The Warren Zevon song he calls “a rip-off of Hunter S. Thompson”
“Let’s remember that Hunter S. Thompson is the finest writer of our generation.” – Warren Zevon
A cultural revolution unfurled in the 1960s that shifted the sensibilities of the great American novel. The times were a’changing and with the immediacy of the people’s music emerging as a catalyst, culture, as a whole, had to catch up. “In order to make his attempt at the Great American Artwork, [Ken] Kesey had to get out into America itself. To feed off the energy being unleashed there by new technologies, new music, new drugs,” Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker muses.
And so, Kesey literally hit the road and captured culture on the wing like Jack Kerouac before him, “to capture this new America that was forming before their very eyes. What they were searching for was mysterious, it was nebulous, but it was undeniably powerful,” as Cocker writes in The Guardian. This new wave of reportage provided a pivotal impulse that seemingly defibrillated Hunter S. Thompson’s heart to pound like a mutant and feverishly frame the zeitgeist in his own uniquely fitting prose.
With his singular style, Thompson seemed to encapsulate a certain aura of pervasive goodwill that Bob Dylan had abridged with ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, the track that Thompson called “the hippy national anthem“. The poignant purposefulness of Thompson’s work was not lost on his fellow artists, who saw that its inherent playfulness only added to the potency of its punch. One such artist was Warren Zevon, and his biggest hit came mimicking his friend’s style.
While Zevon was working as a bandleader for the Everly Brothers, Phil Everly called him to tell him that he had just watched the 1935 movie Werewolf of London and that he should adapt the title into a dance craze track. “I was at LeRoy’s [LeRoy Marinell] house a few days later, and he was playing that little V-IV-I figure when Waddy walked in. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked, and we answered, ‘We’re doing the ‘Werewolves of London”. Waddy [Wachtel] said, ‘You mean, Ahhooo – those Werewolves of London?'”
From thereon, a sense of liberated fun overtook proceedings, and the song hurriedly took shape. “I try to tell people that aside from the fact that we got the idea for the song from a suggestion by Phil Everly, ‘Werewolves of London’, from my point of view as a co-writer, is a rip-off of Hunter S. Thompson. I can’t imagine why people don’t see that. And I must tell you that Hunter doesn’t see it, because Hunter’s too modest. He’s a real gentleman,” Zevon later said.
Eulogising the impact of his friend, he added: “He’s a genius who doesn’t have that capacity to worry about what people have taken from him, which of course, my whole generation has derived a great deal from him. But he can be a real good friend, he can be a more reliable friend than a lot of people who aren’t on the same… wavelength.”
Whether on this occasion, that influence was limited to the colourfulness of the lyrics or the visceral social commentary – Jackson Browne said: “It’s about a really well-dressed, ladies’ man, a werewolf preying on little old ladies. In a way it’s the Victorian nightmare, the gigolo thing,” or maybe that nightmare was more akin to a Fear and Loathing-like hallucination – remains to be seen as Zevon left that interpretation, there is no doubting that Thompson’s liberated spirit lingers within it.
In fact, he had a significant influence on Zevon in general, and as the artist Bob Dylan declared as the “musician’s musician”, Zevon, in turn, influenced a generation of performers. Unlike many others, Zevon peculiarly claimed, “I find Hunter S. Thompson’s presence immanently calming.”
“Hunter is endlessly entertaining because he talks the way he writes,” Zevon says in an outtake for the documentary Keep Me In Your Hearts. “I have been a great fan and reader of everything of Hunter for many, many years before we met up… and then we started blowing things up together and bonded that way.”
Well, the explosive ways of ‘Werewolves of London’, with its first-rate band of Zevon, Wachtel, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood, became a huge hit that helped to launch Zevon as a solo artist and mystically push the spirit of Thompson a little further on down the road.
