Song · Warren Zevon
“Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner” by Warren Zevon
From the album Excitable Boy (1978)
“Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner” by Warren Zevon appears on 8 radio countdowns from 3 stations between 2007 and 2026. It was first released in 1978 on the album Excitable Boy. Its best result is #80 on the WYEP Best Songs of the Past 50 Years. In the combined RockLists rankings it is #715 indie & aaa song of all time.
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Warren Zevon met David Lindell in 1973 in Sitges, in Catalonia, where Lindell was running a bar called the Dubliner after a spell as a mercenary in Africa. Lindell's war stories lit the fuse, and together they wrote "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner", the tale of a left-wing soldier of fortune: a Norwegian named Roland who signs on with Biafra in the Nigerian Civil War, Thompson gun in hand, then heads for the Congo.
It sits on Excitable Boy (1978), produced by Jackson Browne and Waddy Wachtel, with Zevon on piano and organ, Bob Glaub on bass and Russ Kunkel on drums. It was never a single, but the fans adopted it anyway, and it was the last song Zevon ever played for an audience, on Late Show with David Letterman in October 2002, the year before he died.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
RockLists rankings
Indie & Adult Alternative
All Rock Formats
All-time and decade countdowns
| Year | # | Station | Countdown | of |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2007 | 817 | WTMD | WTMD Top 897 Songs of All Time | 897 |
| 2016 | 537 | WYEP | WYEP 913 Countdown 2016 | 913 |
| 2019 | 1097 | WYEP | WYEP Labor Day Weekend Countdown 2019 | 1099 |
| 2020 | 1018 | WXPN | WXPN 2020 Greatest Songs of All Time | 2020 |
| 2022 | 932 | WYEP | WYEP Countdown to Fall 2022 | 603 |
| 2023 | 115 | WYEP | WYEP Countdown to Fall 2023 | 1229 |
| 2024 | 80 | WYEP | WYEP Best Songs of the Past 50 Years | 1049 |
| 2026 | 434 | WYEP | WYEP Greatest Songs of All Time | 1180 |
Also listed as: Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.
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