Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner
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"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.
The song glorifies the exploits of a fictional Norwegian mercenary who fights in a guerilla war in the Congo, is betrayed and murdered by his comrade (Van Owen), and whose headless body seeks revenge. His weapon of choice is the Thompson submachine gun. The song includes references to the CIA's involvement in tipping the scales, where under their orders Van Owen murders Roland because he was "the best". Later in the song Zevon mentions other "revolutions" where Roland's spirit wanders, they are also incidents where it could be argued outside involvement tipped the scales. "In Ireland (Irish Republican Army), in Lebanon (Lebanese Civil War), in Palestine (PLO) and Berkeley (People's Park)" The final reference "Patty Hearst heard the burst of Roland's Thompson gun... and bought it". Could be implying Ms. Hearst either was caught up in the revolutionary spirit of Roland and got involved with the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army) or "bought it" as in she was duped.
Some have argued that "Roland" is a metaphor for Western (i.e. European and American) foreign policy that intervened in Africa and caused things to go out of control. And, the metaphor implies, the spectre of such foreign policy intervention haunts the world, even to this day. The concept of the headless mercenary is also analogous to the Washington Irving short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" where the specter is headless Hessian horseman. The Hessian were mercenaries used by the British during the American Revolutionary War. The headless horseman continues to ride and terrorize Sleepy Hollow despite his lack of head just as in "Roland" "They can still see his headless body stalking through the night.. In the muzzle flash of Roland's Thompson gun."
This song is an prime example of Zevon's willingness to mix political commentary with metaphorical wit.
Many fans insist that this song was the inspiration for Stephen King's The Dark Tower series, which is about a gunslinger named Roland; however, Stephen King himself states that the novels were inspired by the poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" by Robert Browning.
[edit] Historical background
Warren Zevon wrote this song in the 1970s as a comment on Western interventionism after the first Congo War had been fought from 1960 to 1965. In 1960, shortly after independence from Belgium, the Congolese provinces of Katanga and South Kasai seceded which led to a divisive political crisis within the postcolonial national government and widespread civil commotion, and then civil war. The civil war ended when President Mobutu took power in a coup d'etat in 1965 and established a one-party state. This civil war in the former Belgian Congo attracted many European mercenaries in the first half of the 1960s fighting for various factions. (These mercenaries from Europe included former Belgian army officers and other ranks that had served in the Congo's colonial garrison. Many South Africans, like Zevon's Van Owen who kills Roland in the song, and Rhodesians also fought as mercenaries in the Congo.) Limited mercenary actions continued through '66 and '67.
A similar war erupted in Nigeria in the late 1960s with the secession in 1967 of Biafra, a region of the southeastern provinces of Nigeria, until it was reunified with Nigeria in 1970 by superior military force after a lengthy stalemate between Nigerian and Biafran forces. Warren Zevon exercises a little poetic licence in placing Biafra in the Congolese war of 1960-65. Like the Congo, however, the Nigerian Civil War attracted many Western mercenaries from Europe and other parts of the world, fighting for either side, with Biafra attracting the greater number of foreign mercenaries. Many of the mercenaries who were fighting in Nigeria had fought before in the Congo in the previous years of the decade.
Western-mercenary involvement in African wars and politics, from the 1960s through to the present, remains an exceedingly controversial legacy of the immediate postcolonial period in Africa. The 1960s' Congolese and Nigerian civil wars were two of the largest and starkest examples of mercenary involvement and manipulation in postcolonial Africa and set a precedent which had been followed up to the early 1990s.
