For those possibly unaware who Warren Zevon was don’t worry – redemption is at hand.
Between 1976 and his untimely death in 2003 he was the doyen of American songwriters.
Revered by Dylan, Springsteen and Jackson Browne – who played a significant role in establishing Zevon as a force to be reckoned with – he was a true original, devilishly funny, literate, astute and sharp as a tack.
With a fascination for violence, Zevon wrote songs that covered a spectrum from boxing to back from the dead mercenaries, werewolves to ice hockey, chaotic drug deals to envoys in the Middle East – the theme set with the opening song on his first album, a homage to those notorious gunmen of the old west Frank and Jesse James, Zevon establishing himself from the outset as rock music’s Sam Peckinpah, each narrative leading inextricably to a violent confrontation.
Take the closing track of his second album ‘Excitable Boy‘ (1978). Firstly there has never been a better song title than ‘Lawyers Guns and Money,’ while its opening line ‘I went home with the waitress the way I always do, how was I to know she was the Russians too,’ is also beyond compare.
This is Humphrey Bogart saying the first words of a Raymond Chandler screenplay – Lee Child would kill to give Jack Reacher such a sentence.
With his 1976 self-titled debut, Zevon set the bar as high for the singer-songwriter album as it had ever been. The music may have been rooted in the Browne/Eagles LA sound, but lyrically far, far tougher. This is not the California of life in the fast lane decadence, more the LA of novelist James Ellroy than that of Joe Walsh – Los Angeles a city of deluded starlets, fading stars, cheap hotels, loser bars and relationships doomed by drugs and deceit.
The ‘Excitable Boy‘ album proved his most successful, helped in no small way by the minor hit single ‘Werewolves of London.’ Ridiculously labelled a novelty song (it is far too sardonic for that) and besides novelty songs do not contain the word ‘amuck.’
Linguistics are not really my thing but I doubt any other songwriter has ever used the words ‘brucellosis‘ and ‘transactional analysis‘ in the context of a rock song as Zevon did in two tracks on his 1980 album ‘Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School‘ – side one opening with a title track that starts with Warren firing a .44 Magnum revolver into a dustbin filled with gravel, guns proving a recurring theme.
For years in his private life Zevon was beset by a drink problem, describing the rehabilitation process in typically unsentimental fashion in ‘Detox Mansion’ (‘I’ve been raking leaves with Liza, me and Liz clean up the yard‘ – ‘I’m dying to tell my story for all my friends to read,’) from the ‘Sentimental Hygiene‘ album of 1987. With the help of REM, Dylan and Neil Young, he comes out sober and fighting, producing a minor masterpiece (that went virtually ignored) but allowing him to reclaim the title ‘King of Song Noir‘ that Browne had bestowed on Zevon some years before.
From then on he stayed healthy but bounced between record labels for a series of excellent but greatly undervalued albums until being diagnosed with inoperable cancer in late 2002.
Given only a few months to live he strove to finish ‘The Wind‘ which would prove to be his final album. Many of the old crowd (Browne, Springsteen, Walsh, Henley, Schmidt, Petty, Cooder, Keltner) rally round to ensure completion, the album astonishingly good given the circumstances – the closing song a lullaby entitled ‘Keep Me In Your Heart,’ capable of inducing tears from a boulder.
Zevon outlived his first prognosis, passing away on September 7 2003 and with a macabre irony he would have smiled at, just a few days later ‘Keep Me In Your Heart‘ was nominated as ‘Song of the Year’ and ‘The Wind‘ album of the year – both triumphant when it came to the Grammys a month later, leaving some of us to ask where the hell were the judges between 1976 and 1982?
During this period Zevon was constantly lapping the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac and Crosby Stills and Nash, each of whom walked away with the honours in that era.
Almost fifteen years on from his death the art of song writing remains diminished without him. Given that fake news and the Kardashians are ripe for ridicule, his acerbic observations would have continued to enthrall.
Maniac, maestro, maverick, missed – go discover Warren Zevon.
This article was first published on 13/5/2018.
NEIL SAMBROOK is the author of MONTY’S DOUBLE – an acclaimed thriller now available as an Amazon Kindle Book.
