Werewolves Of London

"Werewolves Of London" — Warren Zevon's Glorious Absurdity

The Singer Who Wouldn't Play Along

Warren Zevon was, by the late 1970s, a genuinely singular figure in American rock. He had the songwriter's craft and musical sophistication of his peers in the Los Angeles scene, the ability to construct a song with precision and intelligence, but combined with those gifts was a sensibility that refused the sentimental conventions those peers often trafficked in. Zevon wrote songs about mercenaries, gunfighters, and the darker corners of human motivation with a wit that was simultaneously chilling and hilarious. His debut on Asylum Records had announced those gifts clearly; the follow-up, Excitable Boy, would cement his reputation and deliver the song that most of the world knows him by.

The Genesis of a Monster Hit

Werewolves of London grew out of a collaborative session involving Zevon, guitarist Waddy Wachtel, and the Fleetwood Mac rhythm section of John McVie and Mick Fleetwood. The song was conceived and written quickly, built on a simple and utterly irresistible piano riff that Zevon hammered out with characteristic directness. The concept was gleefully absurd: a werewolf, rendered in the manner of a celebrity sighting, navigating the streets of London with the elegance of a man about town, dining at Lee Ho Fook's, troubling the local beef chow mein supply. The deadpan specificity of the imagery was central to its comedy, and the comedy was inseparable from its genius. This was a song that knew exactly how ridiculous it was and proceeded with total confidence anyway, which is a rare creative achievement in any medium.

The Billboard Run

The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on March 25, 1978, entering at number 76. Its climb was rapid: by May 13, 1978, it had reached its peak of number 21, spending 12 weeks on the chart in total. For a song this willfully eccentric, this resistant to the conventions of radio pop, number 21 was a remarkable achievement. Radio programmers were not generally in the habit of championing songs about werewolves stalking the streets of London, but the track's combination of a hypnotic piano riff, a pounding rhythm, and Zevon's impeccably delivered vocal made it genuinely difficult to ignore. The record crossed demographic lines that most rock songs of that era never approached.

The Howl That Launched a Thousand Imitations

The audience response to the song's central vocal hook, the drawn-out howl that punctuates the arrangement at key intervals, was immediate and lasting. It became one of the most iconic audience-participation moments in the history of rock concerts. When Zevon played the song live, the collective howl from the crowd was a genuine ritual, something the audience had clearly been waiting for and arrived fully prepared to contribute. That kind of participatory magic is rare and cannot be engineered. Zevon understood instinctively that the song was funny in a way that invited the audience to be funny alongside him, and they obliged enthusiastically for the rest of his performing life, which extended across another two decades of recording and touring.

A Legacy Larger Than One Song

Zevon's catalog, spanning multiple albums through the 1970s, 1980s, and beyond to his final, extraordinary record made while dying of cancer, contains far more than Werewolves of London. Excitable Boy, Lawyers, Guns and Money, Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner: these tracks established him as a writer of unusual literary and moral seriousness, someone who used genre trappings and black comedy to illuminate genuine darkness. The song functions as a door into that larger body of work for many listeners, and it is a perfectly constructed door: entertaining, memorable, and smarter than it initially appears. The 42 million YouTube views it has accumulated represent decades of new listeners discovering what the song actually is. Press play and prepare to howl.

"Werewolves Of London" — Warren Zevon's singular moment on the 1970s charts.