As recounted so vividly in CM Kushins’ superb 2019 Warren Zevon biography, Nothing’s Bad Luck, the irascible artist developed a habit of ‘cramming’ for a new album. That is, he would begin furiously composing new material when the upcoming record’s deadline began to loom. The most egregious instance of this may be the now forty-five-year-old Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School.
With this extended perspective, however, this third Asylum Records release (and fourth Zevon solo album overall) can also sound like his most diverse and adventurous effort. The variety of material juxtaposes the heavy riffing of the title song with the tempered folk-rock of “Empty Handed Heart.” Then there are the whimsical likes of “Gorilla You’re A Desperado,” set to an appropriately mechanical rhythm, plus an even more subtly tongue-in-cheek ode to eccentric baseball player “Bill Lee;” it is all the more effective as a virtual solo number featuring harmonica.
Amidst all this high-profile activity resides some content a bit too familiar for Zevon’s sound and his fans (and perhaps even some listeners familiar with his work only through the previous album Excitable Boy). “Jungle Work” sounds like a slightly less vivid sequel to “Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner,” while “Wild Age” finds Warren and his esteemed company covering ground he trod more touchingly with “Tenderness On The Block.”
“Play It All Night Long,” however, is something else again, an ode to Lynyrd Skynyrd and its audience that uncovers the truth behind the stereotypes in which Neil Young only dabbled in “Southern Man.” Co-writing “Jeannie Needs A Shooter” with Bruce Springsteen brought out the self-consciousness in both composers however: the concluding plot twist is more predictable than dramatic, unlike the artful use of introspective conceit on the country-styled closer “Bed Of Coals.”
Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School begins with a brief introduction via strings (not to mention two gunshots!), the genteel sounds that crop up again in two similarly abbreviated pieces. “Interlude No. 1” and “Interlude No. 2” are excerpts from a larger symphonic piece Zevon worked on for much of his adult life, grand ambition and inspiration indicative of Warren’s time as a youth in the company of Igor Stravinsky.
The good-natured but insubstantial cover song “A Certain Girl” is at the other end of the spectrum. The only one of three singles released from the 1980 LP to garner much attention, that track is more notable for the curiously detached air permeating the arrangements and musicianship featuring Linda Ronstadt, four Eagles (and their confrere JD Souther), long-time Zevon collaborator Jorge Calderon, and Warren’s mentor Jackson Browne (credits for which are virtually indecipherable on the 2011 Friday Music CD).
But that ambivalent tone–the source of long-term reaction to the LP?–was more than likely set by Warren Zevon himself, and understandably so. It was around this time he confronted his substance abuse and at least temporarily conquered it, with the assistance of the album’s dedicatee Ken Millar, a/k/a crime fiction author Ross McDonald.
The result of all these combined efforts was a record with the veneer of pure craftsmanship solidified through co-production by the artist and engineer Greg Ladanyi. Still, there’s an almost indiscernible undercurrent of equanimity permeating Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School, so four decades and a half hindsight serves to uncover as much or more personal insight into Warren Zevon than any of his other LPs.
That includes so-called comebacks like 1987’s Sentimental Hygiene as well as the progressively more autobiographical triad of late-career works culminating with the man’s swan song, The Wind, completed and released in 2003, the year of his passing.
