After a nearly two-year hiatus from live performing and a public battle with the bottle, Warren Zevon proved the virtues of strength and muscle and jungle work with a kinetic, athletic and sometimes broadly theatrical show at the Universal Amphitheater. If Zevon's raucous rock & roll testimonial defied some audience expectations and skittered across the boundaries of excess, he can he forgiven, for he was clearly reveling in his newfound presence and power.

Although the blond, tousle-haired singer looked like the same Zevon onstage, the difference became apparent from the first chords of the show-opening "Play It All Night Long," which he embellished with a series of knee drops and prancing high kicks. It was just the beginning of a high-spirited evening that saw Zevon whirl through an encyclopedia of rock moves -- splits, crouches, startling suspended leaps.

All night, Zevon eschewed his more introspective, lachrymose material in favor of the pointed and sardonic rockers in his repertoire. The sole exception was a sensitive version of the junkie lament "Carmelita," introduced as a number "for all you Sam Peckinpah fans." For the most part, the mood was playful, with Zevon sticking to such crowd pleasers as "Gorilla You're a Desperado" and "Werewolves of London" (now boasting caustic references to James Taylor and Jimmy Carter).

The evening's stunner was the mercenary narrative "Jungle Work," which Zevon transformed, with a few modest effects, into a mini-Apocalypse Now. As guitarists David Landau and Zeke Zirngiebel shot off feedback screeches and the rhythm section settled into the song's doomy martial beat, Zevon appeared onstage in camouflage fatigues, looking every inch the shellshocked soldier of fortune. As Zevon and the band growled the chorus, blasts of carbon-dioxide smoke shrouded the stage. Between verses, the singer crawled and tumbled around, playing search-and-destroy behind the amps. Finally, Zevon the dog of war went down in a hail of prerecorded gunfire under a flickering strobe light, and two uniform-clad roadies bore him out on a stretcher.

The night drove to a climax with hammerheaded versions of "A Certain Girl," "Poor Poor Pitiful Me," "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" and a surprise encore of "Bo Diddley Is a Gunslinger," all of which Zevon howled in a full yet harsh baritone that threatened to become a scream. In response to the audience's ovation, Zevon announced ungrammatically "I sing as good as I can, and I dance as well as I want to." As he skillfully demonstrated that evening, he manages pretty damn good and pretty damn well.

CHRIS MORRIS
(RS 324 - August 8, 1980)