Warren Zevon: Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School CD Track Listing

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Warren Zevon Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School (1980)
Originally Released 1980\nCD Edition Released June 30, 1992\n\nAMG EXPERT REVIEW: Excitable Boy earned Warren Zevon a hit single ("Werewolves of London") and the mainstream success he richly deserved, but his new fame came with a price; the hard-living Zevon did not react well to the temptations that come with rock stardom, and in the wake of Excitable Boy he had developed a severe drinking problem. Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School was cut as Zevon was working hard to stay clean and sober and put his career back on track, and it projects an ambition and strength of focus that was decidedly absent from Excitable Boy. The album's rockers hit harder and cut deeper than any of his previous work, especially the twisted Southern gothic of "Play It All Night Long" and the mercenary's anthem "Jungle Work," while "Bed of Coals" and "Wild Age" found Zevon bravely addressing his own failings and expressing his need for a greater maturity in his life. While the album was still short on subtlety compared to 1976's Warren Zevon, "Empty Handed Heart" proved Zevon could still write a straightforward song about love (not a happy one, but no one expected that from him anyway), and the two interludes for orchestra gave credence to Zevon's claims that he planned to write a symphony some day (and that it might even be worth hearing). And if "Gorilla You're a Desperado" was a throwaway, it was a better waste of time than "Night Time in the Switching Yard" on Excitable Boy. While Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School didn't quite return Zevon to the top of his game, it made clear that the quality of Warren Zevon was no fluke, and is a stronger effort than Excitable Boy in nearly every respect. -- Mark Deming\n\n\nAMAZON.COM CUSTOMER REVIEW\nReading the book? Buying the reissues? Don't overlook "Bad Luck Streak...", May 6, 2007 \nBy John Stodder "a.k.a. Juan La Princi" (livin' just enough)\nTracing Warren Zevon's career from his self-titled "first" album, to this one, you can certainly see some slippage. "Warren Zevon" represented the fruits of several years of writing songs in obscurity -- great songs, as it turned out. "Excitable Boy" didn't have as many good songs, but it had enough, and it was zesty and captured its moment, bringing the pugilistic spirit of Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson or Ernest Hemingway into rock for the first time. "Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School" is actually a better album than "Excitable Boy," but at the time it came out it was treated like a disappointment. Musically, it is as sophisticated as "Warren Zevon." The string interludes are actually quite beautiful. The sad ballads "Empty Handed Heart" and "Bed of Coals" are quite affecting and artful. "Gorilla You're a Desperado" and "Play it All Night Long" are two of his funniest lyrics, and the title tune is efficient and cinematic in its depiction of a loser running out of luck in an unlikely place. "Bill Lee," about a maverick baseball player of the 1970s, is a brief song in three parts, a perfect little profile in music and words. The two weakest songs are "Jungle Work," which strikes me as a rehash of the great "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner," and "Jeannie Needs a Shooter," which is supposedly a collaboration with Bruce Springsteen (but I don't believe it.) But they are listenable -- you don't skip them. I love the final track, "Wild Age," a hard-rocking meditation on the fear parents have that their kids might go bad and never come back. Can't help but think he was worrying about himself as well as his kids, because as we know, he was trying and failing to deal with his alcoholism at this time. \n\nLike "Excitable Boy" and a few of his other albums, this one is full of guest musicians, rock royalty of the late 70s. The best of them are Linda Ronstadt, a lovely duet partner on "Empty Handed Heart" and part of the background chorus on "Bed of Coal," and David Lindley, who fires up several songs here with his broad-gauge slide guitar. \n\nThis is a record that will grow on you. It doesn't fulfill the promise of that first album (the one with "Poor Pitiful Me" and "Desperados Under the Eaves," but it's his attempt to get back there, and when it works, it's fine. \n\n\nAMAZON.COM CUSTOMER REVIEW\nPlay them all night long!, March 4, 2005 \nBy andy8047 (Nokomis,Florida)\nThis album did not spawn many hits as 1978's EXCITABLE BOY did. On the cover we see the late Warren Zevon,who died of lung cancer in 2003,standing inside of a dancing studio filled with beautiful female students. The only memorable song is PLAY IT ALL NIGHT LONG,which would appear on the compilation,THE BEST OF WARREN ZEVON-A QUIET NORMAL LIFE. The lyrics are pretty much silly("Grandpa pissed his pants again,he don't give a damn."). How about "Grandpa's doing sister Sally,Grandma's dying of cancer now."