Warren Zevon -- Recorded Live at the Roxy: STAND IN THE FIRE -- The Liner Notes

One of the most heinous crimes in rock ‘n’ roll was the suppression, intended or otherwise, of Warren Zevon’s mind-blowing Stand In The Fire, recorded live at the Roxy in Los Angeles. It tragically disappeared many years ago from the bins of music stores and could be found only by the intrepidly obsessed, and then strictly on the inferior format of cassette. Now, at long last, this vanquished treasure is available to decent, law-abiding citizens on compact disc.

Much has been said and written about Warren’s remarkable songwriting, but he also happened to be a sensational performer. I was a fan long before we became friends, and I’d seen him in concert many times. It was always raw and wild and unforgettable (except to Warren, of course, who later told me that there were entire tours he couldn’t recall).

In his slightly more sedate middle years, he favored solo acoustic shows, which were impressive -- but I can tell you that there was nothing quite like Zevon in his anti-acoustic mode, unchained and rampaging with a band. For those of us lucky enough to have experienced that seismic jolt, Stand In The Fire is a joyful and raucous ignition of memory. For those who never got to see Warren take the stage, this is a grand taste of a mad rock wizard in his prime. Hang on to your Thompson guns.

--Carl Hiaasen

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This is the opening paragraph of the Rolling Stone review I wrote about this record when it was first released, at the end of 1980:

“In certain ways, Warren Zevon’s fourth Asylum album is also his first real rock & roll record. Cut liver than he’s ever been this past August at the Roxy in Los Angeles, Zevon has made Stand In The Fire one of those rare and remarkable in-concert LPs that’s not just a souvenir of a successful tour or a low-cost résumé of former glories and recent hits. Like Lou Reed’s Rock ‘N’ Roll Animal, Jackson Browne’s Running On Empty and Neil Young’s Live Rust, Zevon’s Stand In The Fire is a portrait of the artist as a tightrope walker, defiantly dancing the hairline between emotional exorcism and mass entertainment.”

I wouldn’t take back a word.

I would do something about the ice-cream-torpedo synthesizer licks in a few of the songs, if I could. They were hip and very new wave then. They sound ancient and awkward now, like the flimsy, cosmetic modernism that Zevon found so wrong in a lot of rock ‘n’ roll songwriting. In one of his final interviews, a year before his death at 56 from lung cancer on September 7, 2003, Zevon explained to me the standards he set for himself in the very beginning: “When I was a kid, I read Norman Mailer and John Updike, John Cheever and John Fowles -- that generation ahead of me of serious, so-called ‘literary’ writers. I wanted to see what intelligent and poetic writers had to say about contemporary life.” Zevon aspired to those Big Sentiments as well, he insisted, “as a songwriter. Certainly you had Paul Simon and Bob Dylan. But nobody seemed to be trying to be the John Updike of rock songwriting.”

At the start of the ‘80s, Zevon was still alone in that work. In 1978 he scored one hit single and a Top 10 album to go with it -- “Werewolves of London,” from Zevon’s second Asylum record, Excitable Boy. He also had enough FM airplay and rave-reviews to keep him in cult-hero comfort. But no other singer-songwriter of his generation -- certainly no one else in Zevon’s L.A. peer circle of singing freeway cowboys -- addressed murder, desperate passion, espionage, crippling loneliness, and fuck-you excess with such lethal wit and confessional grace.

Or with so much John Lennon, Jim Morrison, and Jerry Lee Lewis running riot in his piano attack and party-wolf singing, especially when he got in front of an audience. Two months before the Roxy dates recorded for Stand In The Fire, Zevon played another big local date at the Universal Amphitheater. This is how critic Chris Morris, in his Rolling Stone review, described one highpoint of that night, Zevon’s outrageously theatrical performance of “Jungle Work,” from his previous album, Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School:

“Zevon appeared onstage in camouflage fatigues, looking every inch the shell-shocked soldier of fortune. As Zevon and the band growled the chorus, blasts of carbon-dioxide smoke shrouded the stage. Between verses, the singer crawled and tumbled around, playing search-and-destroy behind the amps. Finally, Zevon the dog of war went down in a hall of prerecorded gunfire under a flickering strobe light, and two uniform-clad roadies bore him out on a stretcher.”

“I asked him one time if he considered himself an entertainer,” Jackson Browne said of Zevon a few years ago. “and he said, ‘Yeah, absolutely.’ He had no doubt. He would consider himself an entertainer more than he would an artist or writer.

“It surprised me,” admitted Browne, who had been instrumental in getting Zevon signed to Asylum and was Zevon’s producer on his first two albums for the label. “Because I’ve always regarded the people whose work I love the most as beyond that, above entertainment. And he just gave me a funny smile: ‘If you’re not entertaining, you’re not doing anything.’”

