James Baker's theme song

Warren Zevon's ouevre, like Johnny Cash's, was reappraised on his deathbed. In all the discussion of his impending mortality, though, people missed his more upbeat songs. One of them, "The Envoy," is the closest we'll get to a Warren Zevon song about the Western Sahara.

The song is about "trouble in the Middle East." For our purposes, we can assume he meant Middle East-North Africa, but made sacrifices for scansion. The Syria-Lebanon theater is tense, Israel has nuclear weapons, Morocco is presumably run rampant over Western Sahara, and "Baghdad does whatever she please." Into this mess comes the president/Kofi Annan's envoy, James Baker.

I'm hoping James Baker played "The Envoy" on a boombox when he jetted between Tindouf, Algiers, and Rabat. If not, the next envoy to the Maghreb should.

This clip of the song is the best I could find on the internet, but it captures the general coolness of disinterested international mediation nicely.


Warren Zevon-The Envoy