backwash of the 1960s Southern California scene. Zevon’s piano-focused arrangements were a welcome antidote to the guitar-drenched stuff pouring out across the FM dial. Zevon’s message to us – perfectly delivered by the driving music and the sharp lyrics was this: There is a big, crazy world out there. It’s dangerous, fascinating, and you should be part of it. Get out there and taste it. Forget about that commune in Vermont.
Zevon was of course capable of writing heart-breaking songs about lost love and personal tragedy (“Keep Me in Your Heart,” “Accidentally Like a Martyr,” “Hasten Down The Wind,” and “Carmelita”) and he is admired for his gimlet-eyed view of Los Angeles (“Desperadoes Under The Eaves,” “The French Inhaler,” “Gorilla, You’re a Desperado”).
I suppose it is nice that he is finally getting the recognition he deserves from an institution he never seemed to care about. But the real benefit here is that maybe some of my younger fellow political junkies will now discover the Warren Zevon who means so much to so many of us who grew up on him: songwriter, musician, raconteur, and uncredentialed – but searingly astute – political scientist.