Because this will likely never be picked up for print anywhere…
The last song the public ever saw Warren Zevon play came on October 30, 2002. It was at the request of his host, David Letterman. The song chosen wasn’t the overplayed staple of classic rock stations everywhere, “Werewolves of London”, nor the Russian Mafia and Honduran exile tale of “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”. Instead, it was a third song off Zevon’s seminal 1978 album, Excitable Boy, “Roland the Headless Thomson Gunner”.
Look at the songwriting credits for “Roland” and you’ll see Zevon sharing credits with a David Lindell. Lindell wasn’t your typical Zevon collaborator, whose partners included Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt and the Everly Brothers.
Lindell and Zevon met in a chance encounter in Spain, 1974, where one gig after another had led the musical expat to a bar (where else?) somewhere North of Barcelona. “The Dubliner” was then being run by what Zevon would describe as “a piratical ex-merc”. Lindell, another American ex-pat, presented himself with a business card listing his occupations as guerrilla and mercenary soldier. They became quick friends over any number of drinks and used Mike’s gun for hire exploits to provide the inspiration, if not the alcohol-soaked details for the song.
For those not familiar with the work, the song tells of the eponymous mercenary from Norway signing on for his next hitch to fight in the “Congo War” where he would carve his submachine gun way across Africa before running afoul of the CIA (they were jealous of his skill with a Thompson don’t ya know? Or was it that the CIA flipped to supporting the opposing side?) who convince one of Roland’s fellow mercs to blow his head off in betrayal.
The macabre nature common to Zevon’s work comes through in the remaining refrains as Roland’s headless apparition searches the Dark Continent for his killer before finding him in a Mombassa bar and returning the favor, taking out his Brutus in a hail of ghostly gunfire. The song gives the headless Roland no rest though and sends him on to haunt the world’s conflicts “Sympathy for the Devil”-style from Ireland to Palestine to Patty Hearst and the then current SLA terrorism.
Simply because Zevon was working with someone having firsthand experience (reportedly) in such matters, didn’t mean he was shy in taking a little poetic license. The .45 caliber Thomson had been widely used by the US in WWII (WWI as well in early incarnations) and it became as widely distributed as any other effective fighting tool, seeing use (by both sides) in the Arab-Israeli war of ’48, by the Chinese in Korea, Castro’s revolutionaries, the Khmer Rouge, and some African Nationalists such as the Patriotic Front of the Rhodesian Bush War and of course by “colonial” powers like the French in Algeria. With the OSS and SOE arming European resistance efforts with Thompsons during WWII, this combination of circumstances makes a derring-do Norwegian expertly wielding a Thompson in the heart of Africa not totally unbelievable, but not completely corroborated either.
The rest of the song also presents some fuzzy details as well. Roland sets out for Biafra, a short lived independent state carved out of and then reunited with Nigeria during a bloody civil war from 1967-1970. So perhaps the soon to be headless hero got in some mercenary shenanigans there first, but it’s in the “Congo War” where Roland is sung to have spent these same years “knee deep in gore”. Those dates and location tie nicely to the first and second Mercenaries’ Mutinies led by Jean Schramme among others. Historical accuracy gets a bit fuzzy here with Roland both battling the Bantu (the largest ethnic group in the Congo) and killing to help the Congolese.
Maybe Lindell had a bigger hand in writing the lyrics than is normally credited…Jean “Black Jack” Schramme was not just another restless gun, but a true citizen of the Congo who viewed himself as a “white African” and having lived and worked there for the 20 years of his life prior to taking up arms. Any mercenary fighting alongside Schramme, who saw Congo independence and the UN backed expulsion of settlers (among myriad perceived wrongs) as antithetical to what was best, might certainly take the view that they were on the side of the “true” Congolese—which appears may be the case with Lindell and his fictional creation.
Whether Roland was a complete fiction, or some closely held amalgamation of Lindell’s experiences and Zevon’s prodigious imagination may not be answerable.
With Zevon lost to us some 20 years ago and David Eric Lindell taking one more queue from Roland, possessing a wraith-like footprint and leaving his status and whereabouts unknown, maybe any tale of mercenaries, guns, bars, murder, revenge, Africa, and ghosts, deserves a bit of mystery to remain and I bet both would agree.