Talk about the lost treasure of the Sierra Madre. I'm going to be revisiting Warren Zevon's work frequently. For those of us who are fans of cinema noir, or novels set in the darker half of the human experience, Charles Bukowski for example, Zevon is the essential soundtrack. He doesn't shy away from telling it like it is: "I'm getting tired of you/You're getting tired of me/And it's the final act/In our little tragedy/So don't feign indignation/It's a fait accompli/You can screw everybody I've ever known/But I still won't talk to you on the phone". You can't BUY that kind of bitter, knowing, resigned yet outraged acceptance of humankind's essential beastliness. Yet at the other end of the scale, he'll produce a sweet, sweet paean to the better angels of our nature. Zevon was an optimist at heart, but one who took his umbrella with him. This is straightforward rock, so much the better to showcase his incomparable command of language and his ability to sum up an entire life, a whole relationship, in half a dozen words.
Oh, and can you think of any other song in which the protagonist confesses that his cock is sore?
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