The Song That Made Warren Zevon Swear Off Vacations for Good
Allison Rapp

Published: July 12, 2023

Warren Zevon needed a vacation in the late '70s. He was working on his third album, Excitable Boy, which would finally bring him some long-overdue commercial success. Before that, though, a break from his usual scenery was in order.

"I went to Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands," Zevon recalled during a BBC appearance in 1984. "And I wrote this song late one night on wet cocktail napkins after a long day of improbable and grotesque mischief."

The song - "Lawyers, Guns and Money" - detailed a wild evening from its very first lines: "I went home with the waitress, the way I always do / How was I to know, she was with the Russians, too?" "Obviously," Zevon noted during the 1984 interview, "I survived all that. But I learned something from the experience: I never take vacations."

That same year, the Wallflowers teamed up with Zevon's son Jordan for a performance of the song on Late Night With David Letterman, two years after Warren Zevon made his final appearance on the program. "It was something that was destined to happen," Jordan later explained of the tribute album. "Even Dad said, 'Just don't do any of this shit while I'm still alive.' You can't be a performer for as long as he was and not want to leave some sort of legacy behind, so I know that he would have been proud of the posthumous attention."