? Isn't that silly? PIALN is a ode to Lynyrd Skynyrd and their signature song SWEET HOME ALABAMA. Another lyric from the song is "play that dead band's song". Three LS members were killed in a plane crash in the seventies. The other songs are cool. \n\n\nAMAZON.COM CUSTOMER REVIEW\nWarren Zevon's Third Great Album In A Row, July 31, 2004 \nBy The Footpath Cowboy "rockerusa2002" (Kingston, NY United States)\nBAD LUCK STREAK IN DANCING SCHOOL is Warren Zevon's third great album in a row. Zevon had gone clean and sober for the first time when this CD was recorded, and it didn't dull his sense of humor one bit. On the title track, he examined his bad habits in a sarcastic manner which anyone with ANY addiction (drugs, alcohol, tobacco, food, caffeine) can understand, while "Jungle Work" humorously describes mercenary violence in a way that inspired me to do what I need to in order to remind myself that "carb" stands for the names of four politicians who support such actions (Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Bush). The other songs are all great, too, and you should pick up this CD. \n\n\nAMAZON.COM CUSTOMER REVIEW\nWe parachute in, we parachute out...., September 19, 2003 \nBy Tim Brough "author and music buff" (Springfield, PA United States) \nThere were, for a time, stories that Warren Zevon was working on a concerto for strings. If there was, we are sadly unlikely to ever hear it. But snippets from it appeared on his third Elektra/Asylum album, "Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School." Given a taste of rockdom via the surprise success of "Werewolves Of London," his ambition soared along with his excessive living. So the album opens with both beauty and brutality, a crescendo of strings ending with a pair of gunshots. And so it goes throughout the album, as Warren weaves tales of betrayal in "Jeannie Needs a Shooter" (I always wondered what Springsteen's version of this song would've sounded like), heartache with Linda Ronstadt on the gorgeous "Empty Handed Heart" and a sublimely funny look at the Los Angeles life as he trades places with "Gorilla You're a Desperado," and the monkey ends up in "Transactional Analysis."\nAs with his previous two albums, the playing is top drawer. It always amazed me that Zevon could take the usual stable of LA's Mellow Mafia and make them sound tough. The cover of "A Certain Girl" all but leers from force, with the call and response of "What's her name? I can't tell you!" taking on a near psychotic energy by the song's end. Zevon's literary humor is in fine form as he describes the mercs of "Jungle Work." It is a subtle prankster who can pair lines like "We parachute in, we parachute out" without going after a sledgehammer to pulverize the joke, but he manages to do exactly that.\n\nThe album's last two songs were the "Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School's" finest moments. "Bed Of Coals" and "Wild Age" are Zevon's most mature songs to that point. As a lover watches his life collapse, he realizes that he can't be a reckless child anymore, and immediately follows with the longing of "Wild Age," which fades out with The Eagles smooth harmonies and Zevon's desperate, joyous yelping for a time that he knows is no longer there. It cemented Warren's reputation as a songwriter of unflinching emotional capability. \n\n\nAMAZON.COM CUSTOMER REVIEW\nThanks Warren, March 23, 2003 \nReviewer: A music fan\nI think that being a performing artist is a tough job. Aside from having to produce art, your personal changes are chronicled and discussed publicly. Warren made this record during his "tumultuous" period. Sometimes times of crisis give birth to incredible product that would have been impossible to create absent the madness. Look again at Rolling Stones' Black and Blue, a ridiculously great and underrated collection that was recorded during Keith's worst times. Personally I put Warren Zevon in a musical brilliance and accomplishment class with Keith Richards, Bob Dylan, and Louis Armstrong. Recognized or not, Warren laid it down. This record is from the early phase and is volatile and full of wonder. Empty-Handed Heart is perfect and might have merited inclusion on Genius and the Anthology. Warren of course evolved in his later, sober years into the musical giant who created Mutineer, Life'll Kill Ya, and My Ride's Here. But you don't get those until you've lived with this one, Excitable Boy, the Envoy, and Sentimental Hygiene. The ride's the point, and Warren is the American master. \n\n\nAMAZON.COM CUSTOMER REVIEW\n"Down On My Knees In Pain . . .", July 9, 2001 \nBy Brent Evans (Rockhampton, Australia)\nWarren Zevon is on a par with Randy Newman as rock's master satirist;and,like Randy,is criminally ignored by all but a few here in Australia.This is a strong followup to EXCITABLE BOY and should have been just as popular.