Warren Zevon had a way with lyrics like few songwriters before or since he graced the music world with his material. He could make you laugh out loud with his caustic humor. But he could also make you tear up a bit with revealing insights about the human heart in all its frailty.
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On his classic 1976 song “Desperados Under The Eaves”, he managed to hit both extremes in one incredible quatrain. And, just for good measure, those lines also summed up West Coast decadence and folly as well.
Warren Zevon and Friends
To many music fans, Warren Zevon popped out of nowhere with his 1976 self-titled album. He had released the LP Wanted Dead Or Alive in 1970, only to see it come and go without a trace. Zevon spent the next several years working as a backing musician while writing songs for what he hoped would be a more impactful second release.
When he finally got the chance in 1976, it was clear that his fellow musicians understood just what this guy brought to the table. The Warren Zevon album featured a bevy of top-notch guest musicians from the West Coast rock/singer-songwriter scene, including members of the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac.
Jackson Browne added even more credibility as the producer of the album. But Zevon was the undisputed star of the show. And his songs acted as the vessels for his penetrating worldview. The stellar album keeps hitting peak after peak, culminating in the stunning “Desperados Under The Eaves”.
California Dreaming
Throughout the album, California is a kind of secondary character, even when Warren Zevon doesn’t mention the state explicitly. It’s hanging around the edges of nightlife chronicles both wistful (“Carmelita” and “The French Inhaler”) and torrid (“Poor Poor Pitiful Me” and “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead”).
It takes center stage, however, on “Desperados Under The Eaves”. A string arrangement adds to the elegiac tone of the song, which focuses on a down-on-his-luck narrator wondering how things can seem so bleak in such a beautiful setting. With one incredibly acrobatic four-line verse, Zevon gets to the heart of the mess.
Motels and Mystics
As the narrator sits nursing his coffee at the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel, he muses on how it all might end. “And if California slides into the ocean,” Warren Zevon sings. “Like the mystics and statistics say it will/I predict this motel will be standing/Until I pay my bill.”
In one fell swoop, Zevon manages to upload a monumental amount of humor, insight, and self-awareness. Not to mention how he makes it all roll off the tongue so effortlessly. His character here manages to come off as deeply cynical and touchingly sympathetic all at once. It’s a fine line that Zevon would continue to walk for the rest of his career.
“Desperados Under The Eaves” probably could have ended right there, and it would have been a classic. Instead, those lines just lead into the anguished chorus, where Zevon muses on the scenery’s secretly threatening nature, and the moving coda, with its stirring melody mimicking the air conditioner in the hotel. A lesser songwriter might have spent an entire career trying to live up to that quatrain. Warren Zevon was just getting warmed up.
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