Warren Zevon’s ‘Excitable Boy’
40 years old and shamefully relevant
Common refrain in song mirrors the ‘boys will be boys’ sentiment that remains too-oft invoked
Warren Zevon released his third album 40 years ago this week. He titled it “Excitable Boy” after what would become the fourth best-known song on the record.
“Werewolves of London” — released in April 1978 — was Zevon’s only charting hit and a song that has attained a howling ubiquity. “Lawyers, Guns and Money” became one of his better known and more frequently covered songs. And “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” enjoyed its own renown for the joyous absurdity of its narrative, about a mercenary with no head but vengeance on the mind.
But “Excitable Boy” is the song that bears an unfortunate resonance at the outset of 2018. Zevon likely wrote it as a cautionary tale. And our culture has lived down to it. Zevon died 15 years ago, making the prickly commentary seem prescient prior to a #MeToo era initiated by tales of p---ygrabbing and sixmonth prison sentences for rape convictions.
Let’s be clear from the go: Zevon was no saint, and his interactions with women weren’t progressive by any yardstick. As he was dying of cancer, Zevon reconnected with his ex-wife Crystal to help care for him while also taking notes for an oral biography to be published after his death. The resulting book, “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon,” frames only his artistic work with admiration. The stories behind the songs share space with stories of him handing out savage beatings while blackout drunk. And then mornings of disbelief at what he’d done the night before.
Excitable boy, they all said.
A bandleader by trade, Zevon wanted most to be regarded as a great writer and finally got his chance in the late ’70s when another established songwriter, Jackson Browne, took an interest in his work. “Excitable Boy” is a remarkable piece of writing. It spans decades in under three minutes, with a resonance that lingers. It’s also bracing and provocative, with increasingly outrageous acts on the part of the titular boy. They crest with explosive violence in the form of a rape and murder.
But Zevon also performs a surreptitious sleight of hand in the song. The oooohing and wooooing background vocals and the “Yakety Yak”-like sax solo are a deliberate tip to the oftromanticized 1950s, as is the name of the victim of the murder and rape, “Little Susie,” a callback to a song by the Everly Brothers, for whom Zevon once served as a tour bandleader.
The Everlys recorded Felice and Boudleaux Bryant’s “Wake Up Little Susie” in 1957, when radio’s notion of a great transgression was falling asleep in a movie theater and being late getting home.
Chart Zevon’s song as a contrast: His excitable boy shows up to dinner overdressed before rubbing a pot roast on his chest. He bites the usherette at an adult theater. And then at the junior prom he kills little Susie.
The refrain for each of the escalating acts is the same: “Well, he’s just an excitable boy.”
It reminds me of a routine by Hari Kondabolu, a comedian who performed in Houston last month. In one of his older stand-up specials, he riffed on the phrase “boys will be boys.”
Both the song and the stand-up bit are reminders of our casual dismissal of actions with cultural phrases that have been allowed to stand too long. Picking apart these phrases rooted in cliche — “he’s just an excitable boy,” “boys will be boys” — becomes damning for those who let gender-specific excuses for behaviors stand. If he pulls her hair, it’s probably because he likes her. That one needs to go, too.
I can only speculate as to Zevon’s intentions with the song. But to my ears, he was turning the critique inward, recognizing his own ill behaviors and the ways we allow them to exist and expand unchecked. His was a shocking song when it arrived in 1978, almost entirely because of the line “And he raped her and killed her, then he took her home.” Such content didn’t find its way into music released by major songwriter types.
But the real subversive strokes in the song were more subtle. The sneering judgment about the boy’s sentence, which didn’t involve prison: “After ten long years they let him out of the home.”
And time and again, he hits at the way this kid’s doings were normalized by language used by his elders: “Well, he’s just an excitable boy.”
Not to credit a longdead white male — a domestic abuser and sex addict to boot — with defining any contemporary movement with his song. But Zevon knew some of the darker corners of our nature. And in writing the song, he pried at the facades, justifications and explanations for them. That the song still resonates decades later is damning in itself.