Top Ten Warren Zevon Songs: The Rosarita Beach Café (#7)

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From Merle Haggard I move to Warren Zevon. (That's nothing -- you should hear some of the back-to-back plays I get on my iPod! The Happy Goodman Family followed by the Ramones? Seriously??) Here's another one of my top ten favorite Zevon songs. #7: The Rosarita Beach Café Talk about a line? "I've got a $1,000,000 bill and they can't change it." And Zevon didn't even write this song. Yes, the liner notes to the album says he did, but he didn't. It was written by Bill Martin, a friend of Mike Nesmith who played keyboards for Linda Ronstadt at one point (probably how Zevon came to hear it) and wrote music for Nesmith's Elephant Parts TV show. This brilliant song is so Zevonesque, though, that you have to give props to Martin for being Zevon before it was cool to be Zevon. The song is about a man who ends up in a bar, stuck there because they can't give him change. He's content to stay there until he acquires a million-dollar bar tab. Zevon recorded this song as a demo, but it never saw a commercial release until four years after Zevon's death. That's too bad. This should've been on a Zevon album. it should've been a Zevon hit. Oh, well, at least we have the demo of the song. And oh, what a song. The Rosarita Beach Café Written by Bill Martin (album credits list Zevon as the songwriter) From Preludes: Rare and Unreleased Recordings, 2007