The Song of the Day is:
Warren Zevon – “Hit Somebody! (The Hockey Song)”
From the album My Ride’s Here (2002)
Blood on the ice ran down through the years
The king of the goons with a box for a throne
A thousand stitches and broken bones
He never lost a fight on his icy patrol
But deep inside, Buddy only dreamed of a goal
He just wanted one damn goal
There were Swedes at the the blue line
Finns at the red
A Russian with a stick heading straight for his head
Brains over brawn-that might work for you
But what’s a Canadian farm boy to do
Warren Zevon – Mitch Albom
One year ago this week, I had my job interview at Capital One Arena for a sound engineer position. I got the job in March, and just a few days after quitting my previous job, the pandemic was declared. I have spent a lot of days in an empty arena, hanging with the building engineers and doing odd jobs. Last month, just before Christmas, I worked my first event, a Washington Wizards game. As it stands, the Wizards’ season has been tremendously impacted by Covid, and we’re hoping for a safe return for the entire team soon, but in the meantime our focus shifts to the Capitals. It’s been a long time coming for me to work my first hockey game for the Caps, and I’m very excited. We’re playing the Buffalo Sabres tonight. To celebrate this occasion, I’m playing one of the most explicitly hockey-oriented songs ever written, Warren Zevon’s “Hit Somebody (The Hockey Song)”. There aren’t a whole lot of hockey songs out there, though I did feature one so far. This song comes from Zevon’s penultimate album, which was released prior to his terminal cancer diagnosis. This was a slight concept album, with many of the songs being co-written by non-musician authors, such as Carl Hiaassen and Hunter S. Thompson. This song’s collaborator was Mitch Albom, a longtime Detroit Free Press sports columnist and author of Tuesdays with Morrie and Five People You Meet in Heaven. Albom is quite a hockey fan, and was able to help infuse Zevon’s tale of Buddy the goon with a genuine sense of hockey lore and terminology. The ain’t Zevon had already been creating witty tales on record for over thirty years at this point, and crafted favorites such as “Werewolves of London” and “Excitable Boy”, but always had a sense of warmth in his music. Initially, there were talks by director Kevin Smith to adapt this tale into a feature film, but that movie was never made, though parts of it did wind up evolving into the 2011 comedy Goon. The person who chants “Hit Somebody” is one of the highest-profile Warren Zevon fanatics around, television’s Dave Letterman. In addition, Paul Shaffer and members of his CBS Orchestra played on this song. Letterman still champions Zevon, and as recently as 2017 made a plea during his induction speech for Pearl Jam at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame about that institution’s snub of Zevon, apparently to no avail. After this album, Zevon did enter the final chapter of his career with his reflection on impending death in The Wind, which was released just two weeks prior to his passing. Though much more somber and sentimental, he kept his trademark sense of humor to the end. During his final public appearance, on Dave Letterman’s show no less, when asked if he had any advice on staring down death, he famously quipped “Enjoy every sandwich”. While it might not be a commonly known song, I do appreciate Zevon for creating one of the most studious songs ever written on the subject of hockey goons. Come on Caps, hit somebody!
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