Chaos/Confusion: Disorder In The House

Warren Zevon (w/Bruce Springsteen): Disorder In The House
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Warren Zevon is one of those artists whose music I’ve enjoyed and appreciated over the years without ever really being a fan, or learning all that much about him. There’s just so much music out there, and so little time. David Letterman, on the other hand, was a huge Zevon fan. He was a guest on Letterman’s various shows more than two dozen times, and even filled in 20 times as bandleader when Paul Shaffer was unavailable.

Back in 2002, Zevon was diagnosed with lung cancer, and shortly afterwards appeared as the only guest on Letterman’s show. Their interview soon became a classic. Letterman’s respect and compassion for his dying subject, coupled with Zevon’s unflinching honesty and humor (which gave Letterman the opening to be funny, too) is striking.  During the course of their discussion, Zevon responded to Letterman’s question about his new-found understanding of life and death with the phrase “Enjoy every sandwich,” which became a pretty well-known distillation of his life's philosophy. Zevon also performed three songs on the show that night. The Letterman show is worth watching, and you can see the interview here, the performance of “Mutineer,” here, “Genius” is here, and Letterman’s request, “Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner” is here. And Letterman's and Shaffer's heartfelt announcement of Zevon's death about a year later is here.

At the time of the Letterman interview, Zevon had recently released an album whose title, My Ride’s Here, seemed eerily prescient in retrospect. But to be fair, his prior album was called Life’ll Kill Ya, so it is probably more fair to say that he was comfortable with his death as a concept, not that he had any mystical foreshadowing of his demise.

After his diagnosis, Zevon worked on his last album, which ended up titled The Wind. It is hard to listen to the album without feeling that Zevon was trying to sum up his tumultuous life and preparing for its end. It includes 10 original songs (or co-writes with his long-time collaborator Jose Calderón), and a poignant cover of Dylan’s “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.” The album included numerous high profile guests, including Mick Fleetwood, Jackson Browne, Joe Walsh, Tom Petty, Billy Bob Thornton, Dwight Yoakam, T-Bone Burnett, David Lindley and Emmylou Harris.  While the album contained its share of contemplative ballads, Zevon could still rock and show his trademark twisted humor, most notably with guest Bruce Springsteen, who shared vocals and played electric guitar on the raucous “Disorder In The House.”

The song lays out the chaos and confusion in the titular house--overflowing bathtubs, falling plaster, doors coming off their hinges. It’s so bad that “even the Lhasa Apso seems to be ashamed.” Then, it becomes clear that the song is about criminals being chased by the police, but it appears that the narrator escapes.

To me, what is most memorable about the song is the fun that Zevon and Springsteen seem to have performing it. The Wind was released two weeks before Zevon died, at the age of 56. The album received five Grammy nominations, including Song of the Year for "Keep Me in Your Heart," and it won two Grammys, for Best Contemporary Folk Album, and "Disorder in the House" was awarded Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocal. These were the first Grammys of Zevon's career, and I suspect that he’d be chuckling to himself if he knew what it took for him to get them.

Small Towns: Small Town News

[preorder a biography of Letterman because the only purchasable videos of his show are on VHS]

We did a theme a couple of years ago called “Where I Live,” and I wrote about my favorite small town, Tarrytown. I’m not going to that well again, so you should read that piece if you are interested.

Instead, I’m going to write about the second thing that popped into my head when I heard the theme, “Small Town News,” a segment that was regularly featured on Late Night With David Letterman, and occasionally on Late Show With David Letterman. Let me start by saying how much I miss David Letterman. I didn't start watching Late Night right away, when it started airing on NBC at 12:30 on February 1, 1982, but a couple of years later, I began to record it on my VCR and watch it in the mornings as I got ready for my day. I pretty much stuck with Dave, and followed him to CBS when he moved to the more coveted 11:30 slot (even if he lost the battle to succeed his idol Johnny Carson to the duller, more mainstream Jay Leno). And when Dave signed off in 2015, I tried to watch his successor, Stephen Colbert, but it wasn’t the same and I have gotten out of the habit.

Late Night was considerably stranger than the Late Show. It was as if NBC really didn’t care what happened after midnight, and it seemingly allowed Dave, and his writers, to do what appeared to be anything they wanted to do. Rotating the screen. Dubbing reruns. Involving the backstage staff. Having strange, fake guests. Having strange, real guests. Weird stunts. Letting Andy Kaufman go wild.  Which is not to say that what he was doing was unprecedented—Steve Allen’s Tonight Show was definitely an influence, and Ernie Kovacs did some similar stuff, but what made the Late Show so unusual was the way that it seemed to mock the entire genre of late night talk shows without being a parody.

