Vinyl Tap: Warren Zevon - Stand In The Fire

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #18:

“Don't it make you want to rock and roll / All night long…”

Ten years after the recording of this 1980 live and lively Warren Zevon album, I saw him in concert on a bill, oddly but wonderfully enough, with X, which I thought of as the perfect Soft Dark L.A. Underbelly Show. The only out-of-place anomalousness of this L.A.-osity was that I was seeing it in Phoenix, where I was living at the time (imagine the pervasiveness, though: "Los Angeles — Have Soft Dark Underbelly, Will Travel"). 

But whatever the state of my geographic discombobulation, I was witnessing a marvelous teaming of the so-called California Mafia and SoCal Punk — although I would argue that the sardonic and cynical Zevon was too dark and edgy ever to Take It Easy, and he could indeed run on empty forever without falling behind, or so it seemed at the time.

But I digress -- though accidentally, like a martyr. Stand In The Fire, however, never deviates, staying the course from beginning to end as a ferocious and fiery concert album of fervor and fun, with selectively cherry-picked cuts (“The dog ate the part we didn’t like,” states the liner notes). Not only was it “recorded live at the Roxy” in L.A., but it was recorded at a time when Zevon was at a peak performance level, trailing clouds of big-hit glory with radio staples like “Werewolves Of London” and “Excitable Boy,” and garnering critical kudos for such songs as the poignant “Carmelita” and “Tenderness On The Block,” and the punchy “Poor Poor Pitiful Me.”

A representative sampling from his early albums up through Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School is backed with a stellar band featuring blistering, controlled-chaos lead guitar from David Landau. Zevon proves himself a commanding, expressive performer, and a strong personality adept not only at striking up the band but in revving up the crowd. At one point in the often gruesome “Excitable Boy,” during the point when our highly-strung titular psycho “dug up her grave and built a cage with her bones,” a blood-curdling Hollywood-style scream, off in the background, can be heard — right on cue.

In addition, a rollicking and raucous version of “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” leaves little doubt that “the shit has hit the fan” for a down-on-his-luck globe-trotting adventurer caught between a rock and a hard place: “Dad, get me out of THIS ONE!” Furthermore, “Werewolves Of London” especially showcases Zevon’s zeal; as he describes how a “Little old lady got mutilated late last night” (which disturbingly rolls a little too trippingly off the tongue), he deliciously alters a line that should send shivers down the spine of sensitive singer-songwriters everywhere:

He's the hairy handed gent who ran amuck in Kent
Lately he's been overheard in Mayfair
Better stay away from him
He'll rip your lungs out, Jim
And he’s looking for JAMES TAYLOR!

Article Author: Gordon Hauptfleisch

Gordon Hauptfleisch is a Blogcritics Books Editor, freelance writer, and book reviewer for San Diego Union Tribune Books (R.I.P.). For many years he worked in and managed bookstores and record stores, when not engaged in serious lollygagging. …

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