Favorite L.A. Albums, Part One: Warren Zevon (1976)
Flashing back on the brilliant singer-songwriter's self-titled second LP
These have been some absolutely horrific days for Los Angeles, anyone who lives there, and anyone who feels any kind of personal or spiritual connection to the place. I’m presently 3,000 miles away from Los Angeles, but it profoundly hurts my soul to see entire neighborhoods and communities — including the homes of many friends and acquaintances — reduced to ashes by these climate change-fueled wildfires, and to know the intense state of fear, anxiety and uncertainty that my family and friends out there are currently feeling.
My childhood visits to Los Angeles (and the year I spent there as a resident in 1979) hugely shaped my life, interests and philosophical outlook, and all but assured that I would eventually find my way back there as an adult. I returned in 1993, beginning my professional journalism career there as a freelancer (and eventual editor) for the late, lamented L.A. Reader, and stayed another 22 years, making L.A. the place I’ve lived the longest over the course of my adult life. While I don’t regret leaving in 2015, when my then-wife and I moved back to Chicago, I’ll always have a deep, deep love for the City of Angels — and right now I’m utterly heartbroken over the tragedies large and small inflicted by the fires upon L.A.’s people, its animals (wild and domestic), its architecture, its landmarks, and its natural beauty.
In times of sorrow and upset, I typically turn to my record collection to help me fully process whatever I’m feeling, and my immediate instinct yesterday was to reach for an “L.A. album”. Of course, a significant portion of the records I own are “L.A. albums” on some level — either because the artist was from there, or their label was based there, their album was recorded there, or some combination thereof.
Which got me thinking: maybe it would help my grieving process to salute Los Angeles by writing about some of the records that truly qualify as “L.A. albums” for me — not just because of their provenance or personnel, but because there’s something about them that instantly pulls me back to my own L.A. experiences. And the first album that immediately came to mind was Warren Zevon’s second.
Recorded in 1975 and released in May 1976, Warren Zevon was the acerbically witty singer-songwriter’s first studio effort since Wanted Dead Or Alive, his dismal-selling 1970 debut, and marked his return to the L.A. scene after having briefly abandoned it to live and sing at a tavern in the Catalonian town of Sitges, Spain. Recorded at Sunset Sound Records and Elektra Sound Recorders in L.A., Warren Zevon was quite the “welcome back” party. The album was produced by Zevon’s longtime pal Jackson Browne, and featured a veritable Who’s Who of L.A. luminaries on its 11 tracks, including Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac, Glenn Frey and Don Henley of The Eagles, David Lindley, Bonnie Raitt, JD Souther, Waddy Wachtel and Beach Boys Carl Wilson and Billy Hinsche, along with Zevon’s former employer Phil Everly. And while Linda Ronstadt was either too busy to show up or didn’t get an invitation, she’d go on to cover four of the album’s songs, giving both Zevon’s profile and his bank account a major boost in the process.
But that guest list, or the record’s warm West Coast sound isn’t why Warren Zevon is such a quintessential L.A. album for me. Really, it all comes down to four songs: “The French Inhaler,” the sad romantic epitaph that ends Side One, and the triple-punch of “Carmelita,” “Join Me in L.A.” and “Desperados Under the Eaves” that ends Side Two. Which is no shade on the album’s other songs, which include such Zevon classics as “Poor Poor Pitful Me,” “Hasten Down the Wind” and “Mohammed’s Radio”; it’s just that — with the exception of “PPPM”’s brief namecheck of Hollywood nightspots The Rainbow and The Haunted House [Edit: The HYATT House, actually] — those other tunes could have been written anywhere else. But “French Inhaler,” “Carmelita,” “Join Me in L.A.” and “Desperados” are L.A. songs through and through.
I vividly remember buying Warren Zevon — it was in the fall of 1984, when I was working as a clerk in the downtown Chicago offices of Beatrice Foods during my year-off between high school and college, and the album was one of many crucial finds I fished out of the budget/cut-out bin of the Washington St. location of Rolling Stone (later Rock) Records. What I don’t recall is why it took me so long to pick it up; I’d been a major Zevon fan since 1978, when my mom gave me a copy of “Werewolves of London” for my 12th birthday, and at that point I already owned all of his albums through 1982’s The Envoy. All except Warren Zevon, that is. Maybe it just wasn’t that easy to find, or maybe I just figured that studio versions of “Poor Poor Pitiful Me,” “Mohammed’s Radio” or “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” couldn’t touch the wild-eyed renditions on his 1980 live album Stand in the Fire, a record whose every grunt and yell I still know by heart to this day.
Whatever the reason, I absolutely fell in love with Warren Zevon once I finally bought the album. I dug every song on it, but “The French Inhaler,” “Carmelita” (a song I already knew from Linda Ronstadt’s Simple Dreams LP) and “Desperadoes Under the Eaves” were what really sealed the deal for me… unexpectedly pulling my mind back to fond thoughts of L.A. at a time when I was living in Chicago and trying to find a way to go to college in New York.
I’d been too young to truly experience the sort of decadent Hollywood nightlife that serves as the backdrop for “The French Inhaler,” and yet every dark visual that Zevon’s lyrics conjured up somehow seemed familiar to me; maybe I’d absorbed something by osmosis during all those evening drives my mom took us on down Sunset and Hollywood boulevards. I loved how the song started out as a sarcastic kiss-off to an ex (“How you gonna make your way in the world/When you weren’t cut out for working?”), then slowly opened up to reveal the narrator’s own culpability in both the breakup and the dashing of the dreams the two once shared (“Yes, I drank up all the money/With these phonies at this Hollywood bar”) before climaxing with a pained glimpse of the ex’s continued degradation (“And your face looked like something Death brought with him in his suitcase”). Yesterday, while listening back to this track, I felt on the brink of tears the entire time — and then, right at the point when David Lindley’s lap-steel kicked in and Frey and Henley harmonized together (“Your pretty face/It look so wasted”), the fucking dam fucking broke. Maybe I was weeping for Los Angeles; maybe I was belatedly weeping for my own L.A. dreams that never quite panned out. Probably both.
