The Man Who Kicked Death In The Balls
‘Play It All Night Long’, ‘Lawyers Guns & Money’, ‘Accidentally Like A Martyr’, ‘The French Inhaler’, ‘Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner’, ‘Excitable Boy’, ‘Boom Boom Mancini’, ‘Reconsider Me’. ‘Splendid Isolation’, ‘Life’ll Kill Ya’, ‘Keep Me In Your Heart’.
Sardonic, ironic and melancholic, Warren Zevon was the Hunter S of the LA singer-songwriter set. A person could learn more about literature and the human condition from WZ’s lyrics and liner notes than an entire stack of New Yorkers. It’s a bitter indictment of the awards show circuit that one of America’s greatest songwriters had to die of lung cancer before they’d give him a Grammy.
Never meet your heroes, the old saw goes. To which we might add, never read their biographies either. I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: the Dirty Life & Times of Warren Zevon (HarperCollins) was written by Zevon’s ex-wife Crystal, drawing on the subject’s journals, plus interviews with almost a hundred sources, including close family members, friends and collaborators like Bruce Springsteen, Stephen King and Carl Hiassen, who wrote the foreword.
Not for nothing did Zevon call one of his Best Of collections Learning To Flinch. I read this book through my fingers. Converse to the usual impulses of wanting to believe the myth was for real, some part of me hoped that Zevon’s noir sensibility, his F Scott Fitzevon schtick, was at least three-parts persona. Not so. I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead is one of the most brutally honest, unflattering, and yet strangely uplifting accounts of a musician’s life you’ll ever read. Crystal Zevon doesn’t pull any punches, but this is not a hatchet job enacted by an embittered ex. It’s a book written with obvious love, adhering to its subject’s last wishes that she should spare his legacy no blushes.
Warren Zevon was an alcoholic. To unpack this simple fact is to learn that when the singer blacked out he beat his wife, behaved abominably towards his children and was a nightmare to work with. He was possessed by the demon drink in the same way Burroughs was pursued by the Ugly Spirit; alcohol made him arrogant, irresponsible and downright dangerous. It compelled him to chase skirt, crash cars and shoot guns indoors. Even Zevon’s staunchest friends wanted to beat the crap out of him at some stage.
He finally quit boozing around the time of the Sentimental Hygiene album in 1987 (which contained the all-time great rehab anthem ‘Detox Mansion’) and spent 17 years on the dry. By all accounts he substituted drink for a sex addiction that rendered him incapable of holding down a relationship for longer than a few months. (Jordan Zevon’s duty as a son was to dispose of his dad’s porn stash after he died. What he didn’t realise was the offending tapes contained film of the old man having sex.)
I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead is as painful as an intervention session, but despite all the dirt, it’s hard not to feel respect when one reads of the courage with which Zevon confronted his doctors’ diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer, or that legendary last Letterman appearance, or considers the guts required to write his final 2003 album The Wind in the knowledge that he had mere months left on the earth.
Of all the voices afforded their say in this compelling car-crash of a book, Pulitzer Prize winning writer Dave Barry delivers perhaps the best epitaph.
“I’d say he kicked death right in the balls.”
Our interview with Warren Zevon, published shortly after his death in 2003.
His last will and testament, The Wind.
boom boom mancini’s a great song. I always saw Zeavon and Steve Earle as kindred spirits musically if very different in their actual sound. Don’t know if anyone else ever felt that way.