There was another, more personal intensity to Zevon’s shows in the summer of 1980. He was newly sober (Zevon’s manic, decade-long alcoholism and dramatic turnaround would be the subject of a famous 1981 Rolling Stone cover story by his friend and greatest press champion, Paul Nelson), and there is a giddy frenzy to Zevon’s singing, piano pounding, and sly lyric adjustments on Stand In The Fire, as if he’s drunk on resurrection and gratitude. “I saw Jackson Browne walking slow down the avenue/You know his heart is perfect,” Zevon ad libs in “Werewolves of London,” a nod to their long, brotherly relationship and Browne’s crucial role in getting Zevon into rehab. And for all of the hell Zevon says he’ll raise in his anything-goes anthem, “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” there are new limits. “I’ve got a .38 special up on the shelf/If I start acting stupid, I’ll shoot myself,” he sang in the original version, on his 1976 Asylum debut Warren Zevon. At the Roxy, Zevon has a .44 Magnum in arm’s reach but, he promises in a scoured growl, “I don’t intend to use it on myself.”

“He had a very fierce defiance about living,” Browne told me shortly after Zevon’s death. “’I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead’ is about charging into that single fact of our life -- that it comes to a close. He could depict the place where these things meet, where you find the desire to go on living in spite of it all. He satirized some of our best intentions, because of that deeper truth -- that the road to hell is paved with nothing but good intentions.

“But Warren did not promote a jaded or cynical view,” Browne said. “It was not his subject -- how to save the world. He just described it.”

Much of the power on Stand In The Fire comes from the band. In the studio, Zevon had L.A.’s best session musicians at his elbows. But at the Roxy, except for his friend and lead guitarist David Landau, Zevon comes armed with an actual group, Boulder, that he picked up whole from the Colorado club circuit. Their specialty: rough-house covers of Zevon tunes. When Landau and Boulder Guitarist Zeke Zirnigiebel hook up for the Thin Lizzy-like doubled riffing in “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” you get a full metal racket that the Warren Zevon take barely implies.

“I was on the edge,” Zevon admitted, smiling, when we talked about the Roxy shows. “I had strained a nerve in doing some James Brown-wannabe dance in rehearsal. I made friends with a doctor I think the Eagles sent to me, and he had to give me these shots every night before the show. I guess it was painkillers and steroids. So there was already a lunatic quality to the show. Jackson refers to it as my ‘karate-on-speed’ period,” he added quickly with a laugh.

Zevon brought plenty of his own extra octane. There is a deliciously exaggerated Elvis Presley shiver in his voice -- part “Hound Dog,” part ghoul -- when he gets to the last verse of “Excitable Boy,” the one about the bones in the cage. When Zevon hits the big finish in “Lawyers, Guns and Money” -- “The shit has hit the fan!” -- he punctuates the exclamation with a hail of bullets, rapidly running his hand down the piano keys. And in “Werewolves,” Zevon replaces the line about the wolfman’s tailor with some celebrity fun: “He’ll rip out your lungs, Jim/And he’s looking for James Taylor!,” shouting the name with wild-animal glee. Fire and rain are now the least of that singer-songwriter’s worries.

The original ten-track sequence of Stand In The Fire also included a revised “Mohammed’s Radio,” with a compassionate reference to the then-President Jimmy Carter’s struggle with the Iran hostage crisis; “Jeannie Needs A Shooter,” cowritten by Zevon with Bruce Springsteen (who basically supplied the title); and a furious medley of Bo Diddley covers. Zevon left the impression that he threw away any tapes that didn’t measure up to that ecstatic panic with an epigram on the inner sleeve from Thomas McGuane’s 1978 novel, Panama: “The dog ate the part we didn’t like.”

The previously unissued songs in this expanded reissue prove otherwise. Two are dance-party dynamite: “Johnny Strikes Up The Band” from Excitable Boy and Bad Luck Streak’s “Play It All Night Long.” The others are striking in their quiet: “Frank And Jesse James,” a song Zevon wrote in the early ‘70s for and about his former employees, The Everly Brothers; and the reluctant-goodbye ballad “Hasten Down The Wind,” which Zevon performs here solo at the piano -- but not alone. “Turn up the house lights,” he demands cheerfully at one point. “I’ve found out the ones who are my friends.”

But the confrontation and cleansing for which Stand In The Fire became famous -- but only modestly successful (it peaked at #80 in Billboard) -- are right up front in the two originals Zevon premiered on that tour. “Stand In The Fire” is pure rock ‘n’ roll baptism, another Zevon stomp about the healing powers of twang and boom. “The Sin” is just as fierce and even faster, “a stark account of crimes against lovers and friends,” as I put it in my 1980 review. Zevon opens the song as judge and jury: “The time that you were cruel for cruelty’s sake.” Yet the guilt is all Zevon’s when he gets to the primal scream in the final chorus: “How am I going to pay for the sin?”

“The battle between these contradictions,” I wrote then, “ends in a draw: i.e., to be continued.” Zevon would stay in that fray for the rest of his life, on every record he made, including another, much different concert album, 1993’s solo, acoustic Learning To Flinch. As for my Rolling Stone review, it ended this way:

“The physical tension and emotional stress embodied in Warren Zevon’s performance in Stand In The Fire is precisely what turns this collection of great rock & roll numbers into a record of great rock & roll. ‘Where’s George Gruel, my road manager?’ Zevon yells in ‘Poor Poor Pitiful Me.’ ‘C’mon out here, George. Get up and dance or I’ll kill ya.’ That goes for the rest of you, too.”

I wouldn’t change a word of that, either.

--David Fricke