The Making Of Piano Fighter: The Giant Years
by Adam Unger - August 11, 2025

The Concept
In early May 2024, Matthew Block and the team at Warner/Rhino reached out to the Zevon team, proposing a box set covering Warren's years at Giant Records for an upcoming Record Store Day exclusive release. The immediate appeal was apparent; all three albums were long out of print. Mutineer and Learning To Flinch, both released during the heyday of compact discs, had never been available on vinyl. Mr. Bad Example previously had its lone vinyl release in Germany, that version now considered a collector's item. Bonus tracks and additional live material were considered, but ultimately proved cost prohibitive as the box was already four vinyl discs.

The Title
How do we sum up this era of Warren's career with a title that is both on brand with his catalog and commercially viable? The obvious choice was simply The Giant Years, but everyone involved wanted something more creative. Inspired by the last decade of David Bowie album box sets from Parlophone, I sent song titles and lyrics as potential candidates. Chemin De Fer anyone? Jordan had the best solution; Warren's friend, author Carl Hiaasen should name the set. Carl and Warren had become fast friends during this period, leading to the duo writing Rottweiler Blues and Seminole Bingo. Carl wrote back quickly with the title Piano Fighter, a song that debuted first on the live album Learning To Flinch followed by a proper studio version on Mutineer. Many thanks to Carl and his team for lending a hand.

Reconstructing History
As sometimes happens with reissues, original artwork and photography may be missing or lost from archives as record labels fold and/or consolidate. This is not a problem localized to these three Zevon albums; graphic artists are tasked to recreate album artwork accurately. Rory Wilson did an excellent job on art direction, collaborating with all of us at Team Zevon to ensure fonts, logos and colors were recreated accurately from the highest quality source materials. No detail was overlooked from text kerning to size to color.

Mutineer proved to be particularly troublesome; the best quality source was the original CD sized artwork. Sometimes you can get lucky; the original photographer may have negatives, transparencies or high-quality copies. The cover photography for Mutineer is credited to none other than Serenus Zeitblom, a character from Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus. The actual photographer was the artist himself, Warren Zevon, pioneer of the selfie decades before the first smart phone.

I recalled the image was taken during a fishing excursion with Carl Hiaasen, which Carl was nice enough to corroborate. Jordan Zevon is always accommodating when I need pictures, stories, leads and anything else he can provide. Another trip to the storage space was on tap with the hope of finding the needle in the haystack.

After digging through multiple storage totes of pictures of Warren with anyone and everyone, including Waddy Wachtel, Eddie Van Halen, Hunter S. Thompson, Johnny Depp, Meryl Markoe and Cybill Shepherd, a text came my way, "cross your fingers cause I think I just found the negative to Mutineer." Written in black sharpie on a Ritz Camera store envelope, "Mutineer Tarpon Fishing."



Enclosed were strips of negatives, one clearly marked by two post it notes. The original image was found, Warren sporting a white T-shirt which had been altered for the final album release.



The Sound
Warner Brothers' audio archive is second to none; their team has every tape meticulously logged, photographed and ready at a moment's notice. Half-inch analog mix reels for all three albums were perfectly preserved. Learning To Flinch and Mutineer were originally recorded to DAT and then transferred to 1/2" mix reels at the time. Even for albums that were primarily released on CD, this extra step was often taken for final mastering. Lacquers for this project were cut from the original 1/2" analog reels by Bernie Grundman. Multiple test pressings were pressed and critiqued for the most minor of imperfections. Once approved by Team Zevon, production began.



Warren's Story
During a conference call with Rhino, the subject came up to include an accompanying booklet with the set. Matt Block raised the question to Jordan, "who would you like to write this, do you have a journalist in mind?" Jordan immediately answered, "Adam will do it."

I worked with Queen's Official Archivist Greg Brooks on similar booklets for the band's 25 album vinyl collection released in partnership with Unviersal Music and DeAgostini in 2018. Greg's added workload due to the Bohemian Rhapsody biopic provided the opportunity to assist on half the albums in this series which were released initially in Italy and expanded to Japan, Chile and Argentina. This later led to Greg and I co-writing text for Queen's The Miracle (Collector's Edition) in 2022.

Greg and I used band quotes to great effect to frame the story of each album; we filled in the accompanying facts and missing pieces. For Piano Figher, I used the same method. Warren wasn't around to tell his story but there was enough archival material to piece it together. I used 35 newspaper and magazine articles from the time, all with insightful interviews from Warren. Thankfully he wasn't shy sharing insights on the creative process with the press; this and his dated diary entries proved to be invaluable.

Finishing Touches
Additional material from this era may provide matieral for future deluxe releases. Warren's personal cassettes do contain early versions and home demos of tracks like Finishing Touches (originally titled A Hard One To Love). Mostly complete soundboard recordings also exist of live shows , most notably the excellent 1990 An Enemy Of The People Tour backed by Gurf Morlix and Dan Dugmore. Nearly 100 DAT live concert recordings still exist and are safely in storage from the Learning To Flinch concerts. Hopefully we will revisit those one day. For those who missed out on Piano Fighter, each album will be released individually before the end of 2025 on vinyl. Until then, it looks like for the next project we might send The Envoy...