![]() ![]() “The Rest Of The Night”- The one B-sideish throwaway here, it wastes some stinging guitar from Mike Campbell. (And, since we’re at the end of this series, I want to take the opportunity to wonder why Warren isn’t in the Rock Hall of Fame, for sanity’s sake?) Here is a song-by-song review.ġ1. The guest stars all give their all, but, regardless of the shadow hanging over them cast by his illness and subsequent death, Zevon’s songs, and his searingly honest performances of those songs, carry the day, just as it had always been with this artist. But I’m here to say that, even separated from the context of its creation, this album stands tall among Warren Zevon’s imposing back catalog, and it’s a fair argument to say that it might have been his best after the one-two punch of Warren Zevon and Excitable Boy a quarter-century earlier. The sentimental among us likely couldn’t find it in ourselves to give The Wind a bad review even if it consisted of ear-damaging shrieks committed to tape for an hour, such were the circumstances surrounding its release. Two weeks after it was released, Warren Zevon passed away on the wind.CK Retro Review: The Wind by Warren Zevon Posted: Septem| Author: countdownkid | Filed under: Retro Reviews, Warren Zevon | Tags: Billy Bob Thornton, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Conversations With Tom Petty, David Lindley, Don Henley, Dwight Yoakam, Emmylou Harris, Gil Bernal, Jackson Browne, Jim Keltner, Jorge Calderon, Mike Campbell, Ry Cooder, The Eagles, The Wind, Timothy Schmitt, Warren Zevon | Leave a comment ![]() The paradox of the wind is that we feel its presence but can never touch it. Included here are three songs from The Wind including “Disorder in the House”, the new Republican congressional theme song, with Bruce Springsteen joining Warren on backing vocals “Prison Grove”, an atmospheric, cinematic tone poem of despair and the tender lump-in-the-throat “Keep Me in Your Heart”. This year also marks the twentieth anniversaries of both Warren Zevon’s final Grammy-grabbing album The Wind, as well as his premature death from inoperable lung cancer in 2003. ( Warren Zevon guesting with one of his biggest fans, David Letterman, on Late Night ) ![]() Not since John Prine’s “Hello in There” (somehow written when Prine was a mere 19) has a young songwriter, not yet old enough to have experienced a teenage daughter of his own coming of age, written so convincingly of an emotion about which he could not yet have had any personal knowledge. Yet on the same tune stack was Zevon’s “Tenderness on the Block”, a first-person touching look at the loneliness of senior citizens. The title song was a lighthearted romp through the anatomy of a psychotic serial killer, complete with girl group backup singers, while the raucous rocker “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” was highly autobiographical, as we find in my classic rock interview. There was “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner”, an unblinking yet tongue-in-cheek look at the shadowy world of mercenaries and gunrunners in third-world hotspots. When it was first released, I remember having to reconcile several things about Excitable Boy, not the least of which being that several of the songs, at least for the times, seemed downright subversive! (And this copy actually glows in the dark!) But because the hit “Werewolves of London” was most people’s first impression of Warren as a performer, he was tagged unfairly with the “novelty song singer” label. By the time Warren Zevon’s third album, Excitable Boy, was released in January 1978, he already had hits, albeit recorded by Linda Ronstadt at her career peak with Zevon’s “Poor Poor Pitiful Me”,”Carmelita”, and “Hasten Down the Wind”. ![]()
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