Full Albums: Warren Zevon’s ‘Excitable Boy’

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

Warren Zevon was quite an excitable boy himself, it seems, if not necessarily in the league of the character described in the song of that name, a highpoint in his third album release. A maverick individual with a bag of demons, he cast a spiky flame across the AOR uplands of the ’70s and ’80s, falling in and out of favor, exasperating and alienating friends, family and fans alike. A couple late career upturns brought him back into focus as the century turned, before lung cancer scythed a swath through his renaissance. It also supplied him the means for some exceptional last gasp, literally, material, releasing The Wind just one month before his 2003 death.

Like many of that era, Zevon’s career began as a songwriter for hire/jingle composer. The Turtles were early recipients of his style. His 1970 debut Wanted Dead or Alive sank with little trace, sending him back to supper clubs and session work. Jackson Browne gave him a huge break, producing and promoting his second disc before taking him out on tour, as his support and gig-buddy. The Browne connection, and the prestigious Asylum label, contrived to bring attention earlier lacking, his quirky songs now available to a much larger audience. This eponymous 1976 album was duly hailed “a masterpiece” by Rolling Stone.

Bolstered by recognition, two years later saw the release of Excitable Boy, again helmed by Browne, together with guitarist Waddy Wachtel. This saw Zevon’s career-best sales, going platinum and attaining a Billboard Top 10 placing. Furthermore, the single from the album, “Werewolves Of London,” #21 on the US chart, prove also an unlikely critical hit in the U.K., at a time when punk rock was more the emergent flavor of the day, alerting this writer to his oeuvre, a love maintained immediately and thereafter.

So let’s see how it and rest of Excitable Boy has lasted, as inspiration and influence for the covers work of others.

Phil Cody – Johnny Strikes Up the Band (Warren Zevon cover)

A standard guitar and piano progression, the original “Johnny Strikes Up the Band” is characterized by Zevon’s gruff vocal idiosyncrasy, the piano part sufficient to remove the otherwise conventional guitar parts. A classic opening song, it plays a sort of “hey kids, let’s put the show on right here” type vibe of no small appeal, a feel-good song about the power of music to make you, yes, feel good. Sometimes said to be about Queen, given the lyrical mention of a Freddie, it seems more likely to be about himself, unless John Deacon was really being credited as the prime ignition of that “Bo Rhap” hitmakers.

Phil Cody is a jobbing folk-rocker with the road in his blood. He toured with the 1990s Zevon, the two having a lot in common. This track comes from a disc he made, Cody Sings Zevon, all the songs given a folksy jug band sheen. With a voice a little harsher than his mentor’s, Cody infuses the songs with a swagger quite separate from the more conventional originals, not that much removed from John Hiatt’s more bluegrass based work.

Lauren O’Connell – Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner (Warren Zevon cover)

Surely one of the weirdest songs in the Zevon canon, “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” sounds as if should come from the pages of Marvel’s Sgt. Fury & his Howling Commandoes, a cousin to Stan Ridgeway’s protagonist in “Camouflage.” It is actually, if loosely, based on the exploits of co-writer David Lindell, a one-time mercenary who operated a bar in Spain. Lauren O’Connell gifts it with a simple organ and drum machine backing, her voice a sparse and spare commentary. A defiantly DIY musician, she has a bevy of material available, mainly of her own composition, but this comes from an all-covers selection called, concisely, Covers. I like the deadpan contrast between the presentation and the content, which adds to the overall oddness.

Spoiler: At no stage did Lindell either lose his head or continue to fight thereafter, the construct being about the ghost of a fearless, if deceased, hired fighter.

John McEuen – Excitable Boy (Warren Zevon cover)

“Excitable Boy” has always made me think about the backstory to the film Halloween and the formative childhood adventures(!) of Michael Myers. The idea of it becoming a bluegrass workout certainly appeals, not least as one supposes(!?) this sort of story more commonplace in Appalachia, so I applaud the idea. Frustratingly, the reality fails to deliver quite the expectation, perhaps down to the quality of John McEuen’s vocal, which swiftly reveals why he was never much in demand as a singer when he was with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. This comes from what should have been a promising set of songs, Roots Music Made In Brooklyn. Gathering together a crack team of bluegrass virtuosi, including David Bromberg, Jay Unger and even Steve Martin, they rattle through a set of otherwise predictable and genre appropriate covers. It would have been good, even with the vocal misgivings, to have seen more attention to out-of-context songs like Zevon’s.

Joe Louis Walker – Werewolves of London (Warren Zevon cover)

Now this is real good fun, a funky and bluesy take on “Werewolves of London” that both keeps an inescapable grip on the original, as flying off to parts fully unrealized in the, lets be honest, fairly basic meat and potatoes of the hit single iteration. With new life coursing through its veins, my love for the song is revived and revamped together, even though it includes the presence of Waddy Wachtel, who co-wrote the song, on additional guitar. Joe Louis Walker is an archetypal electric blues man, steeped in the genre. However, on the death of his roommate Mike Bloomfield (The Electric Flag, Butterfield Blues Band), he turned his back on the blues for several years, enrolling at San Francisco State University. Luckily, he came back, remaining active on the scene since 1986. This comes from a 2021 release, Eclectic Electric, which contains also a remarkable version of “Hotel California.”

An interesting point I learnt in the research for this is that the song refers to the sort of louche lounge lizard who preys on the older woman for their pleasures, with (allegedly) Phil Everly being the source material!

