The Autism Diaries?! (Part 59)
A new occasional series here at “Sounds Good“
I listened to Warren Zevon this morning. It’s always the right choice. I could not listen to him all the time, like all in a row, but any day that is started with Warren Zevon is, frankly, going to be a good one. I realised today that the song ‘Excitable Boy’ is what I am always writing towards. In my fiction at least. It’s the story of a psychopath, told so economically. Obviously a big part of the magic is the jaunty sing-song of the chorus-type refrain (“Excitable boy, they all said/Well, he’s just an excitable boy”) and the way it’s married up to such a delightful, spry sounding tune. But the lines that devastate in particular are how he goes to dinner in his Sunday best and then makes a decision: “And he rubbed the pot roast all over his chest”. A big clue there in just the third line of the song. He will go on to bite the leg of an usherette in an early morning show for the very next verse of the song, he will then take “little Susie” to the junior prom. Where, horrifically, he “raped her and killed her” and if not more devastating, than certainly even more psychotic we get: “then he took her home”. But the kicker for me is the final verse where it describes him being let out of the home after “ten long years” whereupon “he dug up her grave and built a cage with her bones”. The image is that he did this immediately, like a wind-up toy, like the cartoon Tassie Devil as whirling dervish. And it’s all so simple — D/G/Em — and barbaric — Em/Bm/G/D — and yet the way Zevon tells this, we are all complicit. The other people in the song with their tossed-off but utterly uneasy justification that’s he’s “just an excitable boy”, and us for humming along to a tune that’s nearly impossible not to hum along with, right? Built that way on purpose. That makes the characters in the song (supplying the chorus line) and the audience (listening in, humming along) complicit in some way. That’s what I realised I am trying to do. You are reading along and that makes you complicit. You don’t have to agree with it. You can try your best not to, but by being there as part of the ride you are complicit. I wish you all the very best.
