Warren Zevon wrote the rock song “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” in 1976. For listeners who know fetish and adult media, the track is a record of how a blunt sadomasochistic joke moved, over decades of covers, from a hotel room on the Sunset Strip onto country radio. The sarcasm got sanded down for the mainstream. The original verse did not start that way.
Zevon’s own cut has his usual black humor. A suicide attempt, domestic abuse, and an S&M encounter sit next to each other. One verse is the one people still quote: the narrator meets a girl on the Sunset Strip, she asks him to beat her, she takes him up to her hotel room, and she wrecks his mojo heater. It is comic masochist-hunting from the male narrator’s side, and it is 1970s rock letting an explicit SM request into the lyric. Jackson Browne produced the song for Zevon’s self-titled 1976 album. Later it turned up on compilations including A Quiet Normal Life and I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, and on live recordings such as Stand in the Fire.
The turn came in 1977. Linda Ronstadt’s version made it a Billboard hit, and she rewrote the verse. She remembered Browne pitching the song in the living room of her house in Malibu. The Sunset Strip lines did not fit who she was, so she wanted them out. With Zevon’s agreement she replaced them: she meets a boy in the Vieux Carré, he throws her down, and he shouts “Please don’t hurt me, Mama.” That rewrite is its own kink footnote. The woman who asks to be beaten becomes a man who is thrown down and begs not to be hurt. Power exchange is still in the picture, but the image is safer for a mainstream female pop-rock star in 1977. Peter Asher produced it. Released as an Asylum single, it peaked at number 31 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Almost twenty years later the Canadian country singer Terri Clark had another hit with it. In 1996 she heard Ronstadt’s version at the gym, thought it would make a country record, and started singing it live. She kept Ronstadt’s substitute verse. The single reached number one on Canada’s RPM country chart and the U.S. country top five. Deaton Flanigen directed the video: Clark at a gas station, turning men away until she picks the mechanic. Soft romantic comedy on the outside. Zevon’s S&M punchline is still in the song’s genes.
Other versions kept a trace. In 1986 the hardcore band SNFU covered it on a compilation. Singer Mr. Chi Pig used lyrics in the Ronstadt line, but the people he runs into are still men. Vitamin String Quartet recorded an instrumental on a 2003 tribute album. In 2004 Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt performed it on Enjoy Every Sandwich: The Songs of Warren Zevon, which put the original producer back in the song as a tribute singer.
Most radio listeners know Ronstadt or Clark and have never heard the line about being asked for a beating on the Sunset Strip. Listeners who track kink can follow the chain: Zevon’s sarcastic masochist verse, Ronstadt cutting it, Browne producing the record and later singing the tribute. By 1976 S&M humor was already close to the radio. Pop and country markets kept smoothing it. A shadow of power and of pleading stayed in the lyric.
