Doing Jungle Work With the Werewolves of London (A Cookoo Charlie Soundtrack: First Installment
When I was in high school, my friends and I were huge Springsteen fans, Not only did we purchase every album by The Boss, we also picked up records that had songs Bruce wrote for, or co-wrote with, another artist. One of those artists was Warren Zevon.
In 1982, three years after I had graduated, my best friend, Kenny, and I were parked in a friend's driveway listening to an 8-track he had picked up of Zevon's Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School. Warren had gone over to Bruce's house to ask for some help with his song, Jeanne Needs A Shooter.
As we sat jamming to the recording, I thought that Jeanne was a good tune, but it was Warren's own penned songs that struck a delightfully dark chord in me. You had a gorilla escaping from the L.A. Zoo (Gorilla, You're a Desperado), mercenaries doing (Jungle Work). and a song that integrates an homage to Lynyrd Skynyrd, the trauma of a Vietnam vet and a cattle disease (Play It All Night Long). Suffice it to say, By the time Warren began singing about the Wild Age, the last song on the tape, I had become an extremely "excitable boy.".
Before the week's end, I purchased Bad Luck's commercially successful predecessor, Excitable Boy, placed it on the turntable and immersed myself in the dementedly satirical world of one of rock's most underrated geniuses. Excitable Boy gives us songs about a murdered mercenary (Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner), a "desperate man hiding in Hondurus" (Lawyers, Guns and Money), the title track about a rapist/killer, and, of course, those Werewolves of London. For me, Warren was, and still remains, a twisted tropical cocktail mixing equal parts Jimmy Buffett and Alice Cooper with a dah of "heartbreak motor oil and Bombay gin".
I chose the song, Excitable Boy, for the soundtrack because of the line "he bit the usherette's leg in the dark". Drawing inspiration from that lyric, i wrote a scene in which Charlie, at age 11, goes to the theater to watch a dynamite double bill I, myself, had seen back in 1971, The Frogs and the Abominable Dr. Phibes.
While watching nature's retaliation at mankind's arrogant ignorance, Charlie bites a pretty usherette on an inner thigh, as she makes her security rounds. Although he doesn't break skin, this is Charlie's first bite on a human. It's not until seven years later that Charlie actually consumes manflesh