Jerry Garcia – Accidentally Like a Martyr (Warren Zevon cover)

A slower and more stately song than many of the songs here, the original “Accidentally Like a Martyr” is gifted with an almost gospel feel to it, descending chords which ally themselves to Zevon’s plangent vocals. You would think that is about as far in that direction you could take it, but you would be wrong. Slowing it to a near funereal pace, Jerry Garcia pours every ounce of emotion into his spiritedly wracked version. If you ever need an example to counter the lazy dismissals of Garcia’s voice that abound, this would be a prime challenger, such is the pathos that leaks out of him. Tucked away on the sixth disc on All Good Things, the box set of his collected solo material, alongside eleven other similarly unreleased tracks. Recorded in 1977, it was not released until nine years after Garcia’s 1995 death.

I guess one criticism might be that the words, so integral to any Zevon song, which refer to romantic loss, are largely indecipherable. To be fair, for once, that matters not a jot. Speaking of indecipherable, I feel I cannot not also include this version by Bob Dylan, it being one of the most performed cover songs by the Bard of Duluth.

Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country – Nighttime in the Switching Yard (Warren Zevon cover)

Sort of ironic that this should follow Jerry Garcia, with the main riff carrying more than a slight whiff of the Dead’s “Shakedown Street.” So much so that, at first, I thought it a deliberate lift to go with the jam band ethos of Donato’s project, forgetting that Zevon, too, had gone uncharacteristically (for him) funky in his original. Which, it should be added, doesn’t run quite the same risk of shared riffage. As much a vehicle for the band to stretch out, it is entirely apt that a jam band should see “Nighttime in the Switching Yard” as prime nutrition for a marathon session, and there are a number of other bands who do the same with it. Daniel Donato has built up a bit of a following since being described as “Nashville’s newest guitar hero,” with his Cosmic Country band owing perhaps rather less to the style put forward by Gram Parsons than the name might hope. (File under Phish?)

By Zevon’s standards it is filler, a throwaway album track, but, by virtue the groove, it becomes one of his more surprising best.

Thomas von Holdt – Veracruz (Warren Zevon cover)

It seems there is always one song in each of these Full Covers posts that gets ignored by the writer’s peers, making it sometimes difficult for us to finish the job. This time around the honors go to “Veracruz.” Which is surprising, it being one of the best within the Zevon canon. Touching upon none of the usual culprits of misfits and loners, oddballs and iconoclasts, this is a serious song, rooted in historical document, which becomes all the more moving for that. So it is to the array of bedroom gurners and e-buskers, always there for the most arcane of covers, to whom I turn. And Thomas Von Holt is amongst the more engaging, as well as, with his PayPal tip jar, amongst the more enterprising. Describing himself as a country singer from Germany adds further luster; he’s clearly singing in a second language, with also an appealing lisp that blurs all of his sibilance. I like this version of the song, stripped back to voice and guitar, with little effort to recreate the Zevon larynx, so much the pitfall of such performances. I would love that there were an equivalently unadorned version across Zevon’s own live output, especially if played with the same exquisite 12-string as used on Learning To Flinch, the ultimate Zevon live document.

Shawn Colvin – Tenderness on the Block (Warren Zevon cover)

Another of the Browne co-writes, it takes Shawn Colvin’s version of “Tenderness on the Block” to bring out all the Jackson inherent in the melody, although it maintains the glorious hint of the Who’s “Baba O’Riley” in the shimmery intro. Colvin is a consummate coverer, with more than one album dedicated to cover versions. However, rather from one of them, this comes from her second major label release, 1992’s Fat City, which gained her her second Grammy nomination in as many albums. It comes as a surprise this has been, so far at least, her only Zevon cover, such is the affinity her voice feels to have with the material, and subject matter. Plus, presenting the song within a female voice adds a greater poignancy, less apparent than in Zevon’s more observatory stance. The beauty of her tone provides an extra depth to the horror of the story. Besides her voice, much of the other heavy lifting on this version comes from the wonderful interplay between accordion and organ. Exceptional.

The Saltine Ramblers – Lawyers, Guns and Money (Warren Zevon cover)

Is “Lawyers, Guns and Money” the single song that most sums up the Zevon schtick? From the bravado of the delivery, whoops, yelps and all, to the hyperbole of the risible tale, believable only to the narrator? Sure, it questions the disconnect, if any, between imagination and aggrandization, but isn’t that always the way with the best of storytellers? So, then, how to cover it without losing that vaingloriousness? It could have been Hank Williams Jr., who possibly actually lived this sort of life for real, but in the end he adds little than extra hollers, even if he sings as if it were written about, and even for, him. And God spare us from Meatloaf’s execrable din, which sums up the problem of the ditty, in that it seems to demand bluff, bluster, and nothing but.

So it was a relief to find this, from The Saltine Ramblers, about whom I can find very little, beyond hailing out of New Mexico, starting out punk and becoming then progressively country, with a loose, revolving open-door recruitment strategy. If you ignore the shouted exhortation as it starts, it becomes a pleasing mix of mandolin and a twangy surf-country guitar hybrid. The vocalist sounds fully aware the daftness of the lyrical thrust, and it immediately assures a right of passage here. (If you are a Saltline Rambler, get in touch!)

Cover Me is now on Patreon! If you love cover songs, we hope you will consider supporting us there with a small monthly subscription. There are a bunch of exclusive perks only for patrons: playlists, newsletters, downloads, discussions, polls - hell, tell us what song you would like to hear covered and we will make it happen. Learn more at Patreon.