\n1)BAD LUCK STREAK IN DANCING SCHOOL - Driving opener that turns lessons learnt at dancing school into dangerous asssault courses. Good slide guitar work.\n\n2)A CERTAIN GIRL - A cover of a garage rock classic.There's a girl whom our hero lusts after,but he won't tell his friends the whole details until he's won her.Clever answering vocals on the coda.\n\n3)JUNGLE WORK - A stirring tale of jungle mercenaries doing what they're paid to do.Hard guitar and strident vocals makes it sound like you're right in the middle of a jungle battle and the mercs are descending from a chopper.\n\n4)EMPTY HANDED HEART - It amazes me how Zevon can write love songs that can say much more than the simple "I love you" or "I've lost you".This ballad almost breaks my heart with lines like: "Girl we've had some goood times,but time will not stand still;rolling like a rockslide down a hill".Lush background orchestration.Superb backup vocals by Linda Ronstadt.\n\n5)INTERLUDE NO.1 - A classical piece.\n\n6)PLAY IT ALL NIGHT LONG - A biting,cynical look of live down on the farm.Swarming guitars compliment angry vocals.Gives a kick to the head of a certain Southern Boogie Band.\n\n7)JEANNIE NEEDS A SHOOTER - A western epic about a cowpoke falling in love with a sheriff's daughter only to have her(and daddy)double cross him with fatal results.Co-written by Bruce Springsteen.\n\n8)INTERLUDE NO.2 - Another classical piece.\n\n9)BILL LEE - A short tale of an anti-social,lazy guy.Piano,vocal, and harmonica only.\n\n10)GORILLA,YOU'RE A DESPERADO - A funny song about an escaped gorilla who steals Warren's glasses,BMW,and lifestyle.Biting satire on the LA consumerism,helped on by backup vocals by certain Eagles members.Sounds like track was recorded on a California beach. \n\n11)WILD AGE - Album closer;telling you to live your life and always be free,even though you'll probably be running 'til the day you die. \n\n\nAMAZON.COM CUSTOMER REVIEW\nMore happiness from Zevon, March 2, 2001 \nBy J. Carroll "Jack" (Island Heights,NJ)\nThe title track with its chorus of "Down on my knees in pain" lets you know that this is going to be one more trip through pain and struggle with Warren Zevon. You'll be hard pressed to find a lot of happiness on this CD, even "A Certain Girl" deals with the pursuit of love that may not pan out. With a visit to Roland's world of mercenaries ("Jungle Work") to a topical reference to one of baseball's strangest players ("Bill Lee") Zevon creates a world where things don't always work out (Jeannie Needs A Shooter" "Gorilla, You're a Desperado") but you can't stop trying("Empty-Handed Heart") The real question is how did "Play It All Night Long" escape the heat that Young's "Southern Man" received? \n\n\nAMAZON.COM CUSTOMER REVIEW\nA sociopath with a heart of gold, March 17, 2000 \nBy dev1 (Baltimore)\nWarren Zevon is back with another successful addition to his quirky but solid rock'n'roll output. Exploring 'boy meets girl' is the common subject for popular music, but Zevon adds his personal bent. Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School is more like 'boy with a gun in his pocket meets girl.' Hey, he may be a sociopath, but he's sociopath with a heart of gold. On the inside cover is a photograph of a Mack-10 with spent cartridges and an empty pair of ballet shoes lying on the floor. Death and beauty.\nIn the opening cut (Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School) Zevon promises to end his wicked ways and fly straight. The remaining eleven compositions break his promise. Mercenaries cause mayhem in 'Jungle Work,' 'Play It All Night Long' cures all the world's ills with loud music, and Zevon loses his girl to a hairy bully in 'Gorilla, You're A Desperado.' Of course, all the songs were not written by the patients of 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.' Warren Zevon and Linda Ronstadt are beautiful and romantic in 'Empty-Handed Heart.'