Flak Magazine: Review of Warren Zevon's Life'll Kill Ya, 11-26-00

He's been a Confederate soldier, a psychopathic ex-Catholic carpet salesman, and Philip Habib, President Carter's envoy to the Middle East. He's been on the run from werewolves, the Securities Exchange Commission, President Woodrow Wilson, and an assortment of overly amorous women. Now, in his latest album, Warren Zevon is a Crusader, a stage magician, Joseph of Aramathea, and a sexual masochist with low self-esteem.

But mostly he's just a middle-aged man alternately courting and trying to hide from his own mortality. And he's only running from death — not death in the form of a serial killer, the walking dead, or a .38 Special, but just death, without its mask on, the rude failure and inexplicable disappearance that await us all.

This is, of course, far scarier. Writing about Creepy Shit is a way of affirming one's own existence: Very few people are murdered by serial killers, and fewer still by mercenary soldiers with no head, and if you pretend that these are the forms Death takes then you are really pretending that Death is a rare and mythical thing, a joke that's funny because it won't happen to you. Warren's been playing that game for some time, but he changes his tune for this album. It's right there in the title, and the titular song, when he informs us that "Some get the awful, awful diseases;/Some get the knife; some get the gun;/And some get to die in their sleep/At the age of a hundred and one./But life'll kill ya."

There's nothing for him to hide behind musically, either: In terms of production, it's by far the sparest studio album he's ever made. "Porcelain Monkey" is the only track that has that slick, heavily layered sound that is ordinarily one of Zevon's trademarks, and of the other 11, there are several that sound almost as if they were recorded live.

But some things haven't changed. Zevon's songs can rock really hard — "Porcelain Monkey," which is about Elvis, sustains a dramatic energy that stands up to repeated listening. Or they can, well, not. Sometimes it works. Sometimes, as on "Hostage-O," the slow, acoustic sound can impart a sort of elegaic quality. (I wouldn't have thought that an Elizabethan ode to a dominatrix could make me want to cry, but he's full of surprises that way.) There is a quiet sparseness to "My Shit's Fucked Up" that makes this song about aging and loss exactly half funny and half terrifying.

But Zevon makes his way through "Ourselves to Know" and "Fistful of Rain," good songs otherwise, as if he can't find the accelerator. This can be frustrating, but whereas the less vigorous songs on some of his previous albums just feel ill-conceived, the less vigorous songs on Life'll Kill Ya feel like Zevon had the right idea but couldn't quite do it justice.

Zevon's taste for the grim and nihilistic hasn't changed. The liner notes feature a detail from Pieter Brueghal's "Triumph of Death," wherein legions of soldier-skeletons with coffin lids for shields overwhelm the forces of the living, torturing and slaughtering them. (The detail is an enlarged version of a small picture that can be found on the inside cover of A Quiet Normal Life, Zevon's so-called "best of," which was released in 1986.

It's not surprising to learn that this painting is a favorite of the man whose only charted hit contains the line "Little old lady got mutilated late last night.") But Zevon, who has described himself as "a heavy-metal folksinger," always has some cheer in him — it may hide for a while, but it will always emerge eventually, usually at a radically inappropriate time.

Zevon could have ended the album with the title song — which itself ends with the words "Requiescat in pace — that's all she wrote" and an unresolved chord that fades away into nothingness. He didn't. It's a damned good thing he didn't, too, because if he had, we would have no choice but to tighten the noose and kick the chair out from underneath ourselves. Zevon ends the album with a very quiet song called "Don't Let Us Get Sick." Given the tone of the 11 tracks that precede it, the title itself sounds somewhat pitiful, a plea, perhaps, to an uncaring God.

It isn't. The song is about loss and compromise, and about getting old — but quietly, quietly, it tells us what we are living for, after all:

The moon has a face
And it smiles on the lake
And causes the ripples in Time
I'm lucky to be here, with someone I like
Who maketh my spirit to shine

"I'm lucky to be here with someone I like." Zevon chose to end the album that way. It's not, maybe, riotously cheerful — but what this album seems to be telling us is that riotous cheer is, at least sometimes, a way of lying to ourselves. Just as we lie to ourselves about what death is, we lie to ourselves about what life and love and joy are; death is not a headless Thompson gunner but an inevitable fact, a cloud no bigger than a man's hand but getting closer all the time. Just so, the meaning of life is not exploiting other people for fun and profit, but trying to love them while you can, and joy comes in recognizing how lucky you are to be here with someone you like.

Life'll Kill Ya, in other words, is Warren's acceptance speech upon being awarded the title Elder Statesman of Rock. For heaven's sake, he covers Steve Winwood's "Back In The High Life Again." (An ironic choice indeed for a recovering alcoholic, and believe me, the irony comes through.) Does it seem, at times, maudlin? Of course.

At 53, Warren Zevon is hardly an old man, and his confrontations with death can have something of the air of a condemned man bravely facing down a firing squad armed with Super Soakers. It's sometimes hard to know how seriously he's taking himself. I find that his body of work is very adequately described by a slang term invented by hackers: ha ha only serious. But how much ha ha and how much only serious? That's up to you.

— S. B. Kleinman (redguy at mindspring dot com)