Song of the Day 2/25: Warren Zevon, “Lawyers, Guns and Money”

I don’t know how I missed it, but until this Zevon classic from 1978’s “Excitable Boy” came up on a Spotify playlist last night I never realized it fit The Last Guy™ so well. What did he spend weeks asking for? A steady supply of lawyers, Proud Boy/Oath Keeper guns, and money — lots and lots of money. How was he to know those Moscow hookers were with the Russians too? And “Dad, get me out of this” is practically the motto on the family crest.

In truth, or at least in Zevon’s telling in the liner notes to “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” the title came from a real incident. “My friend Burt Stein (who was also my A&R man at Asylum Records) and I were on vacation in Kauai, Hawaii. We were riding past the cane fields with a young woman whose acquaintance I’d made the previous evening, and she was taking us to a friend’s ‘plantation house.’ She mentioned sort of off-handedly that her friend wasn’t home; that we might, in fact, have to break in. I turned to Burt. ‘Dear Joe,’ I said, thinking of Joe Smith, the president of the record company. ‘Send lawyers.’ ‘And guns,’ Burt added. I said, ‘And money.'”

You can find lots of live versions on YouTube, but this one, from the late Sunday night TV show hosted by smooth-jazz breakout star David Sanborn in the late ’80s, is the only one to feature the alto sax (that’s not smooth jazz he’s playing on the bridge) and the only televised performance that states plainly what hit the fan.

Hank Williams Jr. had a hit with it in 1983, the Wallflowers performed it for the Zevon tribute album and jam band Widespread Panic plays it in concert. But the first recorded cover was by Rick Derringer, who released it as a single, which explains his recasting of the last line.