He’s the hairy-handed gent who ran amok in Kent
This year’s inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame were announced recently, and I’m pleased to see several vintage rockers finally get the nod: Joe Cocker, Bad Company, Warren Zevon, Nicky Hopkins. I first wrote about Cocker, then Nicky Hopkins two weeks ago. I’ll be profiling Bad Company in another week or two, but today’s post focuses on maverick rocker Warren Zevon.
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I’d wager that many fans of classic rock have, like me, a limited knowledge of the career of Warren Zevon. When I saw that the man whose main claim to fame is the 1978 hit “Werewolves of London” had been selected for induction into the Rock Hall, I shrugged my shoulders and said, “Really? I must have been missing something.”
I have a friend in Los Angeles named Michael who wouldn’t mind me describing him as a rock music fanatic, especially when it comes to attending concerts. He and I have often compared notes and experiences about the artists and albums we cherish, and he has turned me on to several that I doubt I would have discovered if not for his recommendations.
To say he was thrilled about Zevon’s upcoming induction would be an understatement. “Since the late ’70s, I have appreciated the writing and performing of Warren Zevon‘s music, by him and by others,” he said. “I have always felt it was a shame that he was never included in the upper echelon of rock ‘n’ roll, and I’m glad for his current inclusion!”
In light of that endorsement, I spent quite a bit of time over the past several weeks diving into Zevon’s catalog of 12 studio albums (released between 1970 and 2002), and I was stunned at how much of it appealed to me. I wouldn’t say he has a great voice, but he sings with defiance and vigor (in the manner of Dylan, Springsteen and others), and I’m pleased to report that many of his songs have memorable melodies, hooks and performances. I urge you to visit my Spotify playlist at the end of the essay and, perhaps, visit a lyrics website (www.azlyrics.com, for example) so you can follow along and get a full appreciation of Zevon’s talent as a lyricist.
Indeed, his way with words may be his greatest strength. As The New York Times put it in its 2003 obituary, “Mr. Zevon had a pulp-fiction imagination which yielded terse, action-packed, gallows-humored tales that could sketch an entire screenplay in four minutes, and often had death as a punchline.” Consider some of his song titles: “Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead,” “Angel Dressed in Black,” “Life’ll Kill Ya,” “Bad Karma” and “My Shit’s Fucked Up.”
In its inductions announcement, the Rock Hall noted, “Zevon wrote poetic but offbeat songs, often with darkly humorous and acerbic lyrics, and delivered them with a dry wit and a twisted energy like no other performer could.”
James Campion, in his 2018 book “Accidentally Like a Martyr: The Tortured Art of Warren Zevon,” wrote, “Warren Zevon was one cool fucker, whose music and humor and pathos made life better, and remains one of the finest live performers I’ve seen with an uncompromisingly smart and, yes, sinister side that always made me smile.”
“Sinister” is right. I remember when I bought Zevon’s “Excitable Boy” album in 1978 and enjoyed the musical sounds on almost every song…and then I started paying attention to the lyrics, which caught me off guard. For such upbeat tunes, the lyrics were pretty damn dark. Take the cheerful title song, which benefits from the great Linda Ronstadt on backing vocals, but here’s a sample of the words: “He took little Suzie to the Junior Prom, /Ooh, excitable boy, they all said, /And he raped her and killed her, then he took her home… /After ten long years, they let him out of the home, /Excitable boy, they all said, /And he dug up her grave and built a cage with her bones…” Yikes.
Mostly, Zevon wrote sharp satire, describing emotionally deep scenarios sometimes with tongue firmly planted in cheek but other times as serious as a train wreck. He was equally adept at moving ballads and spirited rockers, but he was also certainly capable of including a couple of clunkers on every album. As Rolling Stone wrote in a review of 1987’s “Sentimental Hygiene,” one of his “comeback” albums, “Zevon’s albums have always seemed willfully spotty, as if he knew quite well that he’d struck oil but still, self-destructively, placed it alongside goofy dreck. Even if ‘Sentimental Hygiene’ is only a two-thirds-perfect album, it still towers head and shoulders above most of his contemporaries’ best efforts.”
