David Letterman and Music

As David Letterman's glorious late night television career ends tonight, Dave is being properly honored throughout the media landscape for the innumerable highlights and memorable moments and so, so many goofy, sometimes surreal slices of television oddity that likely will never be seen again. At least not seen for the first time, as they so often were on Letterman's shows over the past 33 years.

And this struck me as I thought about the end of this amazing career: he gets credit for so much innovation and so much irreverent comedic brilliance (from Stupid Pet Tricks to throwing watermelons off the roof to trying unsuccessfully to bust his way in to GE headquarters to so much more).

But he doesn't get nearly enough credit for what his shows have done for, and with, music.

Because he has. And his shows have. Big time.

A lot of this is due to his being joined at the hip for the past 33 years with the irrepressible Paul Shaffer, a friend to pretty much the entire music world and a magnet for top-flight talent. You think just anyone could have gotten Hiram Bullock and Steve Jordan and Will Lee and Sid McGinnis to play in his late night band for years (and in some cases decades) at a time? I don't.

So having Paul and the band there has certainly given the show a level of rock-n-roll street cred that I'm not sure any other show has ever had. After all, one of the earliest musical performances on Letterman's show was this.

Yeah. That's maybe the single greatest performer in modern music history given a full 13 minutes—13 minutes!!!—to do his thing as only he could do it.

There was this. When a certain young Athens, GA band was invited on to perform two songs (when does that ever happen outside of Saturday Night Live?) which would soon enough become iconic in their catalogue. Only this appearance came just a few months after their barely noticed (at first) debut album was released, and the second of the two songs didn't even have a title yet.

He got this guy to come on in 1984 and play this great new song. And my understanding is this gentleman was never exactly in love with playing TV talk shows.

So many more great musical appearances have followed. Like this.

And this (from a 1980s anniversary show, and check out Paul and Carole King and the dueling organs at Radio City Music Hall at the outset!)

And oh yeah, Letterman signed off his 11 years at NBC this way.

So. Yeah. So much great music. And it included jazz and country and rap legends and so damn many others who were on their way up in the music world. David Letterman, he of the bad hair and irony-drenched humor and the self-deprecation and the inside jokes that sometimes only he would get and the sardonic and sometimes explosive mayhem he would invite, became a vehicle and advocate for the best music of his era. Paul Shaffer had a lot to do with it, yes. But I also think a great deal of it came from Dave's being a fan. Someone who appreciated music when done at its best, whether it was by a bunch of long-haired kids no one had ever heard of or by legends as big and bright as Bruce Springsteen and James Brown and Bob Dylan.

And because of that investment that Letterman made in the music on his show? The performers pretty much always brought it. This was not phone-it-in time. This was playing the room they wanted to play. And time and time again it showed. Even when those times were as much weird as they were historic.

(Even here, notice how much fun this two seem to be having. Taking the song as seriously as they can and seemingly giving it their all, smiling every note of the way).

And my favorite of David Letterman's musical guests through the years was one I don't think I ever saw on any other talk shows. At least not as often as he appeared on Letterman's.

Warren Zevon.

These two seemed kindred spirits. Both loved their outlaw images. Both eschewed convention (at least for a large chunk of Letterman's career and no doubt for every inch of Zevon's) and made the kind of comedy and music that they wanted to make. For these reasons they fit each other like a glove. Albeit maybe one with six fingers.

When Warren Zevon was dying and opted to go public with it, David Letterman was the outlet where he pretty much said goodbye to the world. The great gonzo rock star spent the entire show with Dave one night in October 2002, the only guest of the evening, and treated both Letterman and the fans to one more night of his music. Culminating in one of the most touching moments I have ever seen on television.

Warren Zevon's many appearances on Letterman's shows personified why and how so many of us love music as much as we do. It's not because it's popular, because so often it isn't. It's because it reaches us on some level that can feel entirely our own. It can make it seem for a few minutes we are the only ones hearing this, and even though it wasn't created for just for us, for a few moments it can feel that way.

That's why Zevon was always my favorite Letterman musical guest, in a canon of great, great Letterman musical guests. They brought out the best in each other, and you get the sense that if there was no audience watching, in the studio or on TV, what they did together would be just as good. Because more than anything, it was for themselves.

Here's my personal favorite Warren Zevon moment on Letterman, which pretty much makes it my favorite musical moment on Letterman. Largely because I saw it live as it aired, and this was the first time I'd ever seen Zevon on television. It's also a great song that I hadn't heard yet, another in his resume of stilted bios honoring those individuals whom he saw as being as much renegades as he was. And partly because while his backing band on the Sentimental Hygiene album (which I had purchased at this point but hadn't played yet...how is that???) was none other than Bill Berry, Peter Buck and Mike Mills, a backing band here of Anton Fig, Sid McGinnis and Will Lee (and Paul Shaffer, of course) really ain't a bad alternative.

Lastly, check out Paul and Sid at the 2:48 marks. And tell they are not thrilled to be doing what they are doing.

Thanks for the laughs, Dave. And just as important, thanks for the music.

Mutineer

Well this is just beyond lovely.

I admittedly haven't listened to Jason Isbell or his former band Drive-By Truckers anywhere near as much as I should. Whenever I hear alt-country, or even think about it, I make a vow to myself to listen to more. Alas, I usually don't. This is just one of my many failings.

But here's one of the many reasons I should. And a hat-tip to good pal and huge Isbell fan Steve Coates for cluing me into this.

Here is a simply stunning version of a rather obscure track by the late, great Warren Zevon, "Mutineer," by Isbell and his wife Amanda Shires during a recent appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman.

For the most part I'll let this performance speak for itself, from the letter-perfect harmonies to the unceasing tenderness of their vocals to Mickey Raphael's harmonica work to the beautiful reverence they pay to this offbeat love song of an offbeat songwriter. But I will add one thing. Check out Dave's reaction following the performance. Warren Zevon was a friend of his, and for years Letterman was pretty much the only TV personality who would pay him any attention. The two had a bond that befit their renegade personalities. So when Dave thanks Isbell and Shires for this performance, he seems genuinely moved, almost choked up at one point.

And honestly, who can blame him?

Reconsider Me (maybe what Sir William was trying to write)

A couple of days back my partner here at Reason to Believe took a brilliant surgical look at of one of the more popular "love" songs of this past generation, Billy Joel's "Just the Way You Are." Like Scott I too have always been perplexed by this odd and unsettling track that pretty much led the way to mass stardom on BJ's finest album, The Stranger.

As Scott said, there is something off here, with these lyrics that Billy wrote in 1977. It sounds like a straightforward love song, and Lord knows it's been treated as such by countless newlyweds at their weddings, but it isn't. It just isn't.

Here's the part that always irked me, at the song's bridge:

I need to know that you will always be
The same old someone that I knew
What will it take 'till you believe in me
The way that I believe in you

The word that pops to mind as the best one-word to describe this song is pretty much right there in that first line: "need." Because this song, above all else, is remarkably needy. It is so terribly insecure. Which, hey, is right as rain in so many pop songs. What is "Yesterday" if not needy? What is "Wouldn't It Be Nice?" What is, for that matter, "Hungry Heart" and a huge chunk of Bruce Springsteen's catalogue if not plainly, desperately needy? Not to mention the Holy Trinity of troubling 1980s desperation: "Every Breath You Take," "The One I Love" and "With or Without You."

Billy Joel could have gone for this, the desperate route that knows it's desperate. But he doesn't. And that's my problem with "Just The Way You Are." It's needy, but it doesn't want to be. It wants to be in control, completely in sync with what the object of his desire is all about and is looking for. Only it isn't. And as a result it's totally unreliable.

Think of some of the lines that come earlier in the song. Like this one:

Don't go trying some new fashion
Don't change the color of your hair
You always have my unspoken passion
Although I might not seem to care 

I don't want clever conversation
I never want to work that hard
I just want someone that I can talk to
I want you just the way you are

Nothing Joel has written earlier in the song (especially "although I might not seem to care") indicates to us that he does unconditionally believe in her. And yet that's exactly what he expects from her—"What will it take 'till you believe in me the way that I believe in you?" It's not true; it's simply inconsistent with everything else he's said in this song. And for the author of a love letter to demand one thing from a lover and not expect to give it in return? It's just not fair.

And this would all be fine if Billy Joel acknowledged his inconsistency here, and maybe attached a level of desperation to it. Which of course Isaac Hayes does in the extended, soulful version that Scott wrote about. But instead Billy just seems to want to play this out as a straight love song. He seems to think he's being sweet, when really he's being straight-out selfish. "I know I don't treat you right all the time. But I need—NEED—to know you still love me. I have no plans to prove this to you, but you have to reassure me. REASSURE me."

