“I went home with the waitress, the way I always do”: Warren Zevon’s five best opening lines
After Tom Waits was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011, he dryly asked, “How long do I have to wait out here in the hall? There’s got to be a room somewhere. I want to get a room”.
He’d become eligible for induction in 1998, but the Rock Hall has a long history of keeping legendary names waiting for far too long to get a room. Sister Rosetta Tharpe only made it in as recently as 2018 (she should have been included with the inaugural alumnus in 1986), while Television and Fiona Apple are still waiting for the nod. Chubby Checker was eligible for 40 years before the Rock Hall let him in last year, at which point they also corrected the record and posthumously celebrated Warren Zevon, as well.
Zevon is one of the great American songwriters, and arguably one of the great American writers working in any medium. As astonishing with words as he was with melodies and the piano (he was briefly under the tutelage of Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft as a teenager), his music contains a heady, breathless and audacious blend of bravado, guts, honest emotion and tall tales, satire, horror, humour, heartbreak and all the rest.
His songs contained both beautiful images and true brutality, sometimes in the same song, in the same line or even in the same second. His images conjure worlds and embed themselves in your brain, capable of driving you crazy with love, lust, hatred and brute force. His songs are like movies; visual, visceral and vividly brought to life in technicolour. Quentin Tarantino could only ever dream of a movie as brilliantly and humanly brutal as ‘Excitable Boy’, ‘Werewolves of London’, ‘Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner’ or ‘Play It All Night Long’.
How satisfying is the run of syllables in ‘Werewolves of London’ when Zevon fires the line “Little old lady got mutilated late last night”? Or how painfully beautiful is the more simple “Never thought I’d have to pay so dearly for what was already mine / for such a long, long time” in ‘Accidentally Like a Martyr’? And how audacious to so effortlessly include a word like “brucellosis” as he did in ‘Play It All Night Long’? His songs are filled with great lyrics the whole way through, but here are five of his very best opening lines.
The five greatest opening lines in Warren Zevon songs:
‘Desperados Under the Eaves’ (1976)
“I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel
I was staring in my empty coffee cup
I was thinking that the gypsy wasn’t lying
All the salty margaritas in Los Angeles
I’m gonna drink ’em up”.
The opening lines of the closing song from Warren Zevon’s first great album are perhaps his first true masterpiece of a song. These lyrics are so instantly evocative that you can’t help but visualise not only the scene he’s describing, but all the ones that came before and after it, as well. And how’s this for a stunning second verse, with clever internal rhyme and an ingeniously ironic quip to follow: “And if California slides into the ocean, like the mystics and statistics say it will / I predict this motel will be standing until I pay my bill”. And then there’s the quietly devastating “but except in dreams, you’re never really free”.
Each is only beaten by that glorious closing line, which finds Zevon back in his lonely room again: “I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel, I was listening to the air conditioner hum / It went hmmm…”
‘Play It All Night Long’ (1980)
“Grandpa pissed his pants again
He don’t give a damn
Brother Billy has both guns drawn
He ain’t been right since Vietnam”.
A song full of brutal bodily functions which doesn’t pussyfoot around or turn a blind eye to human nature and country-living, these lines are full of dirt, blood, sweat, tears, suffering and futility.
Starting on a sour note and only getting darker from there, everything in the South of this song is soundtracked by “‘Sweet Home Alabama’, play that dead band’s song” of which Zevon demands “turn those speakers up full blast / Play it all night long”. The music is as muddy as the story is, as earthy and gritty and as dirty as any of the darkest images in the lyrics.
‘Lawyers, Guns and Money’ (1978)
“I went home with a waitress the way I always do
How was I to know she was with the Russians, too?”
Every line in this song is sensational, but that opener really sets the scene. It’s a story of both bravado and cowardice, two things that are surprisingly common company with each other.
The song struts and swaggers and ploughs through anything that tries to get in its way; this is a real powerhouse of rock writing and performance. Wildly inventive, outrageous in its simple adventurousness, this is Warren Zevon at the absolute peak of his powers.
‘Werewolves of London’ (1978)
“I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain”.
Perhaps the song that Warren Zevon is best known for, no one else would have dared to write a song as crazy, catchy, incredible and indescribable as ‘Werewolves of London’.
The song is full of so many iconic images, hilarious rhymes and brilliantly fluid vocal deliveries (“You hear him howlin’ around your kitchen door, you’d better not let him in”, “He’s the hairy-handed gent who ran amok in Kent”, “I saw a werewolf drinkin’ a piña colada at Trader Vic’s / And his hair was perfect”) and Zevon had as much fun with it in concert as his audiences did, often adding new verses, dropping in new names or new rhymes into the lines. My girlfriend recently suggested to me that I’d hate this song if a modern band released it now, but honestly, no one else could ever come up with something like this.
‘Dirty Life and Times’ (2003)
“Some days I feel like my shadow’s casting me
Some days the sun don’t shine
Sometimes I wonder what tomorrow’s gonna bring
When I think about my dirty life and times”.
Written right before his untimely early death, Zevon managed to beautifully, brilliantly and brutally look back at his wild life in the lyrics across his poignant final album, The Wind, and, especially so, here on ‘Dirty Life and Times’.
After he had been diagnosed with terminal pleural mesothelioma, his old friend and huge fan, David Letterman, dedicated an entire episode to the ailing musician, which featured multiple musical performances and also Zevon’s beautiful observation that in the face of the ultimate end, “you put more value in every minute you do live. I mean, I always thought I kind of did that, I really always enjoyed myself, but it’s more valuable now. You’re reminded to enjoy every sandwich, and every minute of playing with the guys and being with the kids and everything”.
