38 special up on the shelf/If I start acting stupid, I’ll shoot myself.” In the recorded version, he sang, “I’ve got a. Zevon wrote a fair number of death-related songs over the years, including a semi-autobiographical one called “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” on his major label debut album “Warren Zevon.” It’s a rollicking, crescendo-laden rocker about proudly living the reckless life now and worrying about consequences later. “To my knowledge and relationship later on in his life, he didn’t have any real relationship to religion at all,” Jordan Zevon, Warren’s son, told me last week.Īfter his death, Jordan and his sister Ariel, with their spouses, sailed out in the Pacific Ocean and scattered their father’s ashes. told me when I was writing on the 10 th anniversary of his death. Although his father William Zevon was of Russian-Jewish lineage, “he did not want any kind of a Jewish service,” his ex-wife-but-friend-til-the-end, Crystal Zevon. Is it possible to separate Roger Waters’ music from his politics?.He had other people, an inner circle of loved ones who were much more part of his life. I reached out through his publicist and she passed on my message of empathy and conveyed the message that I’d love to speak with him. Thompson, Thomas Pynchon, many more.īut he had a different number in 2002 and I couldn’t reach him after his mesothelioma, a rare cancer of the membrane around the lungs was made public. He was the most well-read rocker I ever knew and his taste was eclectic and sublime - Ross MacDonald, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King, Hunter S.
No interview involved, no tour to promote, just conversation, his observations often laced with oblique references and ironic humor.
I had Zevon’s home phone number and sometimes we’d just talk. “A decade of sobriety out the window because you’re having a beer.” It could sometimes be unnerving if you didn’t know him well. Zevon often took time to think before responding. Should I not have done that?” (You know, maybe not good form to have an alcoholic drink in front of a recovering alcoholic.) “Oh shit, I’m sorry,” I blurted out, alarmed. The waiter came and we ordered beverages, a Diet Coke for him, a beer for me. In the fall of 1989, I had lunch with him at Musso & Frank, the hip Hollywood eatery where he was a regular. I got to know Zevon pretty well through those decades, reviewing and interviewing him for the Globe. Zevon backstage at the Park West in 1982. He’d play a gig at a Boston club and then schlep up to Maine to play a ski lodge. Later on, without the financial backing, and his audience at what might be termed “cult level,” he’d play solo club shows - just him with an acoustic-electric guitar and grand piano. That was when he and his record company could afford it and the crowds turned out.
Warren zevon mutineer full#
It has a pretty staggering effect.”įrom the late ‘70s through the early ‘90s, when he was riding semi-high, Zevon often toured with a full band. But they’re there because they believe in you. Each one of them has prepared a statement about all the times you were drunk, how they didn’t want to tell you what an ass you made of yourself and how you imperiled everybody around you. “They do that intervention therapy,” Zevon said, “where they casually walk you into a room and there’s everybody you know in the world. Zevon checked into a California facility and underwent a month-long intensive detoxification program. “It was a scary thing, but you’re real lucky if the gorge rises and the self-disgust gets to a sufficient cinematic kind of thing where you know that you’re an asshole.”
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