The “Small Town News” segments were a perfect example of the show’s style. Like other segments on the show, like Stupid Pet Tricks, they took something ordinary and pretended that it was appropriate for network television.. As you can see in the video above, from 1988, Dave goes into the segment after what appears to be an improvised bit with a goofy bubble machine and having Paul Shaffer and the band play a cheesy 70's-style “Love Theme.” Throughout the segment, Letterman makes it seem like he has no idea what is going on, he donates $10 per laugh to the United States Olympic Luge Team, for no apparent reason, other than wanting to “just beat those damn Russians at luge once,” he engages in asides about the temperature in the theater, and regularly uses self-deprecating humor.

When Letterman moved an hour earlier, and to CBS, the show changed. Being in an earlier time slot, and competing against the Tonight Show, meant that the network cared more about the show, and many of the odder rough edges were sanded down. Of course, Letterman was also older, and seemed less interested in tweaking authority as much as he had in his younger days. Which was not to say that the Late Show lacked edge, or was slick, dull and mainstream, but it certainly lacked some of the absurdity and anarchy that the earlier show was famous for.

Compare this version of “Small Town News” from the Late Show from 2007—nearly 20 years after the video above.



Putting aside the better production values, including a still silly but more produced theme, nicer cards, etc., you can see that Letterman no longer was pretending that he didn’t know what was going on. No more asking the booth what comes next, or pretending to be confused. In other words, he had gone from being some renegade comedian who somehow found himself with a show that was not completely in his control to a confident TV star. One who still didn’t always seem comfortable with his fame, but was no longer surprised by his good fortune.

The CBS show was still great, and I enjoyed it enormously (because I was older, too), but I guess it is sort of how so often you love a band’s early, sloppier work more than their later, more polished stuff, even as you can appreciate that they have grown and the later material is objectively “better.”

Beginning: Beginnings

Chicago: Beginnings
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As the end of the old year makes us think about those we have lost, the start of a new year makes us think of beginnings, fresh starts and new things, and thus the theme for the next two weeks.

I’ve previously mentioned that the beginning of my concert going life was a Chicago show at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center with my parents. Chicago was one of the first bands that I called my favorite, and I will defend their early output as brilliant. After that though, they went downhill, and fast, to the point that they became a joke. Take their first 5 or 6, or even 8 albums, and they created a body of work that warrants their impending induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Take their next almost 30 albums, and you have an impressive stack of mostly junk.

I’m not going to get into a long analysis of what happened. I mean, listen to the first album—Chicago Transit Authority from 1969. Complex songs, long, interesting solos, intricate horn arrangements, political statements, and yes, some catchy tunes. As time went on, though, the balance between the complex and the commercial began to shift until, certainly by Chicago X, and probably sooner, there was little interesting, and lots of shlock. Whether it was the influence of Svengali producer James William Guercio, or an increasing desire by some band members to make a buck, or the changing music marketplace, or whatever, it happened, and that’s about where I jumped off the Chicago train, never really to return. And then came David Foster, and the guys from Toto, and a revolving door, and it really got ugly.

But let’s forget all of that stuff, because it is forgettable, and just focus on “Beginnings,” from the debut. CTA was a double album, a rarity for a first album, and side one of the original vinyl has three songs—the aptly titled, “Introduction,” a jazzy, horn laden song, which then flowed into the piano intro to the great “Does Any Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? (wait—you don’t remember the piano intro? Because it was cut for radio play), which led into the guitar strum opening of the nearly eight minute long “Beginnings.” Written and sung by keyboard player Robert Lamm, it is a wonderful love song. It captures that feeling of the start of a relationship, when everything is exciting, time stops when you and your lover are together, and you want that feeling to go on forever. It expresses these emotions without being sappy or maudlin, and features great horn work, fabulous drumming by Danny Seraphine, and, yes, a nearly 2 minute Latin percussion fade out (wait, you don’t remember that? Because it was cut.....) “Beginnings” was the band’s second single and failed to chart. But in 1971, when Chicago was more popular and established, it was re-released, and hit #7 on the Billboard Singles Chart.

It would be easy to analogize the new love feeling of “Beginnings,” a feeling that everyone knows doesn’t last, to the gradual crappification and critical rejection of Chicago, so I’m going to do that, because unlike Ike & Tina Turner, sometimes, I like to do something nice and easy. The question (not "Questions 67 and 68," the next song on the album, a personal favorite of mine, and from the number of times he played it on The Late Show, of Paul Shaffer’s), is what happens after that first heady rush of love cools down. Does it morph into a real, true, long-term love, like you find with people who are happily married for decades (like me!), or with bands that you like forever, or does it flame out, and lead to separation, or giving up on a one-time favorite?

When Chicago gets inducted into the Hall, there are going to be articles bemoaning their inclusion, and I get it—they have inflicted many, many bad songs on our ears since the mid-1970s. But before you join the hater bandwagon, listen to Chicago Transit Authority, from its “Introduction,” through the noise of Terry Kath’s “Free Form Guitar,” past the great cover of “I’m A Man,” to the overtly political last side, featuring samples from anitwar protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention and the searing nearly 15 minute instrumental, “Liberation,” and tell me that these guys didn’t begin their career with a masterpiece.