The powerful drumming on the track came from New Zealander Anton Fig, another member of Letterman’s studio band. “Warren came up with this great guitar stuff and we did lyrics together, faxing lyrics back and forth,” said Hiaasen. Hiaasen, a friend of Zevon, co-wrote Basket Case, an offbeat love song about a girlfriend with mental-health problems (“She’s manic-depressive and schizoid, too/The friskiest psycho that I ever knew”), after suggesting to the musician that they based a song on a novel he was writing in 2001. My Ride’s Here, which was released on by Artemis Records, also features collaborations between Zevon and novelist Carl Hiaasen, poet Paul Muldoon and gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson. The witty lyrics, about a Canadian farm boy who grows up to be a star in the violent world of hockey, featured the voice of television host David Letterman as an obnoxious fan who keeps yelling “Hit somebody!” Paul Shaffer, the Canadian multi-instrumentalist who served as musical director on Late Night With David Letterman, played organ on the track. ‘Nobody sings about hockey.’ So one night we sat in the basement with a guitar and a piano and a case of Mountain Dew, Warren’s favourite, and in three hours, we put music to lyrics I had written about a misunderstood hockey goon. “Warren was always asking me to write him a sports song. Listen to My Ride’s Here here.Īlbom, who was in the process of writing the global bestseller The Five People You Meet In Heaven at the time he joined forces with Zevon, had a background as a sports journalist, and sometimes jammed with the songwriter. Author Mitch Albom, who co-wrote the song Hit Somebody! (The Hockey Song) with Zevon for the 2002 album My Ride’s Here, said that the musician’s apartment “was high walls of books”, including those of Kurt Vonnegut and Franz Kafka. The Chicago-born musician said he grew up “reading every word of Norman Mailer and John Updike”, and loved the company of writers. Today, we look at David Letterman’s guest appearance on the Warren Zevon song, “Hit Somebody.Warren Zevon was unquestionably one of the best literary songwriters in music. This is “Took Me By Surprise,” about surprising cameos in TV shows, movies and songs and we try to figure out why the famous people made the cameos in question. So not stuff like appearing on The Simpsons or on Sesame Street, where celebrities regularly make appearances, but cameos that are, well, surprising.Īs you may or may not know, Warren Zevon and David Letterman had a special relationship. Letterman was a big fan of Zevon and actually intended on the singer to be the first musical guest on his late night series, Late Night With David Letterman (Zevon missed the show for unexplained reasons). Zevon even filled in as the musical director of the show when Paul Shaffer was away a few times. The great Don Giller shared Zevon’s various Letterman appearances, including the now-iconic final appearance where Letterman devoted a whole episode in 2002 to Zevon discussing his then-recent fatal diagnosis of cancer. In any event, a few months before Zevon received his fatal diagnosis, he released the album My Ride’s Here. One of the songs, “ Hit Somebody! (The Hockey Song)” was co-written by the newspaper columnist Mitch Albom. Warren and I became friends in the mid-’90s, when he came to play with a novelty band of writers that I belong to. His references were Kafka or Vonnegut or Carl Hiaasen. He was always asking me to write him a sports song - “Make it hockey,” he’d say, “nobody sings about hockey” - and so one night we sat in the basement with a guitar and a piano and a case of Mountain Dew (Warren’s favorite) and in three hours, we put music to lyrics I had written about a misunderstood hockey goon. He said he was in the recording studio with Paul Shaffer and some guys from David Letterman’s band, and Letterman was there, too, and would it be all right if they changed one of the words in our song? And I loved that Warren loved it.Ī few months later, I was on vacation on a faraway island, and the phone rang in the hotel.
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