Warren Zevon CD

Personnel includes: Warren Zevon (vocals, guitar, harmonica, piano, electric piano); David Lindley (guitar, slide guitar, banjo, fiddle); Waddy Watchel (guitar); Jackson Browne (slide guitar, piano, background vocals); Jai Winding (piano, organ, synthesizer); Bobby Keys (saxophone); Bob Glaub, Marty David, Roy Marinell (bass); Larry Zack, Gary Mallaber (drums); Phil Everly, John David Souther, Lindsay Buckingham, Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Stevie Nicks, Jorge Calderon, Bonnie Raitt, Rosemary Butler (background vocals).
Recorded at Elektra Sound Recorders and Sunset Sound Recorders, Los Angeles.
Composer/Lyricist: Warren Zevon.
Personnel: Warren Zevon (vocals, guitar, piano, electric piano); Glenn Frey, Lindsey Buckingham (vocals, guitar); Jackson Browne (vocals, slide guitar); Jai Winding (vocals, piano, organ, synthesizer); The Gentlemen Boys, Don Henley, J.D. Souther, Jorge Calderon, Phil Everly, Rosemary Butler, Carl Wilson, Bonnie Raitt, Billy Hinsche, stephanie nicks (vocals); Ned Doheny, Waddy Wachtel (guitar); David Lindley (banjo, fiddle, bass guitar); The Sidney Sharp Strings (strings); Bobby Keys (saxophone); Marty David, Roy Marinell, Bob Glaub (bass instrument); Gary Mallaber, Larry Zack (drums); Fritz Richmond.
Audio Mixer: John Haeny.
Audio Remasterer: Gavin Lurssen.
Arrangers: Warren Zevon; Carl Wilson.
Warren Zevon was a ten-year music industry veteran who had written songs for the Turtles, backed up Phil Everly, done years of session work, and been befriended by Jackson Browne by the time he cut his self-titled album in 1976 (which wasn't his debut, though the less said about 1969's misbegotten Wanted Dead or Alive the better). Even though Warren Zevon was on good terms with L.A.'s Mellow Mafia, he sure didn't think (or write) like any of his pals in the Eagles or Fleetwood Mac; Zevon's music was full of blood, bile, and mean-spirited irony, and the glossy surfaces of Jackson Browne's production failed to disguise the bitter heart of the songs on Warren Zevon. The album opened with a jaunty celebration of a pair of Old West thieves and gunfighters ("Frank and Jesse James"), and went on to tell remarkable, slightly unnerving tales of ambitious pimps ("The French Inhaler"), lonesome junkies ("Carmelita"), wired, hard-living lunatics ("I'll Sleep When I'm Dead"), and truly dastardly womanizers ("Poor Poor Pitiful Me"), and even Zevon's celebrations of life in Los Angeles, long a staple of the soft rock genre, had both a menace and an epic sweep his contemporaries could never match ("Join Me in L.A." and "Desperados Under the Eaves"). But for all their darkness, Zevon's songs also possessed a steely intelligence, a winning wit, and an unusually sophisticated melodic sense, and he certainly made the most of the high-priced help who backed him on the album. Warren Zevon may not have been the songwriter's debut, but it was the album that confirmed he was a major talent, and it remains a black-hearted pop delight. ~ Mark Deming
Zevon actually released a record prior to his celebrated self-titled "debut," a record so bad that he took to touring with the Everly Brothers. Whatever he did on the road with them paid off. He returned to recording with bone-rattling West Coast tales of prostitutes, heroin addicts, outlaws and suicidal bar hoppers. Thus, Zevon went, with one record, from playing piano on "Bye Bye Love" to becoming supreme chronicler of L.A.'s underbelly.
Easily his richest and most consistent album, this is arguably the best place for the uninitiated to start. The deranged romp of "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" and the tongue in cheek masochism of "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me" introduced the world at large to the darkly sardonic edge of the singer's muse. From the romanticized "Frank and Jesse James" to the starkly beautiful "Desperadoes Under the Eaves," the album rolls with an insightful (albeit sometimes crazed) sense of purpose.Rolling Stone (p.129) - 4 stars out of 5 -- "WARREN ZEVON captures the singer-songwriter at his peak as a black humorist."
Uncut (9/03, p.96) - "Zevon's hardboiled reputation for chronicling LA's underbelly starts here..."
Dirty Linen (p.54) - "A song cycle about Southern California, WARREN ZEVON offered a hard-living, gambling, drug-taking contrast to the songs about the sun and surfing."
Record Collector (magazine) (p.105) - 4 stars out of 5 -- "[I]t's perhaps surprising that the caustic attitude and uncomfortably forthright eloquence were so fully formed so early on."