Warren Zevon was a ten-year music industry veteran who had written songs
for the Turtles, backed up Phil Everly, done years of session work, and
been befriended by Jackson Browne by the time he cut his self-titled album
in 1976 (which wasn't his debut, though the less said about 1969's misbegotten
Wanted Dead or Alive the better). Even though Warren Zevon was on good
terms with L.A.'s Mellow Mafia, he sure didn't think (or write) like any
of his pals in the Eagles or Fleetwood Mac; Zevon's music was full of
blood, bile, and mean-spirited irony, and the glossy surfaces of Jackson
Browne's production failed to disguise the bitter heart of the songs on
Warren Zevon. The album opened with a jaunty celebration of a pair of
Old West thieves and gunfighters ("Frank and Jesse James"),
and went on to tell remarkable, slightly unnerving tales of ambitious
pimps ("The French Inhaler"), lonesome junkies ("Carmelita"),
wired, hard-living lunatics ("I'll Sleep When I'm Dead"), and
truly dastardly womanizers ("Poor Poor Pitiful Me"), and even
Zevon's celebrations of life in Los Angeles, long a staple of the soft
rock genre, had both a menace and an epic sweep his contemporaries could
never match ("Join Me in L.A." and "Desperados Under the
Eaves"). But for all their darkness, Zevon's songs also possessed
a steely intelligence, a winning wit, and an unusually sophisticated melodic
sense, and he certainly made the most of the high-priced help who backed
him on the album. Warren Zevon may not have been the songwriter's debut,
but it was the album that confirmed he was a major talent, and it remains
a black-hearted pop delight.
(by Mark Deming, All
Music Guide)
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