"Dry Your Eyes, My Little Friend" (2003)

Alan P. Scott - Memory

a meditation on the occasion of Warren Zevon's untimely departure,
September 7, 2003


I was a callow, yet already decadent youth spending the night in my girlfriend's dorm room, back in 1981. About 1:00am on a moonless weekend night, the first strains of "Johnny Strikes Up the Band" came blaring from one of the fraternity houses just up the hill. By the time the singer got to "Werewolves of London" I had figured out which house it was coming from and I was calling the frat... the guy who picked up the phone was very apologetic, told me he'd turn it down, but I practically ordered him not to, just begging that he tell me the name of the album, which I went out and bought the next day.

Later on, when the girlfriend had left me, it was "Accidentally, Like a Martyr" that accompanied my drunken misery, and "Roland, the Headless Thompson Gunner" that my friend Jim, also touched by her faithlessness, and I crooned in commiseration over the largest bottle of cheap red wine we could find.

I sobered up and moved on... and somehow Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School and Sentimental Hygeine and the rest never grabbed me the same way... but I still have that copy of Excitable Boy, and I still remember all the words and all the ways it made me feel.

9/11/2003


©2003 Alan P. Scott. All rights reserved.

Last updated September 11, 2003

Contact me:

ascott@pacifier.com