A casual joke at Warren Zevon’s home in Venice, California, turned into the song that would follow him for the rest of his career.
Zevon wrote “Werewolves of London” with LeRoy Marinell and Waddy Wachtel in 1975, reportedly finishing the basic song in about 15 minutes. What began as an exercise in absurdity eventually appeared on 1978’s Excitable Boy and became Zevon’s biggest, and only, Top 40 hit.
The idea arrived through an unlikely source.
Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers had watched the 1935 movie Werewolf of London and suggested Zevon write a song with a similar title. Marinell quickly came up with the distinctive guitar figure, while Zevon and Wachtel helped build a succession of increasingly bizarre lyrics around it.
“I try to tell people that aside from the fact that we got the idea for the song from a suggestion by Phil Everly, ‘Werewolves of London,’ from my point of view as a co-writer, is a rip-off of Hunter S. Thompson,” Zevon told Rolling Stone. “I can’t imagine why people don’t see that. And I must tell you that Hunter doesn’t see it, because Hunter’s too modest. He’s a real gentleman.”
The three songwriters weren’t initially convinced they had created anything important.
Instead, they treated “Werewolves of London” as a novelty, filling it with images of a sharply dressed werewolf wandering through London, eating Chinese food, and looking for trouble. Its humor culminates in the unforgettable refrain punctuated by Zevon’s howling “ah-hooo.”
Getting that deceptively simple song onto a record proved considerably harder than writing it.
Wachtel later recalled that the musicians struggled to capture the right groove during the recording sessions. Numerous combinations of players were tried before Fleetwood Mac’s Mick Fleetwood and John McVie supplied the drums and bass heard on the finished version.
“I sent everyone away, ’cause I really wanted to work up a great [guitar] solo,” Wachtel later recalled. “I got my sound set up, got a nice bottle of vodka. I said to Dennis Kirk [who helped engineer], ‘Okay, run the tape!’ The solo came up; I played it. I looked at Dennis, I played it back and said, ‘That’s it!’ I didn’t even get to open the vodka! Then I put a harmony on it, and it was finished. The solo took as long as it takes to hear it.”
Producer Jackson Browne, an early champion of Zevon’s music, also recognized the song’s potential. Browne had previously helped bring attention to Zevon’s songwriting and produced his 1976 self-titled album.
Released as a single in 1978, “Werewolves of London” climbed to No. 21 on the Billboard Hot 100. It became Zevon’s highest-charting single and helped push Excitable Boy into the Top 10 on the Billboard 200.
“It sold enough for me to make another record but didn’t do extraordinarily well,” Zevon said in an interview with Elsewhere. “Then again none of my records do. For me, hit records were an anomaly – and I don’t really mean ‘they,’ I mean ‘it.'”
The song’s life extended far beyond its original chart run. Its distinctive piano-and-guitar pattern later became part of Kid Rock’s 2008 hit “All Summer Long,” which also incorporated elements of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.”
Forty-eight years after its release, “Werewolves of London” remains instantly recognizable. A song tossed together in roughly 15 minutes became Zevon’s signature hit, proving that one of rock’s most enduring creations can sometimes begin with little more than a movie title, a guitar riff, and a very strange joke.
This story was originally published by Parade on Sep 14, 2026, where it first appeared in the Entertainment section. Add Parade as a Preferred Source by clicking here.