WARREN ZEVON - Mutineer (1995)

I don't know whether there's universal agreement on how people frame different Zevon "eras," but Mutineer has to be considered late-period, right?  After Learning To Flinch, Zevon was in full wizened-troubadour mode, making less produced music with a few handpicked collaborators from a home studio.  I feel like the four years between the trio of records that ended with Mr. Bad Example and Mutineer seems like a pretty clear place to draw a line.  Whether or not that's the standard understanding, that'll be mine.  Mutineer seems considerably closer to me to the record he'd release five years later than it does to his past work.  

(As reader may have gathered, I'm quite familiar with Life'll Kill Ya, whereas really everything except the title track of Mutineer was totally new to me.)

Track One:  "Seminole Bingo"

Despite the preamble above, I didn't necessarily have the impression of a big stylistic shift when first playing Mutineer.  SB sounds like a fairly typical Zevon album opener in line with the preceding few records' opening tracks, albeit maybe a little more placid.  A simple recurring riff on piano and an almost speak-sung tune that's mostly two notes.  The title lyric ending the chorus even has the same first two syllables as "Sentimental Hygiene!"

For my money (wordplay not intentional), "Seminole Bingo" is a better song than, say, "Sentimental Hygiene."  Mutineer basically has rollicking songs and slow soundscape songs; although it doesn't "rock," really, "Seminole Bingo" rollicks.  I think the choice of long wordy phrases is the secret.  Zevon can just sometimes, when he's on his game, bottle up something like "down in the swamp with the gators and flamingos," with the extra few syllables in that line acting as a storytellling-like connection to the next... which somehow manages to work in Lichtenstein right where a three-syllable word needs to be.  In any case, SB is a big grower.  

Track Two:  "Something Bad Happened To A Clown"

I still didn't have the impression of a big stylistic shift at first with the start of the second song.  Oh great, track two is the "Suzie Ligthtning" spot.  But then, as the verse shifts into the chorus, SBHTAC makes sense of some of its unusual percussive instrument choices, as the listener realizes that this is about a presumably terminally en-saddened clown and unlike anything else in the Zevon ouvre to date.  I'm weirded out in a good way.  "He used to honk his horn," [singsongy organ part]...  Mutineer basically has rollicking songs and slow soundscape songs, with the dead (?) clown song falling squarely into the soundscape category.

I'll admit that once I got over the novelty factor, this one did start to wear a little thin.  Even despite the tasy guitar licks trying to liven it up towards the end.  I think the song either needs another verse or more words, or it needs to be shorter.  I'm leaning towards the latter, because the central image is best kept vague the way Zevon is so good at doing; that aspect would only get weaker with more specific details.  Literally the only thing we actually need to know here is that something bad happened to a clown.

Track Three:  "Similar To Rain"

You want more sparse?  Mutineer has got some sparse for you!  Here Zevon goes with the vulnerable quavering vocal.  Spoiler alert, he's a good wordsmith, so he can make that work, coming with a particular spin on a common metaphor, or at least some new words.*  Love as "wet and cold" on its own would be interesting enough, but then the last line of the chorus cements the picture of a metaphorical bad weather day.  

Sometimes love is wet and cold
Similar to rain, just as hard to hold
Love can make you sad and blue
If you don't watch out it'll fall all over you

I'm having a hard time explaining quite why that's different than all the other pop songs out there that compare heartbreak to rain.  Maybe it's the delivery that sells it, or maybe the exquisite xylophone work.  Good track!

I'm not so sure about the sequencing of songs.  The slow  empty-sounding start of "Similar To Rain" sounding so similar to "Something Bad Happened To A Clown" has to have been deliberate, right?  To show that Zevon can start in the same place and go two totally different directions with his soundscapes?  Eh.  Personally, I'd have gone with the more standard fast-slow alternation here.  

Track Four:  "The Indifference Of Heaven"

Definitely a highlight of the 1993 live record, and even better in the studio.  (Although I don't love the doubled vocals.)  Mutineer basically has rollicking songs and slow soundscape songs, and damn does this rollick.  That central chord structure is an all-timer - makes sense if it was originally written to played solo acoustic! - with our man crushing a simple lilting vocal melody that oozes with the melancholy of misspent years while being somehow comforting.  I cannot overstate how much I love Zevon as the wizened, if not necessarily wise, figure spinning simply delivered plainspun lyrics that get to the point in an eloquent way.  TIOH works perfectly as a personal reflection while also working perfectly as societal commentary (the song is amazing even if one doesn't know that it was written with the 1992 L.A. riots fresh in everyone's mind, but knowing that fact makes the whole thing that much richer).  I mean, text never conveys the same thing as the music, but I really wish I could write like this,** let alone sing it so beautifully:

I had a girl

Now she's gone

She left town

Town burned down

Nothing left but the sound

Of the front door closing, forever

A gentle rain falls on me

All life folds back into the sea

We contemplate eternity

Beneath the vast indifference of heaven

Beneath the vast indifference of heaven

I've made no secret of the fact that folky troubador Zevon is my favorite Zevon.  It's in that spirit that I'd say that "The Indifference Of Heaven" is on my short list of best songs that he, or anyone else, has ever written.

