Gun Song – Warren Zevon – Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner

He’s always had some odd songs, many of them are disturbing or off-beat. Again, another artist that doesn’t just write and sing popcorn-brained “oh, baby, do-it-to-me, baby!” songs I’ve always like singers with clear voices who are performing to sing, not scream or get autotuned into key. He doesn’t seem to have (at least to my ear) an amazing range or anything, but he uses what he’s got well.

Warren Zevon – Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner

Interesting pics from the era and the place being sung about. A turbulent time – the effects of European colonialism ending meeting the ideology of communism in a place ruled by tribalism and the inheritor of a thousand years of depredation by Arab and Islamic slavers. It’s testament to human toughness and pig-headedness that anyone survived there, and it is only a bad as it is, and not worse.

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8 thoughts on “Gun Song – Warren Zevon – Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner

  1. Zevon died in 2003 – a real loss to music, as far as I’m concerned. He wrote a lot of hits, many of them made famous by folks like Linda Ronstadt. I’ve always been a big fan of “Lawyers, Guns & Money.”

  2. That’s a great post and I loved the YouTube video.

    As you can tell, the name of my blog came from Zevon’s song, Lawyers, Guns, and Money.

    The Bush Wars and the fights in the former European colonies deserve more attention but I doubt they’ll get it.

    • Figured people here would like it. Or, appreciate it, anyway. Not nearly as popular as “Lawyers, guns, and money,” but that’s sort of the point of my series of Friday “gun song” posts – introduce folks to things they are not likely to have heard, unless they have eclectic musical tastes or are older than dirt.

  3. “Lawyers, Guns & Money” is even more fun to play. Drums, anyway.

  4. “I sit here playing solitaire with my pearl handled deck…”

    The man could turn a phrase.

  5. L G & M may be fun to play, but imo it can’t hold a candle to “Mohammed’s Radio” in that department.

  6. Plenty of Rhodesian FAL rifles aka R1, L1A1, C1A1… I remember those rifles back in the 80’s, we could buy them in Canada with the regular capacity 20 or 20+ round magazines as surplus arms.

  7. My favorite song by Zevon.

    Tho I still wonder why Roland preferred the Thompson, and not an FAL or a G3 which were more plentiful and common in Africa at the time.

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