There's no obviously epochal music on Warren Zevon's 1995 studio album Mutineer, a collection of self-produced home recordings released to little fanfare on Warner honcho Irving Azoff's vanity label Giant. Not that anybody had high hopes for that particular record; in the year of Jagged Little Pill and To Bring You My Love, with grunge holding steady and bicoastal hip-hop ascendant, middle-aged male singer-songwriters were not an industry growth sector. Instead, Zevon's greatest pop-cultural exposure of the era came on an episode of The Larry Sanders Show, where he glumly played himself (and the piano) through a half-hearted rendition of his 1977 novelty hit “Werewolves of London,” a song whose picaresque lyrical brilliance (“little old lady got mutilated late last night”) and third-power catchiness—abetted by the rhythm section of Rumors-era Fleetwood Mac—effectively wrote the royalty checks that Zevon would cash for the rest of his career.
“Werewolves of London” was a monster; enough of an earworm, in fact, that Martin Scorsese used it as Tom Cruise's theme music in The Color of Money (1986). (It was an ideal choice for a young movie star on the prowl; one whose hair was perfect.) In 2008, Kid Rock—a lesser artist than Scorsese, but still an auteur of sorts— released the brain-dead coming-of-age anthem “All Summer Long,” which heedlessly mashed up “Werewolves” with Lynyrd Skynyrd's “Sweet Home Alabama,” tickling confused Boomers' pleasure centers while inadvertently squaring the circle on a long-ago lyrical feud. In 1974, on “Sweet Home Alabama,” Skynyrd frontman Ronnie Van Zant had called out Neil Young for his supposed anti-redneck slander on the song “Southern Man” (“now your crosses are burning fast”); a few years later, after Van Zant and several of his bandmates had been killed in a tragic plane crash, Zevon released “Play It All Night Long,” which imagined a hillbilly clan straight out of “Southern Man”—or maybe Deliverance—blasting “Sweet Home Alabama” in between bouts of banjo-picking, Bible-thumping and incestuous sex. “Play that dead band's song” cries the song's narrator; the line was shocking, mean-spirited, gratuitous and, in a typically Zevonian way, provocatively and productively double-edged. Was he really mocking an act of God, or suggesting—correctly, as it turns out—that Skynyrd's legacy would live on after their deaths, like a “Free Bird” rising from the ashes?
Meanwhile, over on The Larry Sanders Show, the joke was that, professionally speaking, Zevon was a dead man walking. Nobody, from Garry Shandling's David Letterman-manesque title character, to the in-universe studio audience, to the actual folks watching the show on HBO, wanted to hear any of Warren's new shit. Instead, they all howled for “Werewolves of London,” and, having frittered away any residual goodwill (and actual residuals) over two decades of bad behavior, Zevon had no choice but to oblige. The only thing more humiliating than being a one-hit wonder is being a great musician—a “musician's musician,” in the words of admirer and sometime collaborator Bob Dylan—that most people only know as a one-hit wonder. When Warren asks Larry if he can play his 1976 masterpiece “The French Inhaler,” which name-checks Norman Mailer, the host's disinterest is devastating. The mandate is to play “Werewolves of London,” and that's it. Turn those speakers up full blast/ play it all night long.
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On the very enjoyable 2004 Zevon tribute album Enjoy Every Sandwich—named for the tributee's famous last-ish words when he went on actual late-night TV with the actual David Letterman to commiserate about his impending, terminal mesothelioma diagnosis —“Werewolves of London” is covered by Adam Sandler, who gives it a good karaoke-night treatment. Like Letterman, who provided guest vocals on Zevon's tragicomic ice-hockey murder ballad “Hit Somebody,” Sandler is a fan who's found ways to incorporate his idol's music into his own work—e.g. the inclusion of 2002's tender, death's-bed love song “Keep Me in Your Heart” in Funny People (2009). Meanwhile, the most enduring song on Mutineer—the nautically themed title track—is covered on Enjoy Every Sandwich by Bob Dylan in a live performance that bristles with an ornery, deep-seated respect. “There might be three separate songs within a Zevon song,” Dylan once told an interviewer, “but they're all effortlessly connected.” Back in 1987, Dylan had played harmonica on “The Factory,” a rollicking Bruce Springsteen pastiche written for Zevon's studio album Sentimental Hygiene, which also featured contributions from Neil Young, Don Henley, George Clinton, and relative (at the time) newcomers R.E.M.: musician's musicians all, not that their collective presence helped their comeback-minded pal dent the Top 40.
“Reconsider me,” Zevon sang on Sentimental Hygiene, a song whose apparent sincerity, buoyed by a gorgeous, soaring chorus worthy of Jackson Browne, belied a wry recidivist guilt. Between his myriad, self-destructive run-ins with various producers and power-brokers—including Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner, who made him persona non grata in the magazine's pages—and his Three Mile Island-level-disaster area of a private life, there didn't seem to be a promise, vow, or habit that Zevon couldn't break. His trajectory was always twelve steps forward, one giant leap back; “way up on rehab mountain, we learn these things by heart” he snarked on the self-satirical AA fable “Detox Mansion.” Hence the beautiful-loser fatalism of later, stripped-down records like Mutineer and 2000's Life'll Kill Ya, whose characters—as ever a collection of sociopaths and lowlifes, thinly veiled surrogates for their creator—can't help but bemoan their station. Taken together, songs like “Life'll Kill Ya,” “My Shit's Fucked Up,” and “Don't Let Us Get Sick” suggest various stages of grief (denial, bargaining, anger, acceptance) on shuffle. A couple of years later, Zevon did get sick. He issued his reminder about sandwiches and the enjoyment thereof, got off a few more good lines about death and dying, and basked for a few months in the glow of multiple Grammy nominations for his valedictory 2002 album The Wind before succumbing to cancer at the age of 56—old enough to definitively reconcile with friends, partners, lovers, and family members, and to witness the birth of twin grandsons.
The booby-trapped meaning of “Reconsider Me” sprang to mind earlier this year when Billy Joel tried to play sentimental hygienist by campaigning for his fellow piano man to enter the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame—a place where our antihero could finally be ensconced alongside competitors and collaborators living and dead. Despite his two decades of posthumous eligibility, Zevon had never made the short list of potential inductees, allegedly because Wenner, who carries a big stick with the Hall, had issued an over-his-dead-body edict about even considering his long-time bete noir. The idea of Zevon as an abject figure even by the standards of the Los Angeles music scene has endured as one of the truly twisted behind-the-music myths, consolidated by Crystal Zevon's scarifying 2007 memoir I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon, which, as a reviewer for Slant put it, tests a fan's devotion. There is, simply, no reconsidering Zevon after reading his ex-wife's exacting, almost forensic account of their time together (and apart), and no excuses proffered—by the author or her vast chorus of commentators—for a rap sheet including (but not limited to) drug and alcohol binges, domestic violence (verbal and physical), and personal betrayals ranging from penny-ante to unforgivable. The Widow Zevon's frustration, disappointment, and almost cosmic exasperation with her late husband is palpable: she was the official addressee of “Reconsider Me,” and though charmed by the gesture, she didn't buy it, not least of all because while serenading her in the recording studio Warren ignored his young daughter Ariