The triumph of Warren Zevon’s 1978 album, Excitable Boy, and its surprise radio hit “Werewolves of London” finally brought the singer-songwriter the mainstream popularity he’d long craved. But success would also send Zevon—a deeply complicated and psychologically scarred figure—spiraling out of control, resulting in the end of his marriage and the rupture of several close relationships due to his worsening behavior and alcoholism (which became the subject of a harrowing cover story in Rolling Stone detailing his intervention, hospitalization, and rehab). That sense of a man in the depths of an existential crisis permeates Zevon’s 1980 album, Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School. Though he’d worked closely with friends Jackson Browne and Waddy Wachtel on his previous two LPs—with the duo co-producing Excitable Boy—Zevon elected to handle production on Bad Luck Streak himself, aided by noted engineer Greg Ladanyi (though Browne and Wachtel would make cameos on the album, along with various Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, and others). While not as celebrated as his first two records for Asylum, Bad Luck Streak is a pure distillation of the Zevon aesthetic, an album brimming with gallows humor and cutting emotional content, furious rock songs and stately pop compositions. Zevon plays things for laughs on the surrealist cod-calypso sing-along “Gorilla, You’re a Desperado,” while he digs into the darkest heart of rural America on the haunting “Play It All Night Long.” There’s an anthemic songwriting team-up with Bruce Springsteen, “Jeanie Needs a Shooter,” a couple classical forays in “Interlude No. 1” and “Interlude No. 2” (reflecting Zevon’s roots as a young Stravinsky acolyte), and a suitably quirky tribute to spaced-out baseball pitcher Bill Lee. Several songs seemed to sum up Zevon’s own tortured state, including the hard-charging title track (which is introduced with the sound of Zevon firing off his .44 in the studio), “Bed of Coals” (an aching country lament co-credited to T Bone Burnett), and album closer “Wild Age,” where Zevon ponders his possible fate (“Some of them keep running ’til they run straight in their graves”). The record’s only “hit” would prove to be a cover of the New Orleans classic “A Certain Girl” (written by Allen Toussaint), which would make it to No. 57 on the charts. While the album itself would reach the Top 20, overall sales paled in comparison to Excitable Boy, as Zevon’s fleeting pop stardom began to give way to a career as a revered cult artist.