"We'll Sleep When We're Dead!" Tim Walz, Warren Zevon and Tenderness On the Block

Look at him there, all but skipping across the stage in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.  

 He seems ready to deal with whatever comes next, including taunting his opposite-number VP candidate JD Vance in a debate CBS has proffered: “See you October,  1, JD,”  Walz tossed out, and now it’s booked.  Earlier that day the bewhiskered, posturing puff adder Vance had childishly advanced closer to Madam Vice President’s Air Force Two ride to make a cheap joke. 

 By now most of us who have heard Vance seek to discredit Walz’s 24 years of service know the key valor-non-adjacent sentence in Chapter 10 of Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy”.   As a Marine, he served four years including in Iraq, “where I was lucky enough to escape any real fighting.”

Really, that’s your flex? 

 Had Vance made a run at the big plane, I like to think Governor Walz would have leaped onto him as part of a dogpile with her Secret Service folks. See, I’m one of Tim’s people—a former linebacker, like the lads he coached. (And also with him as a fervent Warren Zevon stan, of which more in a moment.) 

Vance is already headed for the slag heap of history, right?  Trump is ready to blame him, even though the bloated orange one put his own campaign in the weeds with his own focus on crowd size and Hannibal Lecter natter instead of policy.

When the opponent was Joe Biden, Trump felt he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot loose appendage JD on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters.  Now that the polls are turning, Vance’s ineffectuality has made him the opposition’s favorite mistake.

 All that said, the Joy Offensive has been great, but now it seems Harris’s sure instincts have guided her to platform issues and the “When We Fight We Win” phase, in which the Trump/Vance Weirdness and general aura deficit means the derangement is all on the red side. 

The moment when the melding of joy and the right choice of running mate reached a certain memorable peak came at the duo’s first shared rally a week ago in Philly.  Walz was near the sign-off of his 19 minutes at the podium when he considered the abbreviated campaign’s challenge:   “We’ve got 91 days—my God, that’s easy! We’ll sleep when we’re dead!”

By contrast to the already failed Trump/Vance strategy of throwing missed swings at their opponents’  fictional flaws, Walz’s remarks uncorked a folksy fusillade of positive policy strokes. That began with a generous tribute to former fellow VP aspirant Josh Shapiro’s passionate Obama-isms  (citing the Pennsylvanian’s fun vibe at a Springsteen concert in Jersey), moved into the wonders of Kamala (“She does it all with a sense of joy”), and whipped through his own c.v before turning to Trump, who “mocks our laws…[and] froze in the face of the Covid crisis”. Walz noted that Trump, despite protestations, is covertly all in on the dread Project 2025.  To slag the Republican intrusions into women’s health, he cited his constituency’s “golden rule”: “Mind your own damn business”. 

He may as well have socked his crotch and said, “JD, I got your Minnesota Nice right here.” 

Kamala just about matched him with a taunt to the GOP ticket that dared them to get off the couch for the debate: “If you have something to say…” (here she almost broke into laughter)… "Say it to my face.”

Both verbal slaps brought down the house, each sparking an almost giddy roar, a release of long-held anger, and the event closed to the thump of Beyonce (and Kendrick Lamar’s) “Freedom”.  Which only potentiated wide speculation as to when and how hard Taylor Swift might go in joining the surge (the convention is coming right up,  and runs, for two days after Taylor completes the Euro leg of her Eras tour…just sayin’).

Of course there’s one guest artist we can’t have. “As Governor of Minnesota,” Walz  grumbled on X in 2023, “I cannot believe Warren Zevon was not inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”

So many of us remember Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop” and the Obama energy it kindled. Sadly, there will be no performances of “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” by the song’s late author (felled by mesothelioma at age 56 in September 2003), but I’d love to see Billy Joel and his band give it a shot. (Some will remember Joel and Bruce Springsteen at a turning-point 2008 Obama fundraiser in New York City. Perhaps they could reboot what Bruce called at the time, “the summit meeting” between New Jersey and New York."

This rather joyful moment, billed as “Change Rocks,” is chronicled in the first four pages of Chapter 17 of my own book, “Billy Joel: The Definitive Biography”:   https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/236036/billy-joel-by-fred-schruers/

It was only last February that Billy declared, in a message to The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominating committee, the injustice of Zevon not getting placed on a ballot although eligible since 1994. With other voices from Jackson Browne to Shooter Jennings picking up the theme, last year brought a nom.  (Billy was voted in alongside Bruce and Paul McCartney and picked up his trophy from Ray Charles in March 1999.) Billy gave the Los Angeles Times his take on Warren: "He was a real original, and I don’t know if that’s appreciated enough. The first minute I saw him, I was knocked out. He was like the crazy brother I never had. He was fearless, and it stuck with me. I never thought he got the attention he deserved.”

This newsletter will have more to say in the coming times on Zevon, having been started with rock (and yes, pop) music as an inspiration and impetus.  Like so many superior artists, Zevon is as rewarding for the deep cuts as he is at delivering bangers like “I’ll Sleep…”. A favorite of mine in that regard is “Hostage-O”, covered to an utterly convincing fare-thee-well by Dawes frontman Taylor Goldsmith in one of Judd Apatow’s Zevon tributes with L.A.’s musical elite. 

“Hostage-O”  is still mysterious of origin to me.  But there will be more to say anon. 

For the present, the theme is Hope, both in the Obama sense and the Kamala sense. ”Hope” happens to be the name of Walz’s teenage daughter,  born in 2006 thanks to the IVF treatments that had also brought them out of the “hell of infertility” when son Gus was born in 2001.  (Nota bene, nosy hillbilly—no childless cat people they.)

 Zevon’s “Excitable Boy” album—for most fans, his true masterwork and the source of his one top thirty hit, “Werewolves of London” – was about to drop in January 1978 when I got on the phone with Zevon to discuss it. He characterized his rather rocky ascent to critical and soon commercial acceptance as a songwriter this way:  “My job is to be miserable waiting for the next flash.” 

The months and years that followed until a late-career sobriety took temporary hold would be troubled, summed up by Zevon as “dirty times,” but the brilliance was never extinguished. What I recall best from our chat was his take on the eighth of the LP’s nine songs we addressed in order, “Tenderness On The Block.” An emotional snapshot of a young girl’s first love from a dad’s point of view, with Zevon’s trippingly percussive piano and co-writer/producer Jackson Browne singing in the chorus,  it arrived with a characteristic Zevon tale —it arrived on a drunken night in which Zevon pulled the banister down in his house.  “It’s one of the most emotionally positive songs I’ve ever been involved in,”  he told me,  “And very possibly that  comes from being the father of a delightful baby daughter.” 

 Although the album contained a second audience-stoking classic, “Lawyers, Guns and Money,” Zevon could hardly have known the album would hit No. 8 on the Billboard charts, and inaugurated one of the wilder runs in and out of success (and sporadic, hard-won happiness) for the man. His latter thoughts that day, as to how he got where he then stood,  were curiously humble:  “The most important thing was to continue being a musician. In other words, not work  in a bookstore, not sell dope, not do anything but be a musician.” 

He may be sleeping, but I think if Zevon were alive, he’d be quite invigorated and pleased to know he’s supplying inspiration for the most meaningful of presidential campaigns. To paraphrase Warren, it don’t matter if they get a little tired.