![]() ![]() His father-William Zevon, or "Stumpy," as they called him-was a bookie and minor gangster in Chicago. Still, the book gives a reasonable survey of the artist's life and work. Now, however, a decade and a half later, Nothing's Bad Luck feels a disappointment. If Kushins had finished the book on that last tide of good will, the varying registers of the book might have passed unremarked. Released only two weeks before his death, it received nothing but praise, including a pair of Grammy Awards. The songwriter's final album, The Wind, was recorded with the help of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and others, after Zevon was diagnosed in 2002 with inoperable lung cancer. The cult fans demand only new information, the mainstream audience need reminding of who Zevon was, and the music critics require analysis of Zevon's techniques. Kushins in Nothing's Bad Luck, since he can't quite decide for whom he is trying to write. Thompson describes him as "a dangerous drinker.") Only in the days of his impending death from cancer in 2003, when all his lost friends remembered how much they had loved his work and rushed to honor him, did he return to mainstream popularity.Īll this creates a problem for C.M. (You know a man's living too large when even Hunter S. ![]() But he dissipated much of that fame through the 1980s in bouts of alcoholism and self-destructive behavior. He did have a brief period of fame in the late 1970s, following the release of Warren Zevon, the album with "Werewolves of London," "Poor Poor Pitiful Me," and, in a song called "Desperados Under the Eaves," lines as good as If California slides into the ocean / Like the mystics and statistics say it will / I predict this motel will be standing until I pay my bill. What he had were a set of admirers among professional pop artists (basically including everyone who ever tried to write lyrics), and another set of cult followers who bought his records and talked him up as an underrated genius at every occasion. But then, Zevon didn't exactly have fans, in the traditional sense. This spring, 16 years after Zevon's death, we finally have the long-promised biography, Nothing's Bad Luck: The Lives of Warren Zevon, by C.M. The sadness, the ruin, of Warren Zevon is that there aren't enough of them. She put me through some changes, Lord, / sorta like a Waring blender, in the 1976 "Poor Poor Pitiful Me." Or They killed to earn their livings and to help out the Congolese, in the 1978 "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner." Or I'm tied to you like the buttons on your blouse, in his 2003 song about dying, "Keep Me in Your Heart." They're great lines, clever rhymes, and they could only have come from one songwriter. Warren Zevon may not have been the songwriter's debut, but it was the album that confirmed he was a major talent, and it remains a black-hearted pop delight.This was someone who could write that his lover was a credit to her gender. But for all their darkness, Zevon's songs also possessed a steely intelligence, a winning wit, and an unusually sophisticated melodic sense, and he certainly made the most of the high-priced help who backed him on the album. The album opened with a jaunty celebration of a pair of Old West thieves and gunfighters ("Frank and Jesse James"), and went on to tell remarkable, slightly unnerving tales of ambitious pimps ("The French Inhaler"), lonesome junkies ("Carmelita"), wired, hard-living lunatics ("I'll Sleep When I'm Dead"), and truly dastardly womanizers ("Poor Poor Pitiful Me"), and even Zevon's celebrations of life in Los Angeles, long a staple of the soft rock genre, had both a menace and an epic sweep his contemporaries could never match ("Join Me in L.A." and "Desperados Under the Eaves"). Even though Warren Zevon was on good terms with L.A.'s Mellow Mafia, he sure didn't think (or write) like any of his pals in the Eagles or Fleetwood Mac Zevon's music was full of blood, bile, and mean-spirited irony, and the glossy surfaces of Jackson Browne's production failed to disguise the bitter heart of the songs on Warren Zevon. Warren Zevon was a ten-year music industry veteran who had written songs for the Turtles, backed up Phil Everly, done years of session work, and been befriended by Jackson Browne by the time he cut his self-titled album in 1976 (which wasn't his debut, though the less said about 1969's misbegotten Wanted Dead or Alive the better).
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