ROLAND THE HEADLESS THOMPSON GUNNER

"'Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner'" is a song composed by Warren Zevon and David Lindell and performed by Zevon. It was first released on Zevon's 1978 album ''Excitable Boy.'' It is the last song he ever performed in front of an audience, before his death in 2003. Zevon met co-writer Lindell in Paris, where the latter was running a bar after a stint working as a mercenary in Africa. Typically obsessed and interested with the darker side of life, although not without a biting wit and flashes of sardonic humor, Zevon was fascinated enough to pen with Lindell the allegorical story of Roland, a mercenary from Norway who becomes embroiled in the Congo War of the late 60's in Africa, and is betrayed and murdered by a fellow soldier in the employ of the CIA. Besides the obvious historical references to third-world conflicts around the globe and the often shadowy involvement of the CIA within them, Zevon also turned the song into a sort of bittersweet rallying cry to the "revolution" as it was understood in America, which had lost steam by the late 70's, having received its greatest surge of course in the 60's, and the final line of the song, "Patty Hearst heard the burst of Roland's Thompson gun, and bought it..", referring to heiress Patty Hearst's kidnapping and subsequent involvement in the fruitless Symbionese Liberation Army, throws a cynical twist into the song's otherwise heroic portrayal of a mercenary come back from the dead for justice and revenge.
Like Zevon's also classic "Desperadoes Under the Eaves", "Roland" is a look back at a time of upheaval and change that in the end seemed to change very little, leaving the survivors and still-firm believers in the cause as a struggling and cynical minority, or in the title character's case, a ghost still "wandering through the night". The themes inherent in "Roland", of an almost forgotten war, whether it be physical, spiritual or philosophical, and a ragged survivor still lingering on cynically in a world that has moved towards something that is in the eyes of the protagonist a far worse state, is the linchpin of many of Zevon's story-like songs, and indeed part of his own life.