This is an old fashioned rock album. Each side has four rockers and one ballad. Not the kind of think I usually like, but I do like this.
My copy just has a plain white inner sleeve, and I wonder whether I'm missing something, because the back cover goes into great detail about who co-produced, mixed and engineered the album, but nowhere does it say who played on the album.
And the players are what got it attention when it came out (1987ish). Zevon's backing band is three-quarters of the original REM (i.e. everyone except Michael Stipe). They sound much more muscular here than they ever have on an REM album. Whoever's playing lead guitar on Detox Mansion is pretty good too.
Less well publicised at the time, though I sensed it in the playing and had it confirmed a year or two later, was Neil Young's guitar playing on the title track. Especially if you know Neil's Life album well, you can easily detect his trademark contribution to the track. Actually even the synth sound on the track sounds like Life. This may not be a coincidence since Niko Bolas, who was one of the co-producers here, also worked with Neil Young around this time.
Similar, in a milder form, to James a few days ago, one of the things that retrieves this album from rawk'n'roll tedium is Zevon's self-mocking observations about his lifestyle (his alcohol intake was prodigious), as in lyrics like "The mailman brought me the Rolling Stone... / I read things I didn't know I'd done / It sounded like a lot of fun".
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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