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...

Warren Zevon's Manifest Destiny

How crazy is it to mess with one of the best albums of all time and hope to get away with something worthwhile? Probably plenty crazy, but the One Buck Guy fears no challenge. It helps that this classic album is still somewhat underappreciated and overlooked, a lot like the man who created it. Warren Zevon may be the man to those who know him, but unfortunately a big part of the general population either doesn't know him or - if they're of a certain age - only know him as a sort-of goofy one-hit wonder with "Werewolves Of London". Zevon was so much more, and his second album Warren Zevon told you as much. Not a real debut album, that was the ill-conceived, low-budget Wanted Dead Or Alive by Zevon (no Warren yet) produced by gadfly Kim Fowley for Imperial in 1969 - but a real and utterly compelling introduction to the poet laureate of L.A. Noir rock'n'roll.

It's also pretty crazy that this blog has been kicking about for almost a year and a half and I haven't gotten around to posting anything by or about Warren Zevon, one of my favorite artists. On the other hand, most of his albums are what they are, which mostly means great to very good, but also without a lot of material to do alternate albums and the like. More importantly, most Zevon albums feel like they don't need an alternate album. Warren Zevon certainly doesn't, and yet here is one. Most alt albums that I propose on this blog are real alternatives that - at least to me - improve on the released version in one way or the other. But there's room for another sort of alt album, a companion piece that shows the road(s) not taken. Manifest Destiny squarely falls into that concept. No alt album could supplant Warren Zevon, but an alt album can support it and bring some of its underlying ideas closer to the surface. 

The concept of Manifest Destiny isn't entirely mine. About twenty years or so ago I was hanging out at the Warren Zevon Bulletin Board and one of the members there posted the observation that Warren Zevon was both a tresk westwards and from past to present, starting in mid 19th Century Missouri and ending up in 1970's L.A. From this observation sprang the idea of Manifest Destiny, though I had to tweak the track list a bit to make it work in the way I wanted it to. First off, I wanted two specific tracks on the album that weren't on Warren Zevon. One is "Vera Cruz" which could have been had producer Jackson Browne chosen differently. He picked the line-up from the songs Zevon had amassed over the years, deciding to hold back "Werewolves Of London" and "Vera Cruz" for the follow-up. But not only does the song feel like it should be with the ones on Warren Zevon, it also fits into the concept, even though the geographical route now leads through the south rather than Chicago. 

The second song is one that Zevon probably wrote for a follow-up to Wanted Dead Or Alive on Imperial Records that never materialized. "Studebaker", with its Southern California setting and travel motif seemed to fit right into the concept of Manifest Destiny  - all the losers and schemers and lowlifes in L.A. have to come from somewhere, right? There was one issue though: The song was never entirely completed, basically just stopping - so I had to get creative to produce an ending for the song. I did, together with a new opening that fits the narrative and hopefully comes off as hoped.  

The rest of the songs come from Warren Zevon, though in order to fit my idea of the album, two tracks were dropped. I couldn't find a logical way to integrate "I Sleep When I'm Dead" and then dropped "Hasten Down The Wind" at the last second. "Hasten Down The Wind" is a fantastic song, but it just didn't fit well into the road and traveling motif I imagined for side one of Manifest Destiny and also had that (imagined vinyl) side run too long, so with a heavy heart I deleted it from the line-up. 

At first I had a pretty healthy mix of versions from the finished album and the alternative takes and outtakes on its disc of bonus track from the 2008 Collector's Edition. But finally, bit by bit, I replaced the glossier originals by their alternatives, save for the majestic closing track "Desperadoes Under The Eaves" - in my opinion Warren's best song, bar none - which just sounded wrong in its embryionic early version - and "Mama Couldn't Be Persuaded" for which no alternative version has been issued. It just felt right that the road trip concept of at least the first part of Manifest Destiny would push for an earthier instrumentation - see David Lindley's banjo & fiddle that are almost entirely buried in the original version of "Frank And Jesse James", but come to the fore here or the added emphasis on Wddy Wachtel's guitar work that the lack of overdubs reveal. Lindley's fiddle, also much more prominent on the alt version of "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" becomes a real presence on the album while being almost inaudible on Warren Zevon. 

I got into a bit of a pickle when coming upon "Mohammed's Radio"as I didn't want to go with the extremely produced original, including the lush overdubbed backing vocals of Mr. Buckingham and Mrs. Nicks and Bobby Keys' sax that I could go without. I also didn't want to use the alternative version, which in return really clarifies how much of a Bob Dylan rip off/homage the song with its elaborate metaphors is, as Warren tries at one point - rather unsuccessfully, one might add - a Dylanesque vocal delivery. So I 'cheated' and included the version Zevon did for The Old Grey Whistle Test BBC TV show with Jackson Browne. It is one of Zevon's best ever vocal and has just the right amount of instrumentation, including of course a contribution by David Lindley. 

The alternative, more bare-bones versions of "The French Inhaler" and "Carmelita" bring out a more vulnerable aspect to their respective tales of hustling, pimping, drug-taking and despair, with Warren's voice essentially naked. "Join Me In L.A." always had an undercurrent of barely concealed menace, but the alternative version (a.k.a. take 2) with its sinewy, snakey guitar lines brings the menace right to the surface, making the song sound sinister at times, especially in the instrumental interludes, with Warren's protagonist making spoken word offers you should probably refuse, like going off to Griffith Park to take a couple of Octamols. The journey of Manifest Destiny changes, musically and lyrically. The protagonists of the first part, 'The Road' (which would be vinyl side a) are sometimes in trouble or downtrodden, but the promise of something better down the road is still there, and the music still sounds upbeat and determined. But when they have reached 'The Last Frontier' (vinyl side b), a.k.a. the city of angels, things take a turn for the worse, and the music itself becomes moodier and less upbeat. Then again, you'll be hard-pressed to find L.A. rock as noir and despairing as "The French Inhaler", "Carmelita" and "Desperadoes Under The Eaves". 

I still could go on for hours about what makes these songs great, but this is already one of the longest write-ups as is, so I'll just leave you to get to Manifest Destiny to either rediscover these songs in a new context and new versions, or to discover them for the first time. Either way, you're in for a treat.