With its references to “mariachi static,” Ensenada, Echo Park and the Pioneer Chicken stand “down on Alvarado Street,” “Carmelita” totally transported me back to childhood summers in Southern California, when just about everything I experienced, saw or heard about in L.A. and San Diego seemed impossibly exotic compared to the whitebread realms of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Hell, the first legit Mexican food I ever ate was in mid-seventies Echo Park, a neighborhood where Zevon once resided and where I would find myself living in over 30 years later. And while I thankfully never wound up “All strung out on heroin/On the outskirts of town,” I did develop quite a serious Burrito King habit, of which I’m sure Zevon would have approved.
“Join Me in L.A.” is probably the flimsiest track on Warren Zevon, and I remember being rather bemused at first by its funky, almost disco-y thump. But eventually, its evocative invitation to a place where you’ll “find something that will never be nothing”won me over, bringing back vivid childhood memories of looking out over the L.A. basin from Griffith Park Observatory. (And as evocative invitations go, it’s hard to beat Stevie Nicks repeatedly moaning “whoa-oh” on the extended coda…)
And then there’s “Desperados Under the Eaves,” which may well be the greatest song Warren Zevon ever wrote. A noir-ish meditation on descending into abject alcoholism in a cheap motel — I didn’t specifically remember the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel from my seventies L.A. days, but I did recall plenty of joints along similarly skeezy lines dotting the Hollywood and West Hollywood landscapes back then — “Desperados” delivers one perfectly sculpted line and image after another, including the immortal musing:
And if California slides into the ocean
Like the mystics and statistics say it will
I predict this motel will be standing until I pay my bill
And then, to cap it all off, Wilson, Hinsche, Browne and Souther harmonize in imitation of a humming air conditioner, before closing the song with a cryptic mantra of “Look away down Gower Avenue”. I remembered the street name from “Gower Gulch,” the strip mall that opened at Sunset and Gower in the late seventies, which always fascinated me with its weird Old West-style design aesthetic. I also remembered that it was actually Gower Street, not Gower Avenue, but it’s not like I was gonna hold a little poetic license against one of my favorite songwriters…
Speaking of California sliding into the ocean… When I moved to L.A. from Chicago in the summer of 1993, “You’re gonna die in an earthquake” was the general supportive consensus among my Chicago pals. Five months after I got there, the Northridge Quake hit — and while it was really fucking scary, at least (barring a few serious aftershocks) it was over and done with after a few minutes, and I was able to go out and bask in the January sunshine, breathe the fresh air and revel in feelings of immense gratitude for having made it through a major natural disaster largely unscathed.
But folks in Southern California currently have no such luxury at the moment. The heroic firefighters will finally extinguish these flames at some point, but for now everyone I’ve spoken to is extremely (and understandably) on edge, wondering when and where the next wildfire is going to occur. In the meantime, the air is thick with smoke and chemicals, making it hazardous to even go outside.
Just as with the Northridge Quake, rebuilding from the fires — physically, financially, psychologically — is going to take time, and there are a lot of justifiable concerns being expressed already about who will benefit from and who will be screwed by the rebuilding process. But I’ve nevertheless been heartened to see that, just as they did thirty years ago, individual Angelenos are pulling together (on social media and elsewhere) to help each other through this trying time. As my friend
put it, “We’re told that we’re selfish and ego driven in L.A., but when push comes to shove, we’re the exact opposite.”Some local businesses are thankfully getting into the act, as well: Restaurants are serving free meals to evacuees and first responders, AirBNB and 211LA have teamed up to offer free temporary housing to those displaced by the fires, and a number of hotels are offering discounted rates (and waiving pet fees) for evacuees.
And if there’s any silver lining here at all, it’s that these fires happened while we still have a president who actually gives a shit about the residents of all 50 U.S. states, and not just the ones that voted for him or are run by governors from his party. While the incoming commander-in-chief and various MAGA goons were baselessly blaming the historic fires on DEI hires and Endangered Species acts, President Biden quickly stepped up to approve a Major Disaster Declaration to support local fire response and recovery efforts. Given Trump’s track record of playing politics with federal disaster relief, I highly doubt we’ll be seeing such much in the way of quick and helpful government responses to any subsequent blue state disasters over the next four years...
If you’d like to personally contribute to the relief efforts that are currently underway, the following organizations are just some of many doing amazing work on the ground right now:
Greater Good Charities Disaster Relief
Los Angeles Fire Department Wildfire Emergency Fund
Los Angeles Regional Food Bank
Pasadena Humane Society and SPCA Wildfire Relief
(If anyone has any other organizations or links that should be added here, please let me know in the comments. I will continue to include a list of helpful links in future installments of this “Favorite L.A. Albums” series…)
And if you’re out in there in L.A. right now, my heart and thoughts are with you. I’m praying for your continued well-being… and for rain.
Thanks, as always, for reading and supporting Jagged Time Lapse. Stay safe, be kind, and I’ll see you back here next week…
Love this!
1. Zevon rules.
2. Good lookin' out and sharing ways for everyone to help our LA friends.
3. I have that same Los Angeles poster in my office! It's an on old promo for American Airlines. My wife picked it and one for Northwest up at a garage sale for me.
Excellent, takes one who knows. Also, thanks, I didn't realize they updated "Stand in the Fire" -had to check, have to get.