Customer Reviews

Warren Zevon Video LP (Live on MTV, 1982)

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Now that I am retired and have more time to work on music, when I was at my son's house for Father's Day in 2009 I found this VHS tape, one the first concert videos I ever bought, so I could see the rocking parts of "Charlie's Medicine" that I missed seeing when I was just listening to the song on a record. Within the last year, I have wanted to play that song everyplace people have never heard anything like "Charlie's Medicine" before.
It is taking me years to learn to play "Charlie's Medicine." Mainly I am glad that plowing into old age like a rocker is giving me the time to appreciate some of the things I liked between the time I was 12 and 62 more than I had a chance to the first time around. A pattern of notes that repeats while the verses are sung has so many things to get together at the same time that my practicing has to be repeated until it is impossible to do any one tricky thing wrong while I am doing something else. I am not quick enough to do the notes on a guitar, but using two hands on the same octave of a piano I did it often enough in the four weeks that I was with my mother that she told me the notes were going through her head when she went to sleep when she finally thought it was time for me to go home. I got out of Wichita, Kansas, before the church shooting started, but retirement allows me to appreciate Warren Zevon more than I ever liked going to church every week or work every day. Warren Zevon was the most exciting person I knew who was my age. He was born two months before I was in 1947. Then Emmylou Harris was born within two weeks after me. When I listen to people who had such great talent, it makes me proud to think: this is us.

As someone who missed out on the whole "Zevon Experience", he was dead before I was really aware of him, This VHS is the closest I will ever get to seeing him live, and it's amazing!