For Warren Zevon the falconer has finally called. Two years ago Zevon came to Boston for one-night showcase and couldn't fill Paul's Mall, this city's aging, aching monument to what once must have been the better life. And most of the people who did appear were part of the local music community. Tonight, people are lined up for at least a block outside the Paradise, Boston's newest, most prestigious butcher-block palace/rock club. Someone dressed as a werewolf is extorting the crowd, and a pavement artist has drawn a huge reproduction of Zevon's newest album, Excitable Boy, on the sidewalk. Zevon has, uh, drawn blood.

This doesn't seem like the second tour of a performer who three months ago had little more than a cult following. Zevon and his band (alternately called the Killer Elite and the Jackals of Love) sound like they've been on the road two months, not two weeks. They have the reckless energy and go-for-it excitement of a band already caught between fatigue and pressure, raggedness and ruggedness It's a fight they must constantly wage to be effective, because Zevon's music --centered on his own martial, rhythmic piano style (he never takes any solos) --demands precise abandon. When Zevon gets sloppy, when the center cannot hold, the anarchy loosened upon the bandstand is mere, not majestic.

Tonight, however, Zevon is close to majestic. Waddy Wachtel's and David Landau's guitars sound like Gatling guns when they crash down on "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner." The coda to "Desperados Under the Eaves" could conclude my life and I wouldn't complain. And when Zevon screams, "Send lawyers, guns and money" seven tunes in a row, he gives terror a better name than it deserves.

It is the plainness of Zevon's voice that provides its power -- it is the no-nonsense demand of a stickup man. A bit shaky at the set's beginning, his vocals are streamlined and impassioned by "Mohammed's Radio." Like the best of American rock & rollers, Zevon is as haunting for what he doesn't say as for what he includes. And when ill excesses are kept at bay -- as at the Paradise -- he can make his weaker songs ("Poor Poor Pitiful Me") into better ones and his best songs ("Johnny Strikes Up the Band") into magnificent anthems to rock & roll heroism.

This is a performer and a band that exist on late-night nerves, court disaster, and then tear your lungs out, Jim. Zevon's hair was perfect, but he played as if he wanted to rip it out.

KIT RACHLIS
(RS 264 - May 4, 1978)