#22 – ROLAND, THE HEADLESS THOMPSON GUNNER – Warren Zevon - 2/4/2020

On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California. On September 18, 1975, Hearst, or “Tania” as she called herself, was captured in a San Francisco apartment and arrested for armed robbery alleging she was brainwashed by her captors.

Great art sometimes find inspiration in strange places. Zevon described the creation of ROLAND, THE HEADLESS THOMPSON GUNNER in the liner notes to his Anthology collection: “In 1974 I ran off to Spain and got a job in an Irish bar called the Dubliner, in Sitges, on the Costa Brava. The proprietor was a piratical ex-merc named David Lindell. He and I wrote this song at the bar one afternoon, over many jars.”

One of Zevon’s best and most complex songs, you hear the song’s true meaning seeping out during the closing lines which reference Hearst: “Patty Hearst heard the burst of Roland’s Thompson gun and bought it.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRWCK9zGynA

1977