The Benja-man Is Verbose

I've mentioned the impossibility of separating reactions to Zevon's last few records with knowing his eventual fate.  For  The Wind , one doesn't need to bother.  This was always going to the be the last album, and was always going to be the one in which everyone recording it and every last listener would be fully aware of the mesothelioma thing.  In his non recording artist life, it sounds like our man was full of the usual contradictions - the pain and wasting away, obviously, but it sounds like a relapse on alcohol and a lot of solitude, with a mix of self-pity and cheerful indifference depending on the day.  Still, Zevon wasn't alone -alone at the end.  He had a professional best friend to the end in Jorge Calderón - whose rare absence from a Zevon album I probably should have noted on  My Ride's Here  - as his musical comrade in arms, performing on every song and cowriting most of them.  Zevon had both of his adult k...

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.  P...

I've mentioned that I'm already quite familiar with  Life'll Kill Ya , but it's been long enough that I can hear it with fresh ears, and now in context of the whole career. Track One:  "I Was In The House When The House Burned Down" Until this relisten, I always thought it was kinda of a shame to me that this one is sorta Kill Ya's ambassador to the world, the lead single at the time and today probably the one that the casual Zevon listener knows.  Not because I didn't like it, but because there are others on the record that're less repetitious and speak to me more.  I can't deny the appeal, though.  A simple strummed guitar part and a simple insistent drum pattern set the stage for what  the listened can expect from this collection - direct to the point of being painful.  And hey, harmonica fits in great.  Lyrically we get Zevon's scope of debaunchery and poetry, naturally making "I had the shit 'til it all got smoked...

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 ....

Stand In The Fire  [1980; although I'm using the 2007 reissue] tracklist 1)  Stand In The Fire 2)  Jeannie Needs A Shooter 3)  Excitable Boy 4)  Mohammed's Radio 5)  Werewolves Of London 6)  Lawyers, Guns, And Money 7)  The Sin 8)  Poor Poor Pitiful Me 9)  I'll Sleep When I'm Dead 10)  Bo Diddley's A Gunslinger/Bo Diddley [cover of Bo Diddley songs, mostly "Gunslinger"] B1)  Johnny Strikes Up The Band B2)  Play It All Night Long B3)  Frank And Jesse James (solo piano version) B4)  Hasten Down The Wind (solo piano version) Learning To Flinch  [1993] tracklist 1)  Splendid Isolation 2)  Lawyers, Guns, And Money 3)  Mr. Bad Example 4)  Excitable Boy 5)  Hasten Down The Wind 6)  The French Inhaler 7)  Worrier King 8)  Roland Chorale 9)  Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner 10)  Searching For A Heart 11)  Boom Boom Mancini 12)  Jungle Work 13)...

Much like with the previous record, I don't have any particular preconceptions going into  Mr. Bad Example  or any real sense of its reputation.  I think Zevon was by this point firmly a has-been who'd never be a megastar again, his former cast of millions reduced to longtime friends and collaborators like Waddy Wachtel, who produced and is all over the guitar work.  I think Zevon was also by this point firmly a critical darling who had a devoted cult audience that he probably didn't properly appreciate.  And of all of his albums, our 1991 effort here is firmly one of them. Track One:  "Finishing Touches" This is increasingly becoming the song to which I look forward to coming back whilst exploring the record.  True, I sometimes complain about one-riff songs.  All I can say is that I'll forgive a lot for a really, really good riff.  On that backdrop we have Zevon in articulate bitter mode, with yet another classic opening line ...

Unlike pretty much everything that came before it, which has a bit of a reputation ( Sentimental Hygeine  as the one with R.E.M., the sober record, the revival after a down period, etc.) I didn't have any particular expectations coming in to Transverse City  other than some off-peak Zevon.  We're fully mired in the period that's only for the die-hards, where Zevon just wasn't on the world's radar.  He still made music, though! Track One:  "Transverse City" I'm not much of a fan of a lot of things about the '80s, and although some great music happened there, the decade-specific pieces of the overall audio aesthetic rarely fail to make me cringe. *   To me, "Transverse City," both the song and the record, get off to a bad start with the first sound being synthesizer.  Sure enough, synths soon envelop everything, with the analog instruments struggling to get heard.  That type of sound, which I guess once sounded slick and futuristic (especia...