And it led me to this. Scott gave you the Late Sir William Joel of Long Islandington. I give you the even later Sir Warren Zevon of West Hollywoodshire.

And I give you the song that, I suspect, deep down Sir William may have been aiming for with "Just The Way You Are." I could be all wet, but this is how I hear it. Warren's lovely and regretful tune from his vaunted 1987 comeback album, Sentimental Hygiene

Here are the lyrics, which for a songwriter as challenging as Warren Zevon could often be are actually fairly straightforward:

If you're all alone, and you need someone
Call me up and I'll come running
Reconsider me
Reconsider me

If it's still the past that makes you doubt
Darling that was then and this is now
Reconsider me
Reconsider me

And I'll never make you sad again
'Cause I swear I've changed since then
And I promise I will never make you cry

Let's let bygones be forgotten
Reconsider me
Reconsider me
 
You can go and be
What you want to be
It'll be all right if we disagree

I'm the one who cares

And I hope you see
That I'm the one who loves you
Reconsider me

Let's let bygones be forgotten
Reconsider me
Reconsider me

And I'll never make you sad again
'Cause I swear I've changed since then
And I promise I will never make you cry

As I said, I'm not sure I am even in the ballpark here, but this seems to be the song that Billy was trying to write. Only he didn't.

There are a few similarities. Both eschew a traditional verse-chorus-verse setup and instead choose to punctuate each verse with the title of the song, rather than drop it into a repeated chorus. Both have a mid-tempo, pop feel to them. Both employ familiar structures of the eras in which they were produced. "Just the Way You Are" has that electric-piano, light jazzy sound so familiar with mid-70s pop songs, while "Reconsider Me" has that glossy 80s studio polish we've heard time and time again. Both are very much of their time.  

But with "Reconsider Me," Warren Zevon (or the narrator of the song) acknowledges how much he's screwed up in this relationship (it's right there in the title) and he's pleading for a second chance. He's not really making any excuses, and he's making it clear he'd rather forget all that old bad stuff and just move on. Which is not dissimilar to what Billy does.

And perhaps it's not fair to expect Billy Joel, who was in his 20s when he wrote "Just The Way You Are," to have the same level of self-realization that Zevon did at 40 when he wrote "Reconsider Me." That's important; writers need to have time to grow and mature into themselves. Could Bruce Springsteen have written "Tougher Than the Rest" at age 26, rather than age 38? Probably not.

Yet still, it's a failing in "Just the Way You Are" because the song is too contradictory for us to trust what the narrator is saying. To beat a tired and worn cliche into the ground, he wants to have his cake and eat it to. He wants unconditional approval from her, yet makes it clear there have been times and will be times when he's unable to give it in return. It's just too needy to be honest.

To the point where I can't help but think if Billy had written this one with the same sentiment in mind, the line "Reconsider me" would be replaced with, "But you still love me, right?"

Warren Zevon isn't seeking reassurance in "Reconsider Me." Earned or not, he's seeking a second chance, maybe a renewal. But in "Just the Way You Are," all I hear is Billy Joel seeking  reassurance. And it seems pretty clear from the words that he hasn't earned it.

Poor Poor Pitiful Me/Cadillac Ranch

Do I like the way he segues from one great song to another? I do. That one's an original and one's a cover? Yes. Do I love how he tweaks the melody ever so slightly to accomodate his own range? You betcha.

But most of all what I love is how damn happy he seems to be, how energetic, how much he seems to love just bashing this out.

One of the more interesting and talented writers ever? Sure. But for me that may pale in comparison to the joy he's showing right now.



(Also, if "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" really is about Jackson Browne, that just makes this pairing all the more delicious. As does the fact that he's doing this in Passaic.)

My 25 Favorite Songs Part III

Interestingly, Part III (songs 15 down through 11) covers a 30 year swath of time, from 1969 to 1999. I had no idea my tastes were so expansive! (And yes. By "tastes" I mean "waistline.")

Up next, we enter my Top 10. But for now, here's the five songs that make up the middle portion of my personal Top 25.

