Get excited...for more Excitable Boy of the excitable Warren Zevon

I didn't necessarily plan on doing an alt version of Excitable Boy, because there is no real reason to do so. Excitable Boy is an excellent album from top to (almost) bottom, so it doesn't obviously need a do-over, but then again Warren Zevon didn't need one either, yet I was happy to try to strengthen its thematic undercurrent in transforming it into Manifest Destiny. But the work on that Zevon album led me - as usual - down the road of doing a re-listen to most of his discography and finally I did some minor work on Excitable Boy. 

It's hard to beat the one-two punch of Warren Zevon and Excitable Boy. They are both great albums, but they are great in different ways. I have a theory of what makes an album great, and now you will obviously be obliged to hear it. Obviously, the ground rule is that you will needs lots of great songs and no bad ones. Then, there are two ways of being great. You either have a coherence in sound, sensibility and possibly themes, which Warren Zevon has in abundance. Or, you can simply have a batch of killer songs, which is the case of Excitable Boy. Excitable Boy doesn't have much coherence in between the songs - in stark contrast to its predecessor - but it essentially plays like a Greatest Hits record, proposing a bunch of memorable songs in different styles. 

And yet, things could have been quite different, as told by guitar hero Richard "Waddy" Wachtel (and co-producer of Excitable Boy) in the Zevon oral history biography I'll Sleep When I'm Dead. Deep into the work on the album, co-producer Jackson Browne called him up to invite him top a replay party, to which a fluxommed Wachtel replied: "Don't you need a full album for that?", to which Browne replied that they did and the work was done. At that point, during the first 'final set list' of the album, Excitable Boy included two ballads from way back when to essentially fill up what was already an exceedingly short album. "Tule's Blues", a beautiful ballad written for his then girlfriend Marilyn 'Tule' Livingston, was already almost a decade old at that point, while "Frozen Notes" dates from the early 70s. 

Rock'n'roller Wachtel famously hated these quote "boring, folky" numbers, then noted that the audiences yawned their way through these two numbers at the playback party, with the proposed first version of the album running a ridiculous 24 minutes. It's closer to 27, but point taken, it still was a rather slim and sketchy proposition that wouldn't have allowed the album its instant classic status. So Wachtel pulled Zevon and Browne out of the room, told them they don't have a record yet and get to work dammit while he was on tour for two weeks. By his return, Browne and Zevon had co-written "Tenderness On The Block" and Zevon had come up with the classic "Lawyers, Guns And Money". And the Excitable Boy we all know (hopefully) and love was born. 

So, what do to with Excitable Boy? "Veracruz" is off the album in the One Buck Records alternate universe, but I really wanted to put the very short, very charming a capella "I Need A Truck" on it, which is the perfect preamble for things to follow. And then I needed another track from the leftovers. I agree with Wachtel that that new version of "Frozen Notes" is a snooze, inferior to the first version he cut in the early 70s, but I think his revised version of "Tule's Version" is a worthwhile addition. The first version was lost adrift on Zevon's misshapen debut album Dead or Alive, even if it served for hinting at something deeper to Zevon's songwriting. But really, what makes this new version is Zevon's lyrical revision of the ending of the song, which changes the perspective to his young son Jordan, the kid he had with Tule, and that he basically didn't see for his entire early childhod - the song's final line "does he ask if I'll be coming home soon?" quietly breaks your heart.  

Which brings me to how this version of Excitable Boy is different from the original. On the surface, not that much has changed: one song out, two other songs in and a different, but not too different sequencing. I wanted "Truck" to segue directly into the familiar opening beat of "Werewolves Of London", pushing otherwise excellent album opener "Johnny Strikes Up The Band" to side two opener. The ballads would make obvious side closing numbers. Otherwise, the biggest issue was were to hide "Nighttime In The Switching Yard". That's right, I said hiding, because NITSY is the clear fly in the ointment here, a song that isn't outright bad, as it is filler, and at almost five minutes by far the longest number of the album, which makes its disco-funk somewhat tiring. Another issue for me was the cover art, which isn't befitting a classic album. I agree with art director Jimmy Wachtel, brother of Waddy, that Warren "looks like a corpse" and "a fifteen-year old boy" due to the abundant retouching of the pictures. Photoshopping before photoshopping! I used the inner sleeve art as new cover art, after playing around with the 'Willy On A Plate' back cover, but results for that one were inconclusive (see below). 

What really sets this edit of Excitable Boy apart from the original is the feel that the two new numbers give it. In its original form, the album was a great example of third person narrator storytelling. Unlike the sometime clearly autobiographical songs on Warren Zevon, none of these songs are specifically about Zevon, making the jolly tales of necrophilia, headless phantom assassins and waitresses working with the Russians a little easier to digest (the merry backing vocal arrangement of "Excitable Boy" really disguises its darker-than-dark tale as a happy singalong moment). Yet, the naked autobiography in "I Need A Truck" and "Tule's Blues"add a bit more Warren into proceedings, from his womanizing and drug and alcohol abuse ("I need a truck to haul all the wimmens from my bed", "I need a truck to haul my percodin and gin") to his role as an absent father in "Tule's Blues".    

Whether Excitable Boy needed more Warren in its tales is for you to decide, but I believe both of the newly added tracks deserve to be heard and appreciated, and surrounded by its A grade colleagues, that is easier and more agreeable than ever. Maybe even...exciting? Take it away, excitable boy...