I have often read critics call the successful Excitable Boy inferior to Warren Zevon's 1976 eponymous album because they say it is full of filler. Well, maybe I'm biased because I first heard it when I was 11, but I'll stand up for it. It certainly isn’t as strong an album as Warren Zevon but name me many from that time period that are. And as for the filler disclaimer, only “Johnny Strikes Up the Band” and “Nighttime in the Switching Yard” constitute filler in my book, and both songs are placed at the top of each side so as not to take away from the strength of the other pieces.

What made Excitable Boy a breakthrough was the single “Werewolves of London,” which hit #21 in the spring of 1978. With its gruesome lyrics of mutilating little old ladies and ripping out lungs, it made for the perfect sing-along at camp in the 5th grade. The title track is perhaps even more gruesome. Here Zevon tells the story of a troubled youth who rapes and kills little Suzie before taking her back home from the Junior Prom, resulting in a 10 year stay at an insane asylum. Upon his release, he digs up Suzie’s grave to build a cage from her bones. All this is sung over a jumping musical track with gleeful backing vocals provided by Linda Ronstadt and Jennifer Warnes. Sick, shocking, and more than a little disturbing, this was the kind of over-the-top music that the hedonistic pop world sorely needed. I’m just surprised that it ever received any airplay.

“Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” is a cartoon sung with tongue planted firmly in cheek. This revenge fantasy finds our headless hero searching the dark continent “for the man who done him in…Roland aimed his Thompson gun/He didn’t say a word.” Well, of course not, silly, he has no head.

Unsettling images aside, it was clear that Zevon’s intelligence matched his black humour. Listening to this album as a youth provided me with lessons in geography as Zevon placed his characters in Mombasa, Johannesburg, Honduras, Havana, and throughout the districts of London, among other locales. He even offers a crash course in espionage when the CIA decides to kill Roland, and again when the narrator in the hilarious “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” finds himself in various international hot water.

As I grew older, I began to appreciate the “filler” songs like “Veracruz” with its graceful arrangement, and also the handle-with-kid-gloves “Tenderness on the Block.” But the song I grew to like the most, indeed one of the best tracks on the album, is the achingly bittersweet “Accidentally Like a Martyr.” Against his own semi-classical piano playing and a weeping guitar from Waddy Wachtel, Zevon muses on the fallout of a relationship. “The days fly by/Shoulda done, shoulda done we all sigh.” Amen, brother.


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