\n\nBad Luck Streak is backed by Elektra's killer session band including David Lindley, Rick Marrota and Waddy Wachtel. Usually heard on releases by Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt, Zevon lets then cut loose. Top pick: "Wild Age' is one of the best teen anthems of the 1980's. \n\n\nHalf.com Details \nContributing artists: David Lindley, Don Felder, Don Henley, Glenn Frey, J. D. Souther, Jackson Browne, Joe Walsh, Linda Ronstadt \nProducer: Greg Ladanyi, Warren Zevon \n\nAlbum Notes\nPersonnel: Warren Zevon (vocals, guitar, strings, harmonica, piano, organ, synthesizer); Jackson Browne (vocals, guitar, slide guitar); Jorge Calderon (vocals, guitar); Rick Marotta (vocals, drums, syndrums, tubular bells, percussion); Linda Ronstadt (vocals); David Lindley (guitar, lap steel guitar); Waddy Wachtel, Joe Walsh, Don Felder (guitar); Ben Keith (pedal steel guitar); Leland Sklar (bass); Glenn Frey, J.D. Souther, Don Henley (background vocals).\n\nRecorded at The Sound Factory, Los Angeles, California. Originally released on Asylum Records (509).\n\nBAD LUCK STREAK IN DANCING SCHOOL finds Warren Zevon knee deep in his own literary yet sardonic and grotesque music. From the opening riff of the title track, Zevon pounds and rocks against the tide of typical singer-songwriter blather. Zevon swings his mighty piano through an array of countrified boogie, bare-knuckle rockers, absurd pop, and swooning ballads. He hits the mark with the doomed love of "Jeannie Needs a Shooter" (title supplied by Springsteen), which became a minor hit upon its release. There are a few missteps, mainly the forced funk and overwrought machismo "Jungle Work." \nHe turns his sights on country life on "Play it all Night Long," invoking incest, cancer and Lynyrd Skynyrd in one fell swoop. It also bears the distinction of being the only pop song in history that contains the word "Brucellosis." On "Gorilla, You're a Desperado" he once again strikes at his own California homeland, reveling in the shallow glitz of Los Angeles.\n\nIndustry Reviews\n3 Stars - Good - ...rank[s] alongside Zevon's best work.\nQ Magazine (03/01/1995)\n\n...He had already built a reputation to rival Randy Newman as a writer of graphic, sardonic adventure, and this album underscored his genius....featuring in-your-face arrangements and top-notch playing by some of LA's finest...\nMojo (07/01/2001)\n\n\nROLLING STONE REVIEW\nThere's a sense of resolution. Not a solution so much as an unburdening, a reckoning with secrets that, revealed, can be swapped, like a pawn ticket, for some kind of stopgap redemption. Or a start toward it anyhow -- a beginning: "Swear to God I'll change," the singer says in the title tune. No wonder Warren Zevon's dedicated this fine new album to detective novelist Ken Millar, who writes under the pen name Ross Macdonald.\n\nZevon's first Asylum LP, Warren Zevon (1976), and 1978's Excitable Boy were filled with tension, tough romance and a wild, charging spirit that led its own mad march. When Johnny struck up the band, that's what you'd hear. Music that sounded shrewd and satirical and a little sinister, songs sung by a smiler with a knife. Stories about characters who can best be seen in the half-light. Love songs without much hope. Protagonists who've been worn out or shot down or, like that excitable boy, bent out of shape and left playing with broken toys in the attic. These compositions were notably short on half-measures: they never backed off. They sounded tough, smelled sulfurous. Once in a while, you even caught a whiff of self-immolation.\n\nThis toughness of Zevon's, as well as his highly literate recklessness and affection for characters with long guns and nagging consciences, set people to thinking about his kinship with writers of fiction that has been called "hard-boiled," as if it were a quick breakfast order in a one-arm joint. Hardboiled: the word has a kind of visceral accuracy, a smart, vintage sound. And, with a few contemporary modifications, it suits Warren Zevon pretty well.\n\nWhen Zevon's numbers are funny, they cut like a good Philip Marlowe wisecrack, and his evocations of Los Angeles, snappy and spare and full of nightshade, are as vivid as any of Marlowe's reveries when Raymond Chandler's private eye stares out his grimy office window at Hollywood. Some of Zevon's narratives have the fleet, seemingly dispassionate tone of Dashiell Hammett, and, on Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School, the singer's account of a team of mercenaries ("Jungle Work") boasts the gunmetal gleam of Hammett's Red Harvest. The edgy self-examination of such old songs as "Mama Couldn't Be Persuaded" and "Accidentally like a Martyr," or a new one like "Empty-Handed Heart," comes straight from Ross Macdonald, who once had a character say: "My husband has been looking for his father for some time and gradually breaking up. Or maybe...he's been looking for his father in the hope that it would put him back together."