Anderson.

Someone on the Warren Zevon lyrics site just brought up this line: "I never liked the way he cut your hair." Apparently the last straw before he dumped her, when everything about the person you thought you were so wild about suddenly seems defiled.

Don't know the song, and don't can't say I love the line out of context, but it dredged up a Laurie Anderson fave I hadn't heard of in years.

Starts out, "I no longer love your mouth. I no longer love your eyes. . . " works her way down to no longer loving the color of your sweaters, and finally, "I longer love the way you hold your pans and pencils." 
 
Funniest lines ever, or easily in the running.

Full lyric:

Sweaters (from Big Science)

I no longer love your mouth. i no longer love your eyes. i no longer love your eyes. i no longer love the color of your sweaters. i no longer love it. i no longer love the color of your sweaters.

i longer love the way you hold your pans and pencils. i no longer love it. your mouth. your eyes. the way you hold your pens and pencils. i no longer love it. i no longer love it.

Well I got started on Warren, and God knows I can't let go.

Just found this wonderful thread on the official Warren Zevon site where people are sharing their favorite Warren lyrics. Some of the most memorable lines of my life.

And as luck would have it, Jean Genet led me to Nabokov, which led me to check out my little Nabokov page to see what I had quoted from him there, and that landed me back on that wonderful Shakespeare passage I transcribed a few months ago (. . . Would through the airy region stream so bright / That birds would sing and think it were not night.), that got me thinking about that boy I broke up with this spring, and of course all the tragic Warren Zevon songs are running through my head, cause did he write any other kind?

Still waking up in the mornings with shaking hands
And I'm trying to find a girl who understands me
But except in dreams you're never really free
Don't the sun look angry at me

That was my favorite song of his, Desperados under the Eaves. Don't the sun look angry at me.

But here's the one really stuck in my head at the moment. I've been wrestling with it for weeks, interweaving the lyrics with some other song, couldn't find a solid way in.

But then somebody on the Zevon site posted half a verse and it all came back. And then I looked it op on the web, and here's the whole thing. (Try picturing Linda Ronstandt singing the Descant in the most angelic voice she ever summoned, while he lamets throwing down diamonds in the sand over and over again.)

Empty-Handed Heart

All these empty places
I try so hard to fill
Will I find another love?
I pray to God I will
Girl, we had some good times
But time does not stand still
It's rolling like a rockslide down a hill

I've met someone I care for
I know she cares for me
Will I fall in love again?
It's a possibility
Girl, we had some good times
That time cannot undo
No one will ever take the place of you

Heart jinxed condition
Never sure how I feel
Trying to separate the real thing
From the wishful thinking
Sometimes I wonder
If I'll make it without you
I'm determined to
I'll make my stand
And if after all is said and done
You only find one special one
Then I've thrown down diamonds in the sand
Then I've thrown down diamonds in the sand
Then I've thrown down diamonds in the sand
Then I've thrown down diamonds in the sand

Descant:
Remember when we used to watch the sun set in the sea
You said you'd always be in love with me
All through the night, we danced and sang
Made love in the morning while the church bells rang

Leave the fire behind you and start
I'll be playing it by ear
Left here with an empty-handed heart

___

So hard to pick out my favorites from this guy's career. Sometimes I love Warren cause he takes me places I've never been, sometimes I love him for taking me right where I spend my whole life.  "Trying to separate the real thing from the wishful thinking?" Me too, buddy. Me too.

Not the last words he uttered, or even the last words I heard from him, but definitely the last ones that mattered. I finally watched the second half of the tragic VH1 "Inside Out" special on Warren Zevon getting his death sentence from his oncologist and rushing into the studio to make one last album.

I watched the first half the night it aired, and sobbed uncontrollably every two to three minutes. They chose all the right songs to play in the background, lot of brilliant counterpointing: Warren would be saying or doing one thing, usually with at least a whiff of sarcasm or irony, and a stunning Zevon song with a wickedly different take on the same subject would keep in to sweetly heckle him. No words, but if you grew up on those songs like I did, all it takes are few notes to bring back the rush of feelings they provoked. Sometimes a few words, but never all the way to the climax. I've quoted this one before, but it may be the alltime greatest title, so how can I stop myself:

The phone don't ring
And the sun refused to shine.
Never thought I'd have to pay so dearly,
For what was already mine.
For such a long, long time.

We made mad love
Shadow love
Random love
And abandoned love.
Accidently like a martyr.
The hurt gets worse
And the heart gets harder.

Loses something without the music, but go find it yourself if you're so damn dismissive. "Accidently Like a Martyr." Just one title like that, that's all I ask for.

Oh, so the show was just tearing my heart out, so I decided I had to share it with someone, and that should be my ex, but he doesn't come round here much anymore, so I had to wait a couple months, and I started it back at the beginning, but it didn't make much of an impression on him, cause he was only moderately aware of the music, from the times I forced it on him on long drives. And I don't think he liked some of the violence. Read off a list of titles and I'd be hard pressed to supress a smile at "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner," but he would just furrow his brow and wonder why he was dating me.

So it's been weeks since he was here and I decided I wouldn't torture him with the rest of it. Dissappointing ending, because they spent so much of the last quarter on "Dirty Life and Times," a really lame rocker from the last album. I don't care if Bruce Springsteen sang it with him, it's completely uninspired, the worst example of the biggest problem with the album. But at least they finished with the last song he ever recorded--at home, because he was too weak to get to the studio. "Keep Me in Your Heart." Hard to listen to that one without breaking down.

And in those final minutes, they also played a glimpse of "Accidently Like a Martyr," and in minute 46, I heard what I think I'll remember as Warren Zevon's final words:

He's sitting in a chair, lamenting: "I haven't been reading at all lately, since my diagnosis." He pauses a moment, starts again. "You know, my (candywife?), Schopenhauer, said 'We love to buy books, because we believe we're buying the time to read them.' Isn't that grand?"

Extremely. That explains why I've got two or three hundred of them stacked up all around this apartment. I believe that's exactly how I delude myself each time I purchase one.

So they weren't even Warren's words, nor were they his last, or even the last to me, but none of that will matter in another ten or twenty years when I look back fondly on Warren shattering one of my great illusions with his dying words.

I've learned one thing about memory: only the strong stuff survives, and 14 minutes more blather on the making of one of his unmemorable songs will slowly evaporate and that quote will be the last thing I ever heard from him.

Not for you, though, because I'll keep on quoting him incessantly on this blog, someday maybe I'll retitle after his album title that first woke me up to who I was, shortly before I turned 18. It was his second album and his second best, (Dead or Alive doens't count--it was just a stack of shitty demo tapes, released later over his objections), but he'll never top the title.

He's just an Excitable Boy. Me too.