Jackson Browne and Warren Zevon

I've mentioned musician Jackson Browne a few times over the course of this blog - this blog which will be twenty-freaking years old in November! It seems like just yesterday it was a mere ten years old.

I knew that Jackson Browne was an important career and personal support for Warren Zevon - I wrote about that back in 2014.

But I only just found out about this Dutch radio recording of Browne and Zevon playing and singing together, available on the Internet Archive for free. It's known as "The Offender Meets The Pretender."

I've recently gotten into Warren Zevon. I've enjoyed his songs over the years, and went to bat against a college radio station in Philadelphia, back in the 1990s because they were bowdlerizing "Lawyers Guns and Money," cutting out the line "the shit has hit the fan" when they played it. Because of the word "shit." 

But I've discovered additional Zevon cuts lately, like Desperados under the Eaves, which has Zevon's musical impression of an air conditioner that is amazingly soulful and affecting.

I've rediscovered "Tenderness on the Block" released in 1978 - it's not on "Offender/Pretender" - but it is on YouTube -  it's hard to believe it was written by the same guy who wrote cynical and gory songs like Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner, Werewolves of London and Excitable Boy (discussed in this droll Paste article "Profoundly Horrifying Song Lyrics: “Excitable Boy” by Warren Zevon.") When I hear these lines from Tenderness:

Mama, where's your pretty little girl tonight?
Trying to run before she can walk, that's right
She's growing up, she has a young man waiting...

I almost expect the next line to be - 

And he's gonna dig up her grave and build a cage with her bones

But this girl won't get caught by the Excitable Boy because:

She was wide-eyed, now she's street-wise

To the lies and the jive talk

But she'll find true love

And tenderness on the block

UPDATE: he co-wrote this with Jackson Browne so that makes more sense.

What's truly horrifying to me is that any teenager Zevon might have been singing about in 1978 is in her sixties now. 

Zevon didn't make it to his sixties, dying at age 56 - not from liquor or drugs (although he abused those for much of his life) or a car crash, but from mesothelioma.

Enjoy.