15) “Desperados Under The Eaves”—Warren Zevon, 1976. Another songwriting giant, and I covered this song pretty extensively a few weeks ago. But Zevon had the uncannily ability to make Los Angeles seem deadly, gorgeous, terrifying, doomed, hilarious, and seductive at the same time. The three times I saw him live there were a few hundred people, tops, in the audience. Which was good. Because it’s nice being able to think you are in on a great, wonderful secret most don’t know anything about. “If California slides into the ocean like the mystics and statistics say it will, I predict this motel will be standing until I pay my bill.”

14) “Land of Hope and Dreams”—Bruce Springsteen, 1999. An invitation of a journey to a promising future, open to everyone—everyone—who wishes to come. The “need not apply” provision doesn’t exist – this train belong to all of us. Sprawling, soulful, timeless. Right on. “Hear the steel wheels singing…bells of freedom ringing.”

13) “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”—Bob Dylan, 1975. This should be a terribly sad song. But a master lyricist, storyteller and, most important, songwriter as skilled as Bob Dylan knew how to tell the real story and while relaying the pain and loss of a breakup, also remembering the good times and the humanity. That’s what I love so much about it - it’s a goodbye, but it’s a beautiful and affectionate one. “I’ll see you in the sky above, in the tall grass, in the ones I love.”






12) “There Is A Reason”—Alison Krause and Union Station, 1996. Alison’s singing is some kind of gift from some far away place – there simply is no voice to match her mix of sweetness and clarity. This is a faith-based song that explains in very simple terms what we’re all really hoping for. As someone who came to the party a bit later in life than most, I can dig it. I really can. “Heaven is the place I call my home, but I keep on getting caught up in this world I’m living in.”

11) “Here Comes the Sun”—Beatles, 1969. Not even Sandy Farina’s saccharine version in the God awful Sgt. Pepper movie (yes, that actually happened, it wasn’t just a bad dream) could make this song sound TOO bad. I have this picture in my mind of George Harrison, taken (just like John) far too soon, arriving at the pearly gates, and having every occupant of Heaven waiting for him, singing this song to him. Well done, sir. “Little darling, I feel that ice is slowly melting.”

Desperados Under the Eaves

A couple of days ago I wrote about Warren Zevon, trying to express my appreciation of him as an artist and of his forgotten masterpiece of a first album.

In my opinion, the finest track on that album is the finest song he would ever write. Which is saying something, as he wrote enough great songs to fill many careers—“Carmelita,” “Werewolves of London,” “Lawyers, Guns and Money,” “Play It All Night Long,” “Reconsider Me,” “Splendid Isolation,” “For My Next Trick” and on and on, right up through his literal farewell, “Keep Me in Your Heart.”

But for me, “Desperados Under the Eaves,” which closes the debut record, really is that good. And it really is his best.

The song is a meditation on the inevitable destruction of California from a man whose own personal destruction also seems imminent, even though his only earthly worry is paying his bar tab. The world may be ending, but buy this guy a drink and he’ll talk with you for hours.

The music is pretty and soft, a gentle violin that evokes the piano chords that opened “Frank and Jesse James” at the album’s start, leading into a whining little guitar. As the piano chords now quietly take over the melody, Warren sings slowly, clearly as he begins to tell his sad story.

I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel
I was staring in my empty coffee cup
I was thinking that the gypsy wasn’t lying.
All those salty Margaritas in Los Angeles?
I’m gonna drink ‘em up

Next his thoughts morbidly turn to the fear of Armageddon. Only...that’s not really what he’s worried about.

And if California slides into the ocean
Like the mystics and statistics say it will
I predict this motel will be standing
Until I pay my bill

Everything changes after Zevon sings that astonishing piece of doomed poetry. Just after it, the band kicks and winds up for the punch, Zevon shouts “Hey!” and something amazing happens. For the only time on the entire record, a full orchestral swell takes over and booms through the speakers, practically blowing them out as a once-mournful ballad now sounds like it’s being commanded from Mt. Olympus. The words are delivered like sledgehammer blows with glorious choral backing, shocking the listeners and forcing them to hang on every syllable.

Don’t the sun look angry through the trees?
Don’t the trees look like crucified thieves?
Don’t you feel like desperados under the eaves?
Heaven help the one who leaves

And then, once more, it’s quiet. And the focus again shifts away from the world’s end to the poor soul singing the song.

