![]() ![]() ![]() "I'd write instrumentals if I were to give up songwriting, although if I had my choice I'd rather write movie soundtracks than anything else. When it's time to write, I make a big pot of coffee and we strap ourselves in until the suffering is done."Īlthough he has often been compared to writers like Raymond Chandler, Zevon says he has no prose aspirations of his own. There's no office we work at my home on what's called the Sofa of Suffering. "Who knows where the ideas come from? Usually from mis- heard and misunderstood comments. The stories range from the grinding disintegration of a relationship in "Finishing Touches" to the tender and affecting "Searching For a Heart." "Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead" is in a class all its own. The album carries a spare but serrated edge. "I just felt that not only would Waddy know what I was doing there (in the studio), but he'd know what he was doing there." Bad Example," Zevon brought on guitarist Waddy Watchel, a longtime friend, as producer. I was going through my Prince period."įor the follow-up "Mr. I locked myself in a room staring at a computer for a year and a half. ![]() "We're not all Neil Young, you know? So I decided to overdub the whole thing. "There were these journalists always complaining about how much overdubbing went on in a record," Zevon says. Zevon went through various programs, best documenting the celebrity dry-out experience in "Detox Mansion" from the 1987 "Sentimental Hygiene." But then there was "Transverse City." His binges were the stuff of cross-continental legend. Unfortunately, Zevon was painfully familiar with too many of his thematic harpies. Linda Ronstadt helped by successfully covering "Hasten Down the Wind," "Carmelita" and "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me."īut it was "Werewolves of London," from 1978's "Excitable Boy," that put Zevon's sardonic humor on the map, not to mention his penchant for dark and sometimes disagreeable scenarios. Critics and performers took immediate notice, but the public lagged. His friend Jackson Browne produced "Warren Zevon" in 1976. He wrote Gallo wine jingles and worked for the Everly Brothers as a pianist and bandleader. One of his songs landed in the "Midnight Cowboy" soundtrack, but his 1969 debut album, "Wanted - Dead or Alive," rode in strapped across the horse. and Fresno, Zevon went from teen garage bands to New York to the San Francisco Bay area. And I'm thinking, `You know, this is worth getting up at 10 in the morning.' "īorn in Chicago but raised in Phoenix, L.A. "The next day I'm sitting with these guys watching the movie and Kevin Kline is on the screen singing along to my song ("Lawyers. and I said, `What? Who gets up at 10?' She said "Lawrence and Irving (Azoff, Zevon's boss) will be there, so be there.' " One day I get a call telling me to be at the studio the next morning for a screening. "I had no idea they were going to use the songs. Zevon seems equally baffled by his inclusion in "Grand Canyon." But when I asked how the rest of the week went, she told me those figures weren't available." A few weeks ago someone called telling me we had a day of phenomenal sales, more than respectable by any band's standards. "But I still don't know how that translates into sales. "Yeah, I'm getting attention," he says with a low, bemused growl during a phone stop in Nashville. Bad Example." Even People magazine, which 12 years ago was more interested in chronicling Zevon's glass-by-glass daylong journey into night, has accorded him good ink. And music reviewers have been good to "Mr. This time around he's got two songs in Lawrence Kasdan's "Grand Canyon." In a movie that convolutedly mixes hope, nervous laughter and dread, Zevon's panicky "Lawyers, Guns and Money" and the new, guardedly optimistic "Searching for a Heart" are a succinct fit. Bad Example." When he last played Parker's in 1990, his "Transverse City" had stiffed and he didn't even have a band, although he easily sold out the house. His performance with the Canadian band The Odds at Parker's next Tuesday comes at the tail end of a two-month tour in support of his 11th release, "Mr. Zevon's songs always suggest a cherub in a trench coat. Zevon has more than paid his bills, steadfastly creating weirdly funny, acerbic, cutthroat rock 'n' roll with enough steel-eyed romance rubbed in to acknowledge and even momentarily ease the pain. At 44, he's survived 20-odd years in one of the most merciless of industries and put behind him the consumption of enough vodka to float the Red October. But Warren Zevon remains upright, if also decidedly twisted. Whether that motel still stands is uncertain. 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. In his 1976 song "Desperados Under the Eaves," a baby-faced Warren Zevon sang: ![]()
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