“I want to wear sweaters, a scarf, the overcoat, the whole thing, like a Winona Ryder movie,” Warren Zevon mischievously joked when faced with a diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer in 2002. “And I can be this miserable, classic Walter Matthau invalid.”
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Such was the spirit of one of the most cynically sentimental songwriters. Zevon’s drier wit and macabre humor followed him throughout his career and his death on September 7, 2003, at age 56. When first diagnosed with pleural mesothelioma, a cancer of the lining of the lung, Zevon even gifted his doctors CDs of his two previous albums, Life’ll Kill Ya from 2000 and the 2002 follow-up My Ride’s Here.
“These are my last two albums,” Zevon said he told the doctors. “Maybe now you’ll understand that eerie acceptance of death you keep asking me about.” Zevon would also start recording his final album following his diagnosis, The Wind, which was released two weeks before his death in 2003,
A classically trained musician, an earlier Zevon song, “He Quit Me,” was featured in the 1969 drama Midnight Cowboy, which he later included on his 1970 debut, Wanted Dead or Alive as “She Quit Me.” By the early ’70s, Zevon was writing jingles and working as a session musician, predominantly for The Everly Brothers’ tours before breaking out with his third album, Excitable Boy in 1978.
Produced by Jackson Browne, the album also featured Fleetwood Mac‘s Mick Fleetwood and John McVie and Zevon’s first hit “Werewolves of London,” along with “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” and closing track “Lawyers, Guns, and Money.”
Former roommates with Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham when the two first joined Fleetwood Mac, both were also featured on Zevon’s second eponymous album, along with the Eagles’ Don Henley and Glenn Frey; all made more appearances on some of Zevon’s subsequent albums throughout the years.
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Bob Dylan, a long admirer of his, even plays harmonica on “The Factory” from Zevon’s sixth album Sentimental Hygiene, which also features R.E.M.‘s Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Bill Berry, who had briefly played with Zevon on their side project Hindu Love Gods from 1984 through 1990.
“There might be three separate songs within a Zevon song, but they’re all effortlessly connected,” said Bob Dylan of Zevon in 2009. Dylan would also return “Zevon was a musician’s musician, a tortured one. ‘Desperado Under the Eaves.’ It’s all in there. … ‘Lawyers, Guns and Money,’ ‘Boom Boom Mancini,’ ‘Down Hard Stuff,’ ‘Join me in L.A.’ sort of straddles the line between heartfelt and primeval.”
Though he never had a No. 1 hit, Zevon continued expanding his catalog with stickier black humor and unfriendly pop scopes that glued a long line of collaborators and devotees — Neil Young, David Gilmour, Jerry Garcia, Linda Ronstadt, Steve Lukather, Graham Nash, and Chick Corea, among many others.
For his penultimate release, My Ride’s Here, Zevon even enlisted some of his friends, the late Hunter S. Thompson, novelist Carl Hiaasen, and David Letterman.
After being diagnosed with cancer, Zevon had a last burst of songs and feverishly wrote his final opus, often working around recording equipment set up near his bed when he couldn’t make it to a studio. “I’ve been working frantically,” quipped Zevon. “But you know, imminent doom lowers the bar a bit.”
[RELATED: 10 Warren Zevon Songs That Deserve a Revisit]
On The Wind, Henley and Browne, along with Bruce Springsteen, Dwight Yoakam, Billy Bob Thornton, Tom Petty and Mike Campbell, Joe Walsh, and many more helped send Zevon off.
The Wind later picked up two Grammys for Best Contemporary Folk Album and Best Rock Vocal Performance (Group or Duo) for his duet with Springsteen on “Disorder in the House.”
“I feel the opposite of regret,” said Zevon of his career. “I was the hardest-living rock on my block for a while. I was a malfunctioning rummy for a while and running away for a while. Then, for 18 years, I was a sober dad of some amazing kids. Hey, I feel like I’ve lived a couple of lives. And now when people listen to the music they’ll say, ‘Hey maybe the guy wasn’t being so morbid after all.’ ”
Photo by Paul Natkin/Getty Images
