I was never a huge Zevon fan, although I owned a couple of his early recordings. L.A. in the '70s, you understand, was a particularly bleak place and time if you happened to love music. Zevon was certainly not the absolute genius he was sometimes credited as being, but at least he wrote some funny lyrics, even if he did feel he had to adapt the protective coloration of working with members of the Eagles, J.D. Souther, and all the other sunstruck L.A. ninnies of the time in order to advance his career in the industry. "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" was a hilarious song. It sounded like Rudyard Kipling meeting Randy Newman in a no-holds-barred grudge match. Even the melody wasn't bad, sort of a watered-down Pretorian bar shanty. "Lawyers, Guns and Money" had one of the best hooks I'd ever heard in a pop song: "Send lawyers, guns and money/The shit has hit the fan." Compared to Henley and Frey, Christopher Cross, or Linda Ronstadt, Zevon was the bomb. (In fact, Ronstadt even covered one of his more tongue-in-cheek songs, "Poor Poor Pitiful Me," without having the slightest idea what she was singing. I'll bet Zevon laughed about it ironically all the way to the bank. Of course this was the same Linda Ronstadt who thought Randy Newman's satirical "Sail Away" was a soaring anthem to the greatness of America.)
Zevon apparently spent most of the later 1980s drying out and not recording. I lost interest in him; never did have much use for avowed teetotalers. Most musicians need a hobby -- drinking or drugs or child pornography -- they tend to be boring people, and if you want to write interesting songs you need to have an angle. (Tom Waits doesn't count, either; he's another songwriter who should have stuck to hard drinking and rough living on the mean streets of West Hollywood instead of moving to Santa Rosa, having a passel of rugrats, and learning to snivel "Yes dear" in appropriately servile tones.)
In Zevon's case it seemed he was better off soused, as I discovered when I got hold of a copy of his "Learning to Cringe" live CD sometime in the later '90s. It was a second hand copy, for sale cheap at my local used-music outlet. I brought it home and only then started to look it over. Uh oh, I thought, bad news right off the bat: Warren didn't have a band. Probably couldn't afford one at that point. It was just him, his guitar, a few Japanese keyboards, and his vocals, in a program of songs from various phases of his career, recorded on one of those undignified "world tours" of second-string coffeehouses and unhip pubs which over-the-hill musicians must learn to endure in their sunset years. After giving the disc a spin (at least the first minute and a half of each track) I realized that the title wasn't merely an ironic jape. It was truth in packaging. Evidently he'd had good reason for hiding behind those glossy, soulless Margarita Circuit studio hacks in the '70s. His guitar playing was coffeehouse-basic; his keyboard work relied heavily on pre-recorded sampling, and the less said about his voice the better. It was shocking how different his voice sounded when he was out of the studio, away from the Aphex Aural Exciter, Pro Tools, and infinite punch-ins. Learning to cringe indeed!
Recently I listened to "Life'll Kill Ya" and "My Ride is Here", two of his recent releases, and had similar reactions to them. I guess I just like his earlier stuff best. It played up his strengths and disguised his weaknesses. There's something to be said for artful camouflage. It's the equivalent of listening to someone ramble on after you've had a couple of drinks. Funny thing: their dull stories become fascinating, and you don't notice the hunk of celery that's wedged between their teeth.
People say "The Wind," Zevon's last CD, is great. I don't know; I haven't heard it. Maybe some day I will.
Despite my blunt commentary, I do have some respect for Warren Zevon. As unnerving as it is to see someone go out at the very bottom of their form, he at least provided an alternative of sorts to the bloated grandiloquence of the '70s in mainstream popular music. And for that he deserves to get the hell out of L.A. permanently and rest in peace wherever.