Still waking up in the morning with shaking hands
And I’m trying to find a girl who understands me
But except in dreams you’re never really free
Don’t the sun look angry at me

It’s poor, poor pitiful me all over again, to quote a great song from earlier in the album. The humor in the irony abounds here—it’s being made very clear to us that the world may be in danger, at least in the drunken mind of the narrator. And it’s evoking images in his swamped mind of trees that resemble condemned killers and a blazing sun that is only angry at him. But still? A girl who understands him would make it all better. Only where does one find the right girl during the apocalypse?

I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel
I was listening to the air conditioner hum
It went “Mmmm...mmm…mmmm….”

And it comes down to this. One more quiet line from a man who is still alive and still in the same dumpy little hotel, only now listening to the air conditioner hum. And as he does the orchestra kicks in again and swells up, up, up, and as Zevon hums along to simulate the sound of the air conditioner humming with him, the full orchestra follows, louder and louder, crashing like Pacific waves on a doomed coastline.

“Look away down Gower Avenue” a chorus sings behind it all, over and over again, as the song fades out, paying tribute to a legendary street in Los Angeles that once stood as a symbol of glitzy prosperity, but now is just one more ghostly relic of yesterday, waiting to sink into the sea. “Look away.”

To paraphrase and bend the immortals words of T.S. Eliot, this is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a humming air conditioner that turns into a symphony.

At least that’s the way it works within the mind of Warren Zevon. Who pummeled us for decades with tales of seedy creatures, slurping along the ground for something to keep them going, while at the same time singing with the innocence of a child. This is how Warren Zevon existed on rock’s outer reaches for 30 years, never able to outrun the demons that he saw chasing him, but occasionally able to stop—for awhile—and have a drink with them.

And never once paying the bill.

Warren Zevon

"I'm drinking Heartbreak Motor Oil and Bombay Gin...straight from the bottle, I'm twisted again." - Warren Zevon, "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" (1976)

While working in a country club kitchen in Simsbury, CT in 1986 during my freshman year of college, a co-worker lent me this odd orange-covered album that came out in the late 1970s, with a sorta creepy looking bespectacled man leering – and I do mean leering – out from the cover like a craven stalker.

“You gotta hear this. There’s a song about a rapist. And a song about monsters. Oh! And a song about a guy with no head!” I was told, excitedly.

Ooo-kay, I thought. Can’t I just keep listening to Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Live 1975-85? Or Abbey Road? Or even the somewhat new-ish Bob Dylan Biograph?

Trust me, he said.

I did. And I am glad I did.

The album, if you haven’t guessed, was Warren Zevon’s Excitable Boy, a 1978 release from mayhap the wildest man rock-n-roll had seen to date. Not only is it Zevon’s best-known album, but it is also lauded by many as his best.

It’s hard to argue against that (though more on this in a minute). Zevon was a songwriter extraordinaire out of the explosive Southern California collective of the 1970s, one who lived as hard a life as anyone who ever graced FM radio in the rock-n-roll era. Born the son of a Russian gangster, he was the oddball brooding in the back of the classroom while writing pulp horror and devouring long-forbidden comics and the most craven forms of comedy known in the pre-hippy 1960s. And it all showed up in his wonderfully perverse lyrics – murderers and mercenaries, screwups and ne’er-do-wells, outlaws and outcasts and no one who ever sat at the popular kids’ table in school.

The songs on his Excitable Boy album were as off the wall as he was known to be, but their disparate nature was equally perplexing.  “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” was a sinister piano ballad about, well, a headless Thompson gunning-mercenary named Roland, seeking vengeance on the man who blew his head off. Meanwhile, “Tenderness on the Block” was an irony-free Jackson Browne-tinged tale of letting your little girl grow up. “Excitable Boy,” the title track and his most infamous song, was about a rapist murderer, performed gleefully as a jaunty pop singalong, while “Veracruz” was a tender and lovely historic-based ballad.

Best of all were the two songs towards the end of Sides 1 and 2, back when “album sides” was actually a thing. “Werewolves of London” – his most famous tune – was a galumphing romp about scary hairy monsters roaming the Soho streets, while “Lawyers Guns and Money” – which closed the record –  could have actually read as a Zevon biography, an unrepentant fuckup who kept finding himself in peril and begging for rescue. (“I was gambling in Havana, I took a little risk. Send lawyers, guns and money – Dad get me out of this!”)

And then there was this – man, could this guy play! His voice was whiskey baroque, deep and menacing yet bell-clear and, when he needed it to be, vulnerable. A virtually peerless piano and keyboard player and a wildly underrated guitarist, Zevon created songs with arrangements were at once spare yet perfectly melodic, with subtle nuances and hooks to always keep you guessing.  This wasn’t shredder rock-n-roll to be played to pumped up stadium crowds – Warren Zevon was more brooding gunfighter than rock star. He was the guy sipping whiskey in the back of the saloon that you were always a little hesitant to approach, because while he looked harmless, something seemed deeply dangerous about him.

He relished the persona, and while the masses never took to him the way they did direct contemporaries like Jackson Browne (one of his greatest friends and supporters) and the Eagles (or for that matter Linda Ronstadt, who turned a few of Zevon’s songs into megahits), he was beloved in the industry and treated as a jewel, self-destructiveness aside. Recently I read I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon, written somewhat affectionately but 100% honestly by his ex-wife Crystal. You know the little misfit kid who begs his parents or teachers for one last chance to do right? Warren Zevon seemed to live his life banking on chance number 500. Like Bullwinkle with the magic hat, this time for sure!

I’ve gone on for a bit now, probably too long – hey, you should have stopped me! But really want to focus for a few minutes on the album hardly anyone ever thinks about when they think about Warren Zevon (those that even do, anyway). If they don’t think about Excitable Boy, they probably think of his 1987 comeback (from a near-decade drug haze) Sentimental Hygiene, a brilliant record ably backed by the members of R.E.M. Or maybe they think of his sad, strident farewell, The Wind, released just before he died in 2003 and with tracks filled with such hard-earned beauty you can practically hear the breath leaving his body.

But seldom do people talk about his first album in 1976, Warren Zevon. And all it was at the time was the most audacious debut by any American artist since Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced? a decade earlier.

Largely piano-based and produced by Jackson himself with a lushness Bob Dylan never dreamed of before hooking up with The Band, Warren Zevon was the masterpiece before the masterpiece. An 11-song collection that zigged and zagged across the forboding Southern California coastline – with occasional stops in the heartland yet ultimately landing on the Pacific’s edge –  traipsing constantly between hopefulness and despair.

The album attacked myths and legends – angrily rebuking Norman Mailer (whose gonzo life no-doubt mirrored Zevon’s in some ways) with “The French Inhaler” about Mailer’s savaging book on Marilyn Monroe, and offering a mighty defense of the James Gang – stalwarts of the Confederacy at the end of the Civil War – with the sympathetic album-opener “Frank and Jesse James.” He examined despondent addiction with “Carmelita,” yet did so against the backdrop of the sweetest little love story you could imagine. He sent up California living over and over again, from the rabid self-obsession (“Poor Poor Pitiful Me,” which Linda later devoured) to the apocalyptic allure of the closing one-two punch of “Join Me In L.A.” (with Bonnie Raitt’s singing behind him) and the masterful tale of woe that closed the record, “Desperados Under the Eaves.” He even sent up faux evangelism with “Mohammed’s Radio,” yet did so in gorgeous, radio-friendly fashion (no pun intended), featuring none other than Stevie Nicks on backing vocals just before she would take part in the recording of a little record called Rumours.

How the album has been set-aside and largely forgotten about through time is beyond me – Zevon never really hit it big, I know, so perhaps the listening public only had room for one of his records.  But no other great debut in rock’s glorious history ever gave the listener a clearer message on what the artist was capable of doing than his first record.

He could make you laugh with nihilistic rants like “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” he could make you cry with aching ballads of loss like “Hasten Down the Wind.” Or he could make you feel joy and pain, comfort and confusion, empathy and disgust all at once on tracks like “Carmelita” and “Mama Couldn’t Be Persuaded” and the formerly mentioned “Desperados Under the Eaves.” Every note played with earnestness and conviction. Even if you wouldn’t trust the guy around anything more deadly than a toaster, you somehow believed him when he sang, “Some may have and some may not, God I’m thankful for what I’ve got” on the shuffling “Backs Turned Looking Down the Path.” Because you wanted to believe him, even if you knew he would eventually let you down.

Warren Zevon admittedly let a lot of people down in his too-short life. But seldom the listener. And back when it all started, on his unforgettable debut record, there was no telling what he might do next. And that was a good, good thing. Even from poor, poor pitiful him.