I'm supposed to be packing and scrambling to do 1800 things before I leave for NY in the morning, but the Warren Zevon documentary started, and I just took a peak as I started a snack and it's half an hour in now, and ripping my heart apart.
(Before I proceed--actually, I'm writing this last, but hate cluttering up the ending. VH1 will be showing it several times this week: InsideOut, and you want the one specifically on Warren. It runs an hour, and there's a little more on it here. It's absolutely amazing--if you like him--and packed with a lot of his best songs, which are just killing me.)
I don't think I explained properly before. I was horrified when John Lennon was shot down and depressed when Joe Strummer died, but the loss there was limited to a great artist, someone whose work I greatly admired. The Clash probably the single most powerful effect on me of any artist ever, so when Joe Strummer died, that was a blow. But nothing quite like Warren Zevon. Of all the artists and celebrities and characters real and fictional since the beginning of time, only Holden Caulfield ever gave Warren a run for the title of person I most identified with.
Love at first sight is a silly little fantasy. I never came close to believing it. Recongition at first sound, that's a different animal entirely. Excitable Boy. Did that register anything with you? Probably not. I must have played the song for 200 people in the past 25 years, usually they say it's cute. Or mormid, if they listen to the lyrics. Obnoxious, sometimes. And they have to listen through for some time before a reaction registers at all. I must have understood the reason very quickly, but it took years for me to accept it. They aren't excitable boys.
I smiled the moment I saw the album cover. I hadn't known. I was just an excitable boy.
It's a simple song ("Excitable Boy" gave its name--my name, our name--to a song and the album), so it wasn't my favorite--that would be Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner, hands down (from that album, and for a longtime from his whole body)--but it's the phrase I played over and over in my head. And smiled. I'm just an excitable boy.
Such a relief to finally learn who you are. I was 17. About fucking time.
It's a simple song, I guess, because it's a very simple explanation. It doesn't really work ever with other people--the explanation I mean, any more than the song does. They can't grasp what we mean by it, or how it could be so all-consuming. When you're an excitable boy, that's pretty much all there is too it. So I explain things that way to people all the time, but hardly ever out loud. I give these long, involved explanations that leave them nearly as puzzled, and then I say, silently, "I'm just an excitable boy," and I know there's an explanation. Occassionally I'll mutter it out loud, but if anything it just provokes an eyeroll. Who needs that?
So Warren told me who I was, and it was also who he was, and of course that was only the start of the relationship that never brought us into physical or even phone contact. I did see him give a concert once, and it was a small place (Park West, in Chicago), so I was pretty close, but I didn't get much sense of him as a person and he certainly wasn't aware of me.
But I got to watch him all those years, wrestling with his neuroses in public and on record, and now he's gone, and the lead bushwacher clearing the brush for my path just stopped clearing this week. How am I going to see where to go now?
Dutton (Penguin) in early 2009. 