Where did Zevon’s cynical worldview come from? No one can say for sure, but he grew up in Chicago, then moved to Fresno, where his parents divorced when he was 14. He had the good fortune to occasionally visit the home of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, where he studied modern classical music. Zevon dropped out of school at 16 and headed for New York City to become a folk singer, but that movement was in its dying days, and he ended up composing advertising jingles and doing session work for the likes of The Everly Brothers, whose careers were at a low point in the early ’70s.
His debut LP, 1970’s “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” failed to chart and offers only a rudimentary version of the talent he would show on his remarkable second effort, 1976’s “Warren Zevon,” recorded in Los Angeles with the help of many LA-based heavy hitters (Jackson Browne, Lindsay Buckingham, Glenn Frey, Stevie Nicks, Waddy Wachtel, Bonnie Raitt and David Lindley). That album included two songs Ronstadt made famous — “Hasten Down the Wind” and “Poor Poor Pitiful Me.” Critics gushed over the songwriting, calling the album a masterpiece, but still, it stalled at an anemic #185 on US album charts.
Ah, but then “Excitable Boy” came next, putting him on the mainstream map at #8 on the US album chart, and singles that still get airplay (“Werewolves,” “Tenderness On the Block,” “Lawyers, Guns and Money”). During this period and in support of 1980’s follow-up “Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School,” he successfully toured as a headliner and in collaboration with Jackson Browne. I regret that I missed these tours; as his 1980 live LP “Stand in the Fire” clearly shows, he was a dynamic performer.
But Zevon had his demons to cope with, and he struggled with addictions. After 1982’s “The Envoy” was rebuked by critics and peaked at a disappointing #93, he took it hard, relapsing and seeking treatment. Although he recovered, and continued writing and recording exemplary work that earned good reviews and pleased his loyal fan base, he didn’t have much chart success with albums or singles after that. However, “Sentimental Hygiene” (which reached #63) is a real revelation, packed with marvelous tracks like “Boom Boom Mancini,” “Detox Mansion” and “Reconsider Me,” and augmented by the musical skills of Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry of R.E.M., among many others.
The fact that so many major stars were eager to participate on his albums or cover his songs on their own LPs speaks volumes for the high regard in which Zevon’s talent is held within the music business. Said David Crosby, “Warren was and remains one of my favorite songwriters. He saw things with a jaundiced eye that still got the humanity of things.” Springsteen noted, “I’m in awe of his diverse musical and lyrical palette, and I’m so glad I had the chance to record ‘Disorder in the House’ with him for his final record.”
In 2002, Zevon was encouraged by his dentist to see a physician for the first time in nearly three decades and learned he had late-stage cancer in his lungs and chest, which left him deeply shaken and resulted in another relapse. Instead of receiving treatment he feared would incapacitate him, he instead threw himself into completing “The Wind,” a searing “nearness of death” album (not unlike David Bowie’s “Blackstar” in 2016), which was released in 2003, just three weeks before his death at age 56.
One of his biggest cheerleaders was David Letterman, who struck up a close friendship with Zevon and had him on his show as the sole guest one night a few months before his death. Zevon called Letterman “the best friend my music’s ever had.” When Letterman asked him if he had any words of wisdom about life and death as he approached his final days, Zevon smirked and said, “Enjoy every sandwich.” That became the title of a marvelous Zevon tribute album released in 2004 and featuring a range of artists from Dylan and Springsteen to The Pixies and The Wallflowers covering fifteen of Zevon’s songs.
Zevon biographer Campion wrote, “It is important that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame not merely cater to the über-famous and instead take the time to shine a light on those who expanded the genre and traversed outside its parameters. Zevon lived on the bleeding edge of those parameters and came back to tell us all about it in incredibly moving, funny, and raucous songs about love, loss and death.”
If I had to pick one song that most grabbed me in my recent discovery of Zevon gems, I think it would have to be “Reconsider Me,” on which Don Henley provides soothing harmonies. It’s a poignant piece born of the changes a man goes through in rehabilitation: “If it’s still the past that makes you doubt, /Darlin’, that was then, and this is now, /Reconsider me…”
Way to go, Warren. You and your honest, edgy music and lyrics definitely deserve this honor.
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