Track Five:  "Jesus Was A Cross Maker"

And now for something completely different... I feel like I'm still wrapping my head around JWACM (originally by Judee Still, who the internet tells me Warren was a few years ahead of pop culture at large in "rediscovering.").  Zevon has done covers before, but here he demonstrates his ability to actually do a good job with that most overdone of clichés, the slowed-down "haunting" cover that's the stuff of thirty thousand shitty movie trailers.  A Zevon slowed-down cover, on the other hand, is almost always at least worth checking out.  His "Jesus Was A Cross Maker" is... well, it's more weird than anything else, giving the instrumental to an organ, turning the "sweet summer angels" part into a hymn-like feature by Rosemary Butler, and making the main tune unrecognizable.  Yes, Zevon the piano man doing a cover of a piano-driven song with no piano.  I think I like it?  It ends after just two verses and 1:55, which seems about right.

Track Six:  "Poisonous Lookalike"

Finally, a pop song exploring Capgras syndrome, a delusional disorder in which one believes that familiar people or objects have been replaced by imposter duplicates!***  Oh no, wait, it's just another paint-by-numbers Zevon song about a failing relationship.  Never mind.  

I know there's always one... but I can't imagine the person for whom "Poisonous Lookallike" is their favorite Warren Zevon song.  I'd actually bet money that there's nobody.  Riff is limited.  Chorus is too long and repetitious.  Song is okay.

Track Seven:  "Piano Fighter"

I actually find the studio version of "Piano Fighter" to be a bit of a revelation.  I wasn't a huge fan of the Learning To Flinch version.  But starting and ending with tickling the ivorys and then bringing in the guitar and percussion as the song picks up, and then gradually giving it more and more back to the piano gives the song a bigger feel.  Played this way, "Piano Fighter" succeeds as an epic story-song about the high and low points in the life of an unlikely rock star.  I mean, the stripped down version was trying for that too, I just enjoy this take a lot more.  Another one that's become a bit of an earworm for me.

 

Track Eight:  "Rottweiler Blues"

Back to the '80s style bass-heavy synths.  RB doesn't quite hit the way it should, in part because of an oddly indifferent vocal performance in which it actually sounds like Zevon is coming in something like a quarter of a beat behind the music.  Weird that they couldn't come up with a better take.  The character sketch is okay, I guess.  I like the line about the skinheads "hunting for their balls."  You know how every record lately I've been saying that there's a track that I think isn't quite finished, needing one or two more rewrites?  For Mutineer, that's "Rottweiler Blues."

Track Nine:  "Monkey Wash, Donkey Rinse"

Leave it to Zevon to invite us to a party in Hell and make it sound like a chill good time.  This isn't quite one of the wild hootenannies of Zevon's earlier career; more the inevitable fate of those of us who're watching the unraveling of our lives, the world, or both.  

David Lindley, who plays fiddle here, has told the world how Zevon explained the meaning of the title lyric to him.  It's both disgusting and fitting for the song in which it appears.

 

Track Ten:  "Mutineer"

We hit pay dirt with Zevon's longstanding propensity to dress simple folky songs in atmospheric synths.  I've been critical of over-synthing the straightforward tunes in the past.  "Mutineer," the song, gets it just right.  The percussion and sound effects convey the maritime theme of the central metaphor, adding that extra special sauce that the nice little tune wouldn't quite achieve on its own.  Mutineer, the album, has been leading up to "Mutineer," the song, so it's 100% fitting as a record-closing title track.****  After what we've been through with all the rain and thunder, the record's offering us the same thing Warren is presumably offering to one of his thousand lovers - a much earned chance to get away for a bit.  Grab your coat; let's get out of here.

Final thoughts:

- I started the post by speculating about the division between "late period" Zevon and the early stuff.  In part that's because ever since I started this project, I've been anxiously waiting for him to morph into late-period Zevon.  Despite the leftover vestiges of '80s production, with Mutineer we are finally there.  The rollicking tracks rollick.  The soundscapes captivate.  The moving tracks make me feel things.  One could make the argument that on some level what we're seeing is him getting the arrangements of the softer songs right, even when drenched in studio magic, whereas he'd been struggling with that previously.  Anyway, I'm not going to declare perfection - a few songs are rough around the edges and a few just are missing something - but I will declare Mutineer pretty damn good.

- And in just thirty-five minutes too!  Gotta salute the fine art of a short, concise record.

- Sadly, Jordan Zevon's live-band rearrangement of "Money Wash, Donkey Rinse" from the 2025 "Join Me In L.A." tribute concert isn't available online at the moment, as far as I can tell.  I'm definitely curious to hear it.

Favorite track:  "The Indifference Of Heaven"

Runner up:  "Mutineer"

Least favorite track:  "Poisonous Lookalike"

Rating:  4/5

On to Life'll Kill Ya, whenever I get around to it!

Definitive list of records by Warren Zevon profiled so far, in order of what I have decided is unambiguously their quality

1)  Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School

2)  Excitable Boy

3)  Mutineer

4)  Warren Zevon

5)  Transverse City 

6)  The Envoy

7)  Sentimental Hygiene 

8)  Wanted Dead Or Alive

9)  Mr. Bad Example

*Marking the first of two consecutive records to touch on the difficulty in holding rain in one's hand.

**Nitpick - I guess I do take issue with the phrasing of the lines referencing Billy and Bruce.  It sounds kinda like he's taking a shot at them for being closeted elites, and I don't think that that was the intention.

***As far as I know, the working hypothesis is that the cause of Capgras is when some issue, whether it be structural damage or a neurologic processing defect, affects the emotional attachment centers of the brain, such that one's perceptions per se are intact but reactions to those perceptions are not.

****One could even argue that Zevon's whole career to date has been leading up to "Mutineer," the song.  The 1996 compilation I'll Sleep When I'm Dead closes with "Mutineer."  If he'd never recorded anything else, would be a fitting "last song."  I wonder how long Zevon imagined he'd keep doing this, because every final track from here on has that "last song" vibe.