Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells A Story
Rod the Mod finds his solo footing, headed for stardom, with the Faces in his wake.
6:00 AM GMT 22/06/2011
Features Disc of the day
Warren Zevon
Excitable Boy
(Asylum, 1978)
Mr Bad Example strikes out into the mainstream...
One of the best uses of music in a movie I've seen in recent times was the deployment of Warren Zevon's Lawyers, Guns & Money during the credit sequence of Alex Gibney's recent Hunter S. Thompson documentary. How apt that a film charting the life and times of the shotgun-toting Dr. Gonzo should end with this tale of a wayward American youth "gambling in Havana" and "hiding in Honduras". Good friends for years, the pair shared a passion for what Zevon's one-time label-mate Tom Waits' referred to as "the lowside of the road". Guns, drugs, alcohol, women: they spent the '70s indulging in them all.
Zevon's eponymously titled Asylum debut peered into the life of the down-and-out in Los Angeles. It would quickly secure the then frantically boozing songwriter sizeable critical acclaim. *Excitable Boy, its leaner, meaner follow-up, took the party into the Billboard Top 10. Propelled by the howls of breakthrough single Werewolves Of London, EB sees Zevon revelling in the unsavoury personae he so often delights in adopting. A particularly nasty zenith is reached during the exuberant piano strides of the title track, in which the "excitable boy" rapes and kills "little Susie" before digging up her grave and "building a cage with her bones". Then there are the eerie verses of Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner - a militaristic hymn that sees the revenge-fuelled protagonist "still wandering through the night" happily decapitating all and sundry. Even when he reaches for the pretty ballads a shadow is briefly cast - witness Accidentally Like A Martyr's opening gambit: "The phone won't ring / And the sun refuses to shine / Never thought that I would pay so dearly / For what was already mine".
Perhaps it's all there in the artwork. When it came to assemble the cover, Zevon insisted that his headshot was touched-up to the nth-degree. His straggled mop of blonde hair brightened, his bad complexion concealed. Savage stories beneath soothing surfaces - they never sounded so good.
Ross Bennett
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 20/03/2009
Further Listening
Warren Zevon- Warren Zevon (Asylum, 1976)
Tom Waits - The Heart Of Saturday Night (Asylum, 1974)
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - Your Funeral...My Trial (Mute, 1986)
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