Ten Favorite Real People Songs: Frank and Jesse James (#2)

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Being the good thief I am, I swiped this great idea of doing a countdown of songs with real people in the title from @teamfreak16 . He's finished with his countdown, and I'm almost done. The last two songs feature two people in the titles. And, as I said yesterday, there's no surprise here at all. Here's today's penultimate song. #2: Frank and Jesse James - Warren Zevon Didn't I start this dang countdown with a song about Robert Ford? And lo and behold, here's the man he killed showing up! It's something when a songwriter writes a song that's both historically accurate and about a modern person. I had a literature professor in college that said "historical fiction" is not so much about the time about which it was written as the time in which it was written. (Case in point: M*A*S*H, which, although set in the Korean War, was really about the Vietnam War.) Here my main man Warren Zevon (who got a mention today in Scott's "heaven" countdown thanks to his rendition of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door") opening what he considered his "first album" (he did an album that sleaze ball Kim Fowley produced in 1969) with a song named after two of the most notorious outlaws of the old west....and the song is about the Everly Brothers. Not explicitly about them ("Robert Ford, a gunman, in exchange for his parole, took the life of James the outlaw, which he snuck upon and stole" is 100% truth about Jesse James, not about Phil and/or Don), but inspired by Zevon's time spent working with them. And yes, you read that correctly: Warren Zevon worked with the Everly Brothers. That's where he met Robert "Waddy" Wachtel, best-known as Linda Ronstadt's frizzy-haired guitarist (and co-producer of Zevon's biggest album, Excitable Boy). When the Everly Brothers broke up, Zevon worked with each individually, even producing and arranging Phil's first solo album. One more great piece of trivia regarding that musical relationship: Phil's father-in-law ran for sheriff in Pitkin County, Colorado. Zevon did a concert for him gratis, asking only that he be named the county coroner if Phil's father-in-law won. Explaining that to David Letterman on his first appearance on Letterman's show in 1982 (Dave's very first episode, no less) went like this: ZEVON: Well, I am, you know, formerly, the coroner of Pitkin County, Colorado. LETTERMAN: You're kidding! ZEVON: No, I'm not. It was an appointment...one night in the Jerome Bar in Aspen, I asked if I could be coroner, and he said the coroner was getting old, and it was an appointment, so he gave it to me. LETTERMAN: You didn't.... ZEVON: (very quickly) No. As for Frank and Jesse, this is about as detailed an account of their lives that you're going to hear, tracing their lives from "a small Missouri farm back when the west was young" to their days with Quantrill's Raiders to their "Robin Hood"-like folk hero status ("they rode against the railroads and they road against the banks, and they road against the government, never did they ask for a word of thanks"). As the first song on his first album, it's easy to see all of the promise in Warren Zevon. And fulfilled that promise hundreds of times over. Frank and Jesse James Written by Warren Zevon Recorded by Warren Zevon From Warren Zevon, 1976 How COOL is this version!!!