WARREN ZEVON - My Ride's Here (2002)

In my personal imagined Zevon career arc, the Mutineer/Life'll Kill Ya duology was always the glorious return to form, perfectly setting up the swan song of The Wind.  And then My Ride's Here was kinda... there, in between the two records, interfering with the narrative.  So, I've listened to the record before, but really only a few times, mostly in passing.  It was fun to finally dive deep into it, in context.

Track One:  "Sacrificial Lambs"

I think on some level Zevon was keen to show that he was still a rock and roll singer who could make music with a bigger rock feel.  Not that "Sacrificial Lambs" is a super heavy song or anything,* just that it returns to the rollicking full-band feel that was once Zevon's stock in trade but was less pronounced on the records that lead up to Ride.  Very straight-ahead song with a vocal melody that sounds, well, like most of the other Zevon openers.  Pretty good, not much to distinguish it, except for the nice drumming.  Drums (I believe all courtesy of Anton Fig) are a highlight of the whole record, generally showing a real knack for throwing in a well timed, interesting bit of percussion.  The other thing that stands out, well...

I'll rant more later about the lyrics overall, but I think "Sacrificial Lamb" is the victim of getting a little too clever for its own good.  Here there are so many namedrops that I'm not quite sure how the story he's telling goes from cults to political-type despots to whatever the end of the song is about.  Some fun one-liners ("they've worked out the kinks in your DNA") but not a coherent picture for me.  Maybe he needs to dumb it down a bit?

Track Two:  "Basket Case"

Okay, this is certainly stupid.  Women be crazy and driving their men crazy, amirite?  And it's not even like he's putting a clever or personal spin on the trope; the lyrics are repetitious, lazy, and uninspired.  *Sigh*.  Okay, riff is fine, song sounds okay.  I think I actually like the "ba ba ba" parts because at least it livens up the show, proves that the record is willing to do something different.  

But for the love of Cthulhu, not at all what I meant when I suggested dumbing it down.  Fine, Warren, you can go back to your impenetrable piles of pop culture and literary references anytime now.  

Track Three:  "Lord Byron's Luggage"

Hey, this is a little different!  LBL is the first track that really plays up the overt folk elements.  A pastiche of folk, anyway, if not anything actually traditional.  Starting with some mix of fiddle and I guess keys made to sound like an accordion, with a playful drum pattern.  Zevon the weirdo Celtic folk singer!  It could totally work!

I enjoy the song, but here's my issue with the lyrics.  And this applies to the record as a whole.  So I'll mention it in a big block now and then hopefully not dwell on it with every song.  Something's happened here in which Zevon's gotten too smart for the room again.  Yes, being well read and having a way with a turn of phrase is part of his brand, but so is being able to cut to the core of something.  Yes, I know that some of his best songs, including that one big mainstream hit, are full of verbose nonsense... but I personally listen to Zevon as much to make me want to cry as much as to laugh.  Ask me to think of great Zevon lyrics, and I think of the mode that gave us:

Some get the awful, awful diseases

Some get the knife, some get the gun

Some get to die in their sleep, at the age of a hundred and one

But life'll kill ya; that's what I said

Life'll kill ya, and then you'll be dead

  

Instead, My Ride's Here is mostly giving us more along the lines of:

Lord Byron had a lot of luggage
He took it when he traveled far and wide
He didn't get to bathe very often
But he liked to change his clothes all the time 

Um... okay?  Byron is a figure who has a lot of associations, so I'm not sure which one I'm supposed to be getting out of that.  Or why I should care.  Especially when that stanza is immediately followed by a stanza of penis-based puns, which is then in turn followed by a stanza referencing Henley Regatta.  All of this surrounds a fairly straightforward chorus that has Zevon in the rain looking in vain for love, as usual.  But what it has to do with the verses is honestly beyond me.

So, I do think not only "Lord Byron's Luggage," but the vast majority of My Ride's Here, is hurt for me by how much time I'm spending fixating on and trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to decipher the various references to understand what the hell is even going on.  Please mentally insert this complaint into three quarters of my other track reviews.

Track Four:  "MacGillycuddy's Reeks"

I find "MacGillycuddy's Reeks" to be a delight.  Zevon goes full into the lilting folk tune mood.  An old fashioned ballad about lost love, except that it's full of his weirdo wordplay and mentions of modern technology.  I dunno, the balance of sublime songcraft, absurdist comedy, and naked sentimentality that defines Zevon's work is hard to get just right even if you're Zevon, as I've detailed; it's so great when he does nail it.  I don't know why exactly he decided to build his old-world ballad around the idea of lines on screens that make mountain-range-shaped peaks and valleys, but I'm glad he did.

Track Five:  "You're A Whole Different Person When You're Scared"

Sometimes all you need is a slow paced contemplative sort of Zevon song where he goes really deep on the vocals.  Great minor chords here, getting that desirably haunting effect on the "kingdom of fear" parts.  Another good song, even if the end goes on way too long - needed another idea if it was going to be over five minutes long.

