That would probably be the early s, when Zevon kicked the severe alcoholism that nearly derailed his career after the success of Excitable Boy. He went public with his demons in a famous Rolling Stone cover story, but there are still a lot of mad tales from those days to go around.
He had no memory of doing this. But we sat down to write a song. It was late. I might have written the first two lines, then I went down.
When I woke up, it was a song. In the mids, he wrote for the Turtles and recorded as half of a folk-rock duo, lyme and cybelle. When his solo debut, Wanted Dead or Alive, bombed, Zevon took a job as musical director for the Everly Brothers, did solo gigs and commercial jingles and, at one desperate point, moved to Spain in search of an album contract.
I was a folk singer who accidentally had one big hit. I wanted to write a certain kind of song, and I did. I was a good father. How poetic is all this? Or about what he might find on the other side. I might change my mind in a week. Sometimes I go to Mass with my ex-girlfriend. In the meantime, Zevon intends to finish that last record. Zevon often played in Colorado to allow for an opportunity to visit with his long-time friend Hunter S. A lifelong fan of "hard-boiled" fiction, Zevon was close to several prominent writers who also collaborated on his songwriting during this period, including Hunter S.
Thompson, Carl Hiaasen and Mitch Albom. Zevon also served as musical coordinator and occasional guitarist for an ad-hoc rock group called the Rock Bottom Remainders , a collection of writers performing rock and roll standards at book fairs and other events. This group included Stephen King , Dave Barry , Matt Groening and Amy Tan , among other popular writers, and it has continued to perform one benefit concert per year since Zevon's death.
An affiliated project Zevon both played on and wrote liner notes for is the offbeat album Stranger Than Fiction , a two CD set attributed to the Wrockers containing rock covers and originals by many of the Remainders authors plus such notables as Norman Mailer and Maya Angelou. One example was in when Shaffer traveled to Canada to film his cameo in Blues Brothers In , Zevon released the self-produced Mutineer. The title track was frequently covered by Bob Dylan live on tour in the s, and Zevon's cover of cult artist Judee Sill 's " Jesus Was a Crossmaker " predated the wider rediscovery of her work a decade later.
The album, however, suffered the worst sales of Zevon's career, in part because his label, super agent Irving Azoff 's short-lived Giant Records , was in the process of going out of business. With record sales reasonably brisk and adulatory music critics giving Zevon his best notices since Excitable Boy , Life'll Kill Ya is seen as his second comeback. He followed with 's My Ride's Here with morbid prescience of things to come , which included " Hit Somebody!
The Hockey Song " which was co-written by Tuesdays with Morrie author Mitch Albom , and featured a spoken guest vocal from TV host David Letterman and the ballad " Genius ", later taken as the title for a Zevon anthology , and a song whose string section illustrates the lasting influence of Stravinsky on Zevon's work.
At about this time, he and actor Billy Bob Thornton formed a close friendship, bonding over their common experiences with obsessive-compulsive disorder. In interviews, Zevon described a lifelong phobia of doctors and said he seldom received medical assessment.
Shortly before playing at the Edmonton Folk Festival in , he started feeling dizzy and developed a chronic cough.
After a long period of untreated illness and pain, Zevon was encouraged by his dentist to see a physician; when he did so he was diagnosed with inoperable mesothelioma a form of cancer associated with exposure to asbestos, and also the same cancer that killed Steve McQueen.
Refusing treatments he believed might incapacitate him, Zevon instead began recording his final album. At the request of the music television channel VH1 , documentarian Nick Read was given access to the sessions; his cameras documented a man who retained his mordant sense of humor, even as his health was deteriorating over time. Zevon performed several songs and spoke at length about his illness. Zevon was a frequent guest and occasional substitute bandleader on Letterman 's television shows since Late Night first aired in He noted , "I may have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years".
It was during this broadcast that Zevon first offered his oft-quoted insight on facing death: "Enjoy every sandwich". He also took time to thank Letterman for his years of support, calling him "the best friend my music's ever had". For his final song of the evening, and his final public performance, Zevon performed " Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner " at Letterman's request. In the green room after the show, Zevon presented Letterman with the guitar that he always used on the show, with a single request: "Here, I want you to have this, take good care of it".
Zevon previously stated that his illness was expected to be terminal within months after the diagnosis in the fall of ; however, he lived to see the birth of twin grandsons in June and the release of The Wind on August 26, When his diagnosis became public, Zevon told the media that he just hoped to live long enough to see the next James Bond movie, a goal he accomplished; coincidentally, the film was entitled Die Another Day.
These posthumous awards were the first Grammys of Zevon's more than year career. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean near Los Angeles.
Zevon's son, Jordan Zevon , did a large part of the work on the album and performed " Studebaker ", a previously unreleased Warren Zevon composition. First-ever CD issues of the Zevon albums Stand in the Fire and The Envoy were released on March 27, by Rhino Records alongside a Rhino re-issue of Excitable Boy , with the three albums remastered and expanded from all previous versions by four tracks each.
Noteworthy rarities in these editions include the outtakes " Word of Mouth " and " The Risk " from The Envoy sessions and " Frozen Notes " Strings Version , a melancholic outtake from Excitable Boy performed on acoustic piano with a string quartet in the style of 's Warren Zevon LP.
On May 1, , Ammal Records , the new label started up as a partnership with New West Records by Zevon's former boss at Artemis Danny Goldberg , released Preludes: Rare and Unreleased Recordings , a two-disc anthology of Zevon demos and alternate versions culled from pre recordings found inside an old road case after Zevon's death. But even with the feel-good patina that The Wind cast on his career, Zevon resists easy canonization, especially now, when critics and music historians tend to recoil against the thornier aspects of classic-rock mythology.
In his drinking days, Warren was physically abusive; when he got sober, he kept apologizing for a specific instance when he struck Crystal, giving her a black eye, which made her resentful.
And then she realized that he had been too drunk to remember those other instances. Later in life, he made amends with Crystal, and personally asked her to write his biography, warts and all. The redemptive quality of The Wind was a departure for Zevon; most of the time, he wrote about deeply flawed people muddling toward uncertain resolutions, with a dubious shot at any greater transcendence.
They own their sins without ever quite reconciling them. For members of the Warren Zevon tribe, your favorite Zevon song says a lot about you. Zevon demurs, suggesting that he needs an orchestra backing him to do the song justice.
For starters, I love the title. Zevon has the best song titles in the business. Sometimes I vote the former, and other times the latter. When Warren Zevon owns up to his complicated life, he makes you see how complicated your life is, too. Warren beamed, though his mother immediately ordered the piano out of the house.
A fight ensued. Fortunately, his aim was slightly off. And Warren got to keep the piano. At 13, he impressed his junior high music teacher enough to warrant an invite to a recording session for the great Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who subsequently hosted Warren at his home several times. Once, he even let Warren sip some of his scotch. By 16, Zevon had dropped out of high school and commenced a long, frustrating climb toward fame and fortune.
Not that this prevented him from living the rock-star life. Crystal pushed him to go to rehab. He refused. One night, she heard three gunshots ring out in the night. She rushed down to the recording studio set up at their Santa Barbara home.
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