Happy 40th Anniversary to Warren Zevon’s fourth studio album Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School, originally released February 15, 1980.
I don’t think I heard “Play It All Night Long” in full until I was in college. My dad had A Quiet Normal Life: The Best of Warren Zevon and it was on heavy rotation in the car, but he would always hit fast forward within the first brutal measure. Even now, when I spin my copy of Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School, I feel compelled to pick up the needle at track six, as though a transgression is taking place.
But it’s a song I think about a lot these days, every time I see the motley crews who rally around a racist president as lies about clean coal and blue collar work spill from his mouth, the drool-soaked crumbs of the rich oozing down into the yelling-open mouths of self-proclaimed deplorables. “There ain’t much to country livin’ / sweat, piss, jizz and blood,” Zevon crackles in the third verse. Sure, it sounds like an LA studio’s version of Appalachia, fed only by repeat viewings of Deliverance. But I’ve witnessed it, over and over and over again. Child rape in dirty trailers, dog fighting rings in the hills, cheap beer and meth and the stench of dead cows rotting in the field.
And sure, the rich lust after their daughters, there is piss and jizz and blood on all their money and expensive furniture. But the rich polish it away, they bury it in philanthropy, on secret islands accessed by private jets. The country folks now have a word to wrap around it and have been told that it’s only right to blast it all night through their busted speakers. Neither is acceptable, and I often wonder what songs Zevon would have written about modern times or if, like a soothsayer, he already did.
Zevon’s fourth album is as tight as its 1978 precursor Excitable Boy (if not tighter) and stacked with the Zevon triple-hit of noir novel (this time, in the south and the west), comedic storytelling and tenderness at both the start and end of relationships. But these themes are never compartmentalized, instead, they overlap and interplay within each other.
With three albums under his belt by this point, Zevon was confident in how he wrote his songs, unafraid to transgress beyond the boundaries of traditional rock & roll. In Nothing’s Bad Luck, C. M. Cushins writes that critic Paul Nelson recalls that during the recording of Bad Luck Streak, Zevon “tossed me a portfolio labeled “Symphony No. 1…pages and pages of meticulously annotated music and a dog-eared copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine.” Snatches of that Stravinsky-inspired symphony show up as “Interlude No. 1” and “Interlude No. 2” on the album.
Opening the album, the title track is as Pure Zevon as one could get: opening with a knife-sharp string fill before a burst of handclaps—made by firing a Smith & Wesson .44 in a barrel of sand —splits the song into a snarl of guitars. “Swear to God I’ll change,” Zevon pleads. His marriage to Crystal Zevon was ending amidst his drinking (“Empty Handed Heart” references this as well) but he’s still in a dancing school, a.k.a. a brothel. He can’t get laid there either, it seems.
Even the album’s artwork—a room of beautiful ballet dancers warming up without paying one blink of attention to Zevon sitting on the floor on the cover, their shoes tossed on the floor next to a machine gun on the liner notes—pays homage to the brutal contrasts presented on the album. What we think of as soft, romance and tulle and gentle country folk can be the cruelest of all.
The Bruce Springsteen-aided “Jeannie Needs a Shooter” is as sentimental as it is funny as it is dark. Cushins reports that Zevon allegedly heard a rumor about an unfinished Springsteen composition—then titled “Janey Needs a Shooter”—and took it upon himself to write the music and re-write the first verse. When Zevon handed in the finished version, Springsteen allegedly said, “It’s nice. But where are the other verses?” and Zevon just smiled. It’s a wry smile you can hear as the song—and the life of our ill-fated cowboy—fades out. (Though the studio version is fine, the best versions are live recordings; the first is from the 1980’s Stand In the Fire tour and my favorite is from the Capitol Theater in Passaic, NJ in 1982.)
Zevon’s catalogue works best in this thematic occupation. You can draw threads between “Jeannie Needs a Shooter,” “Frank and Jesse James” on Warren Zevon (1976) and “Bullet For Ramona” on Wanted Dead or Alive (1969). “Jeannie Needs a Shooter” might even be looked at as a dark parallel to Excitable Boy’s “Tenderness On The Block”—a young woman crosses class lines for love, only this time, without the fairy tale ending.
If “Jeannie Needs a Shooter” is another story in Zevon’s western canon—a musical storytelling akin to The Ballad of Buster Scruggs—the sweaty “Jungle Work” is the spiritual successor (prequel, perhaps?) to “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.” The machine-gun toting soldiers of fortune chew through some of Zevon’s nastiest guitar work, howls of blood piercing through the low-hum of the outro. Zevon’s fascinations with mercenaries is as strong as it ever was and would remain, showing up again in “The Long Arm of the Law” on Transverse City.
But noir isn’t just crime and guns, it’s the unfortunate characters that populate a miserable world. Much like the biographical “Frank and Jesse James” and later, “Boom Boom Mancini,” Zevon takes left-handed Expos pitcher Bill Lee—by this time a close friend—and gives him a short, but heartfelt ballad, capturing his loudmouthed, counter-culture views in a lone harmonica solo.
Amidst Zevon’s darkness there is always humor—both “Bad Luck Streak” and “Jeannie Needs a Shooter” have a dry chuckle to them. But Zevon, tragically best known for the radio-friendly “Werewolves of London,” lightens the tone of Bad Luck Streak with “Gorilla You’re a Desperado.” And although the narrator’s stuck in a cage, it’s the Gorilla—now with the newly-built Villa Gorilla and a shiny BMW—that’s still getting a divorce and “shackled to a platinum chain.” And for fun, you have Eagles Don Henley and Glenn Fry singing backups, complete with a note-for-note ode to their own “Desperado.”
But humor and bravado is just that—a slimy veneer of boldness that masks a wound, and it’s “Empty Handed Heart” that really lets us inside. Zevon’s love songs are full of lament and loss and this one especially so, written for his wife, Crystal Zevon, who left him because of his unpredictable, alcohol-fueled temper. It would be easy to “cancel” Warren Zevon, to accuse the listener of himpathy when the pangs of this song hit. But like love itself, nothing about Zevon is ever simple, even the plink of the piano keys.
Music journalist Steve Hyden theorized that your favorite Zevon song says a lot about you, and there are plenty of candidates on Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School—a hopeless romantic, a mercenary, a lonesome cowboy or desperado of any breed. Zevon has been gone for nearly seventeen years, but in those years, not only has he not been forgotten, he’s been re-embraced, a legacy continued and explored.
Like the man said…play it all night long.
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