Track Six:  "Hit Somebody! (The Hockey Song)"

On the one hand, HS!THS is an overwrought cliched sports story from a writer who ought to be too good for such things.  On the other, if you're going to do a song like this, you should get all the details right.  Make it about hockey, whose violence is part of the romance it still holds in small frozen towns.  Name your protagonist "Buddy" so you can have lyrics that play off the title lyric ending with "somebody."  Mix up the lyrics on the choruses to keep things fresh, and repeat David Letterman's spoken-word contribution exactly the right amount of times (except the final chorus, which is too many times).  Come up with some special songwriter's sauce... in this case, I think it's the repeated line at the end of each verse that serves to emphasize something while setting up the chorus ("he just wanted one damn goal!").  It all comes together.  It does work.

If I'm not in the right mood I tire of "Hit Somebody!" long before the track is over, whereas when I am in the right mood I'd call it... maybe not good enough to be a career highlight, maybe too good to be a guilty pleasure, but some combination of those two things. 

Track Seven:  "Genius"

Back to enjoyably moody, incorporating an actual string quartet and lyrics that roll off the tongue in a way that makes them sound clever, even if I don't totally get them.  For instance, "everybody's your best friend when you're doing well/I mean good" certainly sounds like a clever take on the difference between two expressions with different meanings that are often used synonymously.  I don't know what it means!  A self-serving faux philanthropist?

I don't know that I like "Genius" quite as much as Zevon himself seemed to; he seemed really proud of this one, titled one of the best-ofs after it, played it during his final public performance, etc.  But I do like it.

Track Eight:  "Laissez-Moi Tranquille"

Here I don't follow the lyrics mostly because I don't speak French.  Google Translate tells me that the chorus means more or less "leave me alone."**  I'm not familiar with Serge Gainsbourg or the original version of LMT.  Basically, am fine just to let this be a bouncy bass and percussion heavy little number that scratches the same itch that something like "Gorilla" did way back on the very first Zevon record, released some thirty-two years earlier.

Track Nine:  "I Have To Leave"

I've always really liked this one whilst having a hard time paying attention straight through.  Perhaps because it's so simple a lyric and so simple a melody.  One-idea track, but such a killer idea.  Most recent listen I was fixated on whether he was ever going to take a breath; could've been the only Zevon song without any kind of instrumental break if they'd stuck with it just a little longer.  Oh, well.  

"I Have To Leave" could fit very easily on "Life'll Kill Ya," right down to its unpretentious lyric, addressing conflicting feelings by simply repeating leaving somewhere (physically or metaphorically, possibly this mortal coil, probably not by choice).  The final repetition of the title lyric with the way he longingly goes up two steps instead of going down is sublime.

I was quite surprised to see that Zevon doesn't have a writing credit here; all credited to an old friend.  He totally makes the song sound like one of his.

Track Ten:  "My Ride's Here"

In my head, I sorta want "I Have To Leave" to be the closer, as a narrator reluctantly disappears.  But Zevon's done that sort of ending a bunch already.  Instead, we actually end with kind of a more upbeat take on leaving.  This song's narrator, sure, kinda wishes he could hang around, but he's convinced himself (or tried to) that the proverbial other side, or whatever comes next, is going to be great too.  As usual I really don't know why so many artists and actors are referenced so quickly - L.A. does weird things to one's brain - but I at least get the vibe that our man gets to celebrate the mark he's made during his transient stay in the hotel that is this life.  I dunno, we've heard so often about Zevon's regrets, especially in his later years, that it doesn't seem too out of line to get one damn song where he sounds, if not happy, at least somewhat satisfied.  Just as a music fan, I wish he'd have been able to hang around a little bit longer too.

Other thoughts:

- Both of Zevon's sometimes estranged kids are credited with backing vocals, so, that's nice.  

- Not all of these songs are great.  Almost all of them are interesting.  As probably comes through in the individual track writeups, I'm counting Ride as a generally interesting curio along the lines of Transverse City.  An imperfect but fun collection that showed that Zevon still had a lot to offer the world.  The melding of folk and quintessential Zevon-ness in particular is a promising new direction, one that could have gone on to yield some heavy-duty bounty, if not for, well, you know.

- As I write this, Epilogue: Live At The Edmonton Folk Festival was released fairly recently, giving us the last full (or festival-length "full," anyway) set that Zevon ever performed, from 2002.  Such a short record that I don't think it merits its own writeup, but I did enjoy hearing things rough and unpolished, full of ad-libs, figuring out where he fit in the folk circuit, and so on.  "Detox Mansion" might get a second life in my estimation after seeing it reworked in that format ("fore!").  The show did make me realize how silly it is to imagine that artists' songs are discretely divided into albums' worth of songs such that they're writing, and then not writing for a while, and then writing.  Clearly someone like Zevon who's a true singer-songwriter was writing all the time.  So in retrospect not at all surprising to get an early version of "Dirty Life And Times," which of course ended up on the final record.  

Favorite track:  "MacGillycuddy's Reeks"

Runner up:  "I Have To Leave"

Least favorite track:  "Basket Case"

Rating:  3.5/5

On to The Wind, whenever I work up the emotional strength to 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)  Life'll Kill Ya

2)  Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School

3)  Excitable Boy

4)  Mutineer

5)  Warren Zevon

6)  My Ride's Here 

7)  Transverse City 

8)  The Envoy

9)  Sentimental Hygiene 

10)  Wanted Dead Or Alive

11)  Mr. Bad Example

*My sense of "heavy" will be different than some given how much metal I listen to, heh.  Within that mega-genre, I like the stuff that the serious metalheads consider light and fluffy.
  

*Or maybe "leave me in peace," given the "tranquille" thing?  I continue to not know French.