It’s Anything Goes, Whatever It Takes

It was thirty years ago today that Warren Zevon released one of the five greatest live albums of the rock and roll era – and perhaps the best summary of his own career that he’s ever managed.  The album was Stand In The Fire.

Zevon, of course, died a few years ago, after a long battle with lung cancer.  Which was a jarring experience; rock stars aren’t supposed to die of long-term wasting diseases.  They’re supposed to flame out in car crashes like Johnny Ace, or drug overdoses like Keith Moon or Jimi Hendrix, or on epic drinking binges like Bon Scott, or drug-induced sudden flashes like John Entwistle, or suicides like Pete Ham or Kurt Cobaine, with enough loose ends and unresolved potential to do a romantic-era British poet proud.

Zevon certainly showed the potential to join that crowd; he floated to his commercial and creative peak on a cataract of booze, and a drug or two as well.

And sometime in the early eighties, he hit close enough to bottom to realize he needed to change his ways.  He gave up drinking, went into recovery…

…and, like a lot of artists who give up addictions, seemed to lose a bit of his spark for a few years, releasing albums that, for some time, didn’t quite have the same feel they’d had before.  Zevon got his muse back, of course – a different one than he’d had on Exciteable Boy and Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School – but he was writing some great music before his diagnosis with cancer, which led him to finish his final, Final album, The Wind, just before he died.

And I’m going to speculate that Zevon was very, very glad he had the twenty-odd years of sobriety after he went through spin-dry.

But I wondered – if Zevon had checked out after 1980’s Stand In The Fire, would he be regarded as one of the greatest untold stories in rock history?

Stand was recorded during a two-night engagement at The Roxy in Los Angeles.  Recorded with a group of obscure-ish but impeccably tight LA sidemen (David Landau and Zeke Zirngiebel on guitars, Roberto Piñon on bass, Bob Harris on keys and Marty Stinger on drums), the album featured an audibly blotto Zevon singing gloriously over-the-top versions of a slew of Zevon classics, and shoulda-been classics

The title cut is a big, brawny three-chord anthem featuring a simple but layered call-and-answer chorus that you can hang a side of beef from.   Next is “Jeannie Needs a Shooter”, which started life as one of many songs Springsteen didn’t use on The River; he gave it to Zevon, who rewrote it into one of the great “teenage death-rock” songs of all time.  A hilarious “Exciteable Boy” is followed by a taught, glorious “Mohammed’s Radio”, full of ad-libs (“Even Jimmy Carter’s got the highway blues!”) and ended by wonderful, four-part a-capella ending; the song, like most of this album’s highlights, eclipses Zevon’s studio originals.

“Werewolves of London” is big, boomy, sloppy, and full of drunken ad-libbing (“I ran into Jackson Browne drinking a Piña Colada at Trader Vic’s; his hair was per-feeeeect!“)

Side two (speaking in vinyl terms) was even better, opening with a brawny “Lawyers, Guns and Money” and “The Sin”, Zevon follows by steaking “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” back from Linda Ronstadt, who’d had a big hit the song) and the albums’ highlight, a jackhammer-y “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead”, which had been a fairly perfunctory ode to la vida local on his 1977 major label debut, but turned into an over-the-top, anthemic foot-stomper here, and closing (in its original version) with a rafter-shaking cover of “Bo Diddley’s a Gunslinger”.

The album rarely pops up on “best-of” lists today.  It’s a shame – because it was one of the great achievements of the golden age of the “live album”, which, it occurs to me, is something you just don’t see anymore.  Stand in the Fire, like Cheap Trick’s Live at Budokan, showed the listener a side of the artists that they’d never have gotten otherwise, and captured the energy and spontaneity of great live performers doing what they did best.  In Zevon’s case, it sent off the seventies with a shout and a stomp and a double for the road.

If you can find it, it’s an amazing record.  Give it a shot.