\n\nThere's a spiritual connection between Zevon and Macdonald--and a personal one as well--but this isn't the time or the place to go into that. For now, it's simply important to know that the ties, one way or another, are strong--a fact you'd discover just as readily by reading Macdonald's The Zebra-Striped Hearse and listening to "Wild Age," the cut that ends Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School like an envoi.\n\n"Wild Age" is a sort of brass-knuckles version of Bob Dylan's "Forever Young," and in it, you can hear a lot of fast moving down rough roads. The song starts off like another hitch along that route: a somewhat wistful, halfway-sentimental evocation of the "restless" teenage-outlaw years, complete with harmonies by a couple of Eagles ("And the law can't stop 'em No one can stop 'em/At the wild age"). "Wild Age" soars -- Warren Zevon writes some of the richest melodies in rock & roll, and some of the fiercest--but he lyrics seem to weight it down until the singer gets to the last verse and you realize you've been set up. The effect is like one of those amusement-arcade portraits sealed in plastic. You tilt it, and a skull shimmers out from under a face. Instead of "restless," Zevon substitutes "reckless," and he passes along a last thought like someone who's just wised up and pulled out of a life-or-death contest: "Mostly when the reckless years end Something's left to save Some of them keep running 'Til they run straight in their graves." It's the setup and the change-up that keep the composition from being a sermon. That, and the impression that these are the words of a proud survivor. If Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer ever wrote a song, it would sound a lot like "Wild Age." And even those beach kids who vagabond around in the zebra-striped hearse could catch the cold sting of truth in it.\n\nBad Luck Streak in Dancing School could be Zevon's best album. Certainly, it's the best-sounding record he's ever done, with supple guitar work by David Lindley and drumming by Rick Marotta that gives no quarter. There are various instrumental guest appearances -- by Jackson Browne and Joe Walsh most strikingly--and string arrangements by Warren Zevon that show, as clearly as anything ever has, the results of his adolescent pilgrimages up behind the Whisky a Go to visit Igor Stravinsky. Included are several string-section meditations--a brief introduction and two "Interludes" -- that might be fragments of Zevon's much-rumored and long-promised symphony. This music isn't pompous, grandiose or meant to demonstrate that the artist can "rise above" rock & roll to more "serious" things. Rather, the interludes are exciting because they meld so nicely with the other compositions. "Interlude No. 2" courses easily into a hard, prideful little number about Montreal Expos pitcher Bill Lee. It does everyone proud -- the master, the pupil and the baseball player.\n\nBut Zevon is trying for another kind of assimilation, too, one that doesn't come off quite as well. If the new LP drives harder than his previous work, it's partly because the singer (who coproduced with Greg Ladanyi) is attempting some sort of brash fusion between the soft steps of California rock and the ass-kicks of the tougher East Coast stuff. It's a heroic struggle and, like most heroic struggles, a losing proposition in the end. One of the album's finest numbers, "Bed of Coals" (a great chorus: "I'm too old to die young And too young to die now"), is featherbedded into a typically Southern California, pseudohick country style. The lyric is a powerful confessional, yet the arrangement wants to make you cry in your suds.\n\nZevon's other excursion into rural matters, "Play It All Night Long," is a rousing rocker that collides with the other side of the same problem, emerging in one piece but pretty crumpled. Intended in part as a tribute to Lynyrd Skynyrd ("'Sweet Home Alabama'/Play that dead band's song") and partly as a venture into the mock-macho territory explored earlier in "I'll Sleep when I'm Dead," "Play It All Night Long" catalogs a series of surreal miseries perpetrated by a clan of yokel misfits much in the manner of Randy Newman's "Old Kentucky Home." But it misses Newman's irony and sidelong compassion by a country mile. Zevon's song falls victim to the very clich

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