This morning on a poll they found Philadelphia’s drivers to have the tenth worst road rage in the country (Miami and Phoenix were the worst). I was thinking about that for awhile, because I used to be very prone to road rage until a little thing called Purple Rain came along. It’s physically impossible to get road rage when listening to that album. That’s my trick, people. Give a copy of that album to your psycho–behind-the-wheel friends, and we’ll all save some lives.
Anyways, I checked up on it later and it was only a survey of 22 cities. We chances are we’re probably substantially lower than tenth, and, considering it’s Philly we’re talking about here I’m damned impressed. Way to go, people.
Moving on, I’ve been reading a bunch of books from the Fletch series lately. If you’ve never read them before and you want something that you can read in a night and still enjoy I highly recommend any of the twelve or whatever number that have been written. Anyways, I can’t for the life of me figure out the connection my brain makes between Fletch books and Warren Zevon. Maybe I was listening to a lot of him when I started reading them awhile back. Maybe it’s that both are Los Angeles-based and tend to have a lot of the same type of characters – ex-wives, the depraved, the depressed, the gamblers and the ones just there to take it all in. shit, I don’t know.
Anyways, I was about twelve when I found a Warren Zevon record with some friends in a dad’s record collection. I knew a song off it (“Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner”) and figured there were probably some other songs about machine gun-toting corpses and revenge. Remember, I was twelve. Anyways, I didn’t find any songs like that, but I did find plenty of necrophiliacs, werewolves, revolutionaries, heartbroken wrecks, and the like. It instantly became my favorite record. I still throw it on every once in awhile, and I still think that as a songwriter, he is criminally underrated, but that’s another story for another day. Reading this book the other night just planted that seed, though, and I decided to post a few of his songs from a live show he did for the Record Plant in Sausalito in July of 1978. This is the man at his peak, and with arguably one of the best backing bands in history that wasn’t playing on the R&B/Soul circuit at that time. You can download the entire show at this page, and I wholeheartedly recommend that you do. There's also less giant files for these songs.
“Johnny Strikes Up the Band” – Warren Zevon (direct link)
“Poor, Pitiful Me” – Warren Zevon (direct link)
buy Warren Zevon albums here
oh, and while I’m hitting up the Live Internet Music Archive, here’s the Ween track I’ve been rocking out to this afternoon. I’m trying to decide if I want to see them in a few weeks. I haven’t missed them live since 1997 or so (they’re really that entertaining live), but the show here is at the end of a festival, a seemingly hippier festival than I’d like, though I’d love to see the Secret Machines again. Anyways, here’s a song from the new tour.
"She Wanted to Leave"(live) - Ween (direct link)
"You Fucked Up" (live) - Ween (direct link)
buy Ween tickets here
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