![]() Musically, the fiddle anchors the piece, floating gently above the guitar line until stepping to the fore to take a solo. “Mama Couldn’t Be Persuaded” is the most country-tinged track on the album, in both content and style. “No one knows just where they came to be misunderstood,” Zevon sings, in the song’s final lines, “but the poor Missouri farmers knew / that Frank and Jesse do the best they could.” They want to do the right thing but don’t know how. Casting Frank and Jesse in heroic roles is a common but significant revision - the two were almost certainly vicious and cruel men - but the theme is one that crops up again and again on Warren Zevon: that most people at the fringe are well-intentioned but misguided. “After Appomattox, they was on the losing side / so no amnesty was granted, and as outlaws they did ride”. “On a small Missouri farm, back when the West was young / two boys learned to rope and ride and be handy with a gun”, and when the Civil War broke out the boys “joined up with Quantrill” - meaning William Clarke Quantrill, a vigilante general for the South. ![]() Then the drums and guitars enter and, a few measures later, Zevon himself, singing of two brothers who could never quite do anything right, despite their good intentions. “Frank and Jesse James” opens the album quietly, with the piano picking out the melody all by itself. ![]() But while Browne’s lyrics were introspective almost to a fault, Zevon was much more interested in singing about the characters and stories he saw around him - about prostitutes, and outlaws, and, ultimately, himself. It just sounds like Browne: piano-based melodies, immaculate production, mostly acoustic guitar. Musically, the album is very much Browne’s, in a way that’s a little tough to pinpoint. ![]() But Browne persisted and Geffen relented, and the album was recorded with Browne as a producer and several of his high-profile friends (Glen Frey and Don Henley of the Eagles Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac Carl Wilson and Bonnie Raitt, among others) making appearances. Browne’s personal appeal to David Geffen was what got Warren Zevon recorded at all, and it couldn’t have been an easy sell - Zevon was regarded, if he was regarded at all, as a drunk and a washout, and a mediocre singer to boot. He was coming off of Late for the Sky (his best album) and The Pretender (his most important), and he was the poster child for the sensitive, folk-tinged rock coming out of Los Angeles. It seems strange now, but in 1976, Browne was a veritable rock star. It’s likely that Zevon would have kept on toiling in obscurity had he not met and befriended Jackson Browne in the mid-’70s. That honor belongs to 1969’s much maligned Wanted Dead or Alive, which was neither as bad as people say nor as good as anything that followed. Zevon had been bumming around Los Angeles since the early ’60s, writing songs, playing piano for the Everly Brothers, and drinking tremendous amounts of vodka. And in no place was his vision better realized than on this, his underappreciated, mostly forgotten self-titled album. But though the song did showcase Zevon’s quirky wit, it was unrepresentative of his true musical and lyrical sensibilities the world as Zevon saw it was an altogether darker and more interesting place than “Werewolves” let on. The novelty song off of his 1978 album Excitable Boy was the biggest hit Zevon ever had, mostly because of its wolf-howl refrain and absurdly catchy piano riff (which would, 30 years later, form the backbone of Kid Rock’s smash hit “All Summer Long”). It is an enduring shame that Warren Zevon remains best known for “Werewolves of London”.
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