Computer programmers rarely look like this nowadays, except during the cocktail hour of a steampunk orgy.
Just like her father, but useful.
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: warren zevon (Page 6 of 6)
I want you to look at the picture, Enthusiasts, and listen to the song Warren wrote.
Someone in your life needs to be told that they are loved: go find that fucker now, hunt him down in his sadness and isolation, tell him it’s all gonna be okay.
We all need to be lied to when we’re feeling down.
November 17th, 1973 was a quiet day if you look from far enough away. Certainly, there were tremendous chapters in smaller stories: victories, defeats, birth, death. Actress Leslie Bibb was born this day, so if you ever meet her, casually mention that she was born in 1979; she will like you after that.
The Dead played at Pauley Pavilion in UCLA that day, too. Some Greek students picked a fight with some Greek soldiers and it went as well as expected. Nixon informed the country that he wasn’t a crook, which was not true. (Although–and the dictionary disagrees with me–I always took the word “crook” to mean someone who stole money, which Nixon wasn’t. RN didn’t seem to care much for money – he liked power: assassinating people and bombing countries secretly and making NFL coaches run his stupid trick plays.
How does 11/17 stack up through the years?
Congress held its first session in DC. Suez Canal opened, and Livingstone became the first white guy to see Victoria Falls. Imagine Livingstone’s surprise when the native folks told him the name of the waterfall. “Victoria Falls? You don’t say, old bean! What a lovely coincidence, by Jove!”
Sweden declared war on England and the war lasted for two years. This is a thing that actually happened. You haven’t heard of it because it was pretty much just on paper. Neither side, in fact, seems to have noticed while it was happening. Which is a nice way to have a war.
In 794, Emporer Kanmu moved from Nara to Kyoto, which was very difficult because the moving van would not be invented for over a thousand years. On the other hand, there was less stuff to move: you did not have to worry about the fridge. You would, though, surely be attacked by ninjas. This is old-timey Japan, after all.
America recognized the Soviet Union in 1933. Diplomatically, not like “Oh, hey: there you are, Soviet Union.”
When they asked him who was responsible
For the death of Du Koo Kim
He said, “Someone should have stopped the fight,” and told me it was him.
Here’s something nifty and right up TotD’s alley: Garcia sings Zevon (and plays piano, too!)
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiZrHi7IWLU&w=420&h=315]
The song is a great one, Accidentally Like a Martyr, but it’s a note or two out of Garcia’s range. He does, though, get a neat little semi-solo on the electric Rhodes in the middle of the tune, and this might be the only known recorded performance of Parish on drums. Garcia has apparently told him that the merest glance at the cymbals will result in harsh treatment.
Speaking of covers, and Warren Zevon, there’s a second album of bands doing their versions of the Dead’s songs coming out…soon…and I’ll give it an honest try, but for those of us of a certain age (22, but with a Time Sheath) the only real Dead cover album will only ever be Deadicated.
Every ’90’s Deadhead had this and played it more times than they’ll admit. The record’s main problem is irrelevance. Most of the collection is just dudes jamming through first set songs. The guy from Georgia Satellites sings US Blues okay, and if you saw them do it in a bar to close the set, you’d be losing your shit: they would rock that house, then the house next doow, and then they would go to the retirement home down the street and show their ding-dongs to old ladies for compliments and old men for money. Same with Dwight Yoakum’s Truckin’, and sadly, too, Warren’s Casey Jones.
Points for trying go to Midnight Oil. Once, in the forests of New Jersey, I caught the gospel hour on one of those Sunday shows, those inexplicable shows that air on Sunday at dusk. It was just organ: one man, both keyboards and the pedals, accompanying himself and arguing with his own lines, astonishing that a human could be in so many places. Though there were no words, I knew that song was about Jesus. Midnight Oil’s take on Wharf Rat is like that. I know he’s singing about August West, but all I can think about is the guy who gets all the laughs in the fist Crocodile Dundee. You mistreated aborigines, sure: let’s move on. Last, I heard, that guy was in the Australian Parliament and had intervened in four separate attempts to eat babies: two by dingoes, once by croc, and once by dingo-croc, which is a new thing they have down there because that whole continent is a nightmare.
Dr. John’s Deal was good, if obvious. Suzanne Vega’s China Doll was perfect and fragile, but the stand-out was the last track, Jane’s Addiction doing Ripple. Perry Farrell sings the ending not as a benediction, like Garcia, but as an exultation. Also, they’re playing Ripple The Other One behind him, so that’s cool, too.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxOlQrVa-84]
In other Zevon/Dead related team-up news, there’s this:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD0_sX1qiqY]
That’s the title track from Warren’s under-loved and under-bought 1989 record, Transverse City. Garcia’s on the robot-hummingbird guitar.
They were dissimilar: one East Coast (from Eastern Europe), overcoats and storms, heavy classical training with masters, grey and black, vain; the other West Coast (from Western Europe, T-shirt Tuesday and learning your instrument through hanging out, tie-dye, and…what is the opposite of vain?
What Garcia looked like towards the end.
Right: that. The song’s great, and so is the album, with one small (almost insignificant) hiccup: it’s one of those albums that starts to sound really good after about ten years of listening to it. Interpret that however you’d like.
Garcia also plays on They Moved the Moon, which West Coast Promotional Man, Mr. Completely, thinks would have been bitchin’ coming out of Space; I agree with him.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcxxCFqihkk]
It’s weird little number: the whole album’s ten degrees off-kilter, and if you know anything about Warren, that makes sense. The man was wracked with mental disorders. No joke, but also no free pass: under his sincere problems, the man could also be a bit of a selfish dick.
Unlike you and me, of course. It’s just that someone wrote all of his sins down.
May our sins vanish! Like embers into the aether: yes, my friend? Now! You buy! Three camel, two daughter, 14 pounds dates. SEVENTEEN HUNDRED AMERICAN: DON’T CHEAT ME, JOHNNY FLAGFUCKER!
I’m sorry, excuse me, stop this, what now?
Yes?
You have become some sort of racist extra from the bazaar scenes in Raiders. Why is this, please?
Pass.
You cannot…can you get back on topic?
Ass.
I am going to take that as a big ol’ ‘no’.
The show I posted yesterday generates opinions: some enjoy the energy, and others think that 6/4/78 was too over-the-top, that there is a difference between being enthusiastic and being the naked guy who still keeps trying to eat cops after he’s been shot seven times. Mrs. Donna Jean joining in the NFA jam was certainly her prerogative, and I enjoyed it: she saw everyone else going out-of-tune and decided to join in. Cool beans for Mrs. Donna Jean.
The show was from one of Bill Graham’s Day on the Green shows and Warren Zevon was opening and Warren Zevon was drinking because that’s what he did that year.
It did not go well.
Zevon wasn’t a good drunk, but he was a consistent one. He blacked out, a lot. He liked guns, and kept them handy. Also: pills and hitting people, mostly the woman closest to him. His shit was fucked up.
There is a recording of the abuse that Warren threw at the mostly-Deadhead audience, but it’s not readily available; I did find this picture:
I found this on the wonderful Grateful-Dead-Photos.com that contains some nifty pictures taken by a lovely man with a good eye named Bill Fridl.
You must appreciate Phil’s bemused chuckle at watching Warren eat it, deliberately and seemingly on purpose. “Yeah, I’ll get to the coke, but first I’m gonna watch Johnny Hairline piss off 25,000 people. That reminds me, I should call Ned Lagin.”
Warren: this was a big show, probably the biggest in sheer size you had ever, and might ever, play. The Deadheads liked you coming into it: their heroes had given you the most explicit of thumbs-ups. Covering a song that was in the charts? Unheard of! (Butchering that song? Heard of!) The Dead played one of your goddamn songs: MAKE FRIENDS WITH THEM, you idiot: the audience AND the band.
And it’s odd of him to piss off famous people of any stripe: Warren was an inveterate name dropper; every song in his live show has an intro about “It’s one of Marty Scorsese’s favorites.”Warren was never quite as famous as he knew he should be. It’s not narcissism: I share the opinion. So do most people with a little bit of taste in music.
His live show was usually good, especially during the ’80’s when tough times turned him into a one-man-band, playing twelve string and, of course, piano in little theaters and big bars. When times were good, he had LA sharpies; he could never afford to take the real motherfuckers out with him, though–the guys he hung out with back home and made most of his records with.
Zevon’s first bunch of records were immediately brilliant. They were cool and funny and smart and his hair…well, you know about his hair. His next bunch (and this was a rather larger bunch; some might say ‘most’) were in retrospect full of heartless love songs that over years worm their way into you as their production makes the expected transition from ‘cheesy’ to ‘dated’ to ‘classic’. Then his last three, which were contextually beautiful back then; they stand on their own now.
Writers make sense of place, and explain ourselves to us: without grounding, there is nothing. To this day, there are parts of Lower Manhattan that still feel like Visions of Johanna. Hunter got San Francisco, and the open road, and the trail: Hunter was good with the trail.
But, Warren got Los Angeles right.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0J3ossUzhU]
Warren Zevon could write the fuck out of a song.
PLUS the Heineken.
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