Warren Zevon peacefully passed away Sunday while napping. He died only two weeks after his final album (the masterful The Wind) was released to stores, and one week after the album gave Warren his highest first-week sales total since his mid-’70s heyday. The Wind, reviewed by this writer in last week’s Badger Herald, is an astounding achievement — a perfect capstone piece in a career marked by excellence in craft and feeling.
Throughout Zevon’s career, songs were nothing less than filmic explorations of life, the bad, the good and the funny. In his songs, Warren Zevon explored the world as a place of irony, bitterness, and ultimately, deep and desperate love.
His characters weren’t always likable and his premises often grim, but his melodies and imagery never failed to paint a vibrant and accurate picture of Zevon’s unique vista, from the lonely L.A. streets of “Desperadoes Under the Eaves” and “Carmelita” to the heartbroken lovers of “Accidentally Like a Martyr” and “The French Inhaler.”
From the defeated cynics of “The Indifference Of Heaven” and “I Was in the House ‘Til the House Burned Down” to the passionate believers of “Johnny Strikes Up the Band” and the recent “Keep Me in Your Heart.”
Beginning his career as a staff songwriter and musician in the L.A. studio system, seeing success only briefly with a mildly successful Turtles version of one of his songs, Zevon came into his own — both artistically and commercially — in the mid-1970s, when his first several albums (the first two of which are absolute classics) set the path he was to travel for most of his career.
Blues-y depictions of city life intermingled with sweet-voiced love ballads and character studies of serial killers with the occasional paean to rock and roll.
Although several artists recorded successful covers of his material, Zevon’s own taste of commercial success came with “Werewolves of London,” the ironic joke-fest whose catchy chorus and seeming geniality disguised its dark heart (“Little old lady got mutilated late last night / Werewolves of London again”) enough to produce a Top 10 hit. Still, his best material was far more sophisticated, both lyrically and musically, than this one-hit wonder track would reveal.
Whether rocking out with the cream of L.A.’s studio musicians or basically accompanying himself on piano or guitar, Zevon’s songs were as complex as any pop music ever made, but never annoying or pretentious. The symphonic coda of “Desperadoes Under the Eaves” feels neither forced nor overly cinematic, and the soulful subtlety of “Mohammed’s Radio” or the sheer rocking of “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” is just as effective.
His character-driven pieces (particularly the unbelievably great “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” and “Play It All Night Long”) are nearly unparalleled by songwriters of this era or otherwise. Diverse in subject and execution, neither his reputation as one of the Strip’s hardest partiers nor his more tender side was ever far from sight.
As the 1980s and 1990s progressed, Zevon fell from mainstream view but continued to produce interesting and affecting music. He wrote of U.S. diplomacy with devastating and unfortunate accuracy in songs like “Lawyers, Guns and Money” and “The Envoy.”
His 1988 album Sentimental Hygiene found him collaborating with Neil Young, Bob Dylan and George Clinton, as well as a Michael Stipe-less version of R.E.M. (with whom he would work again as Hindu Love Gods, at their best with a roadhouse version of Prince’s “Raspberry Beret”). Sentimental Hygiene also stands as one of Zevon’s best, with songs that drive as hard (“The Factory”) and coo as gently (“Reconsider Me”) as anything he ever did.
His output became less frequent as the 1990s pressed on, but its quality never lagged. Many of the songs from this period — like “Mr. Bad Example,” “Splendid Isolation” and “Searching For a Heart” — became beloved entries in his canon.
In the recent past, even years before the official diagnosis of his terminal lung cancer, Zevon has seemed preoccupied with death, both searching for its humor and finding pathos in the freshest and most moving manners.
Many of his lyrics seem tailor-made for eulogies and remembrances, perhaps none more than the prayer-like “Don’t Let Us Get Sick” from 2000’s Life’ll Kill Ya. “Don’t let us get sick, don’t let us get old/Don’t let us get stupid, alright?” Zevon implores, “Just help us be brave, and make us play nice, and let us be together tonight.” As his diagnosis was made public and work began on that fabulous final project, Zevon kept up his brave smiling face, letting it down long enough to forge further poems from the darkness, with help from many of his talented and admiring friends.
Warren Zevon was one of the best, a writer whose songs speak to the human condition in fascinating, unexpected and immensely memorable ways. His death will hopefully spawn increased interest in his impressive body of work, and there are few living musicians more deserving of such attention. The fact that he had to die for that attention is sad, but the irony and humor would surely not be lost on Zevon. His perspective was too sharp, his musings on life and death too strong, for it to be. Godspeed, Mr. Zevon.
Further listening:
–I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Warren Zevon Anthology (1996, Rhino Records)
–Life’ll Kill Ya (2000, Artemis Records)
–The Wind (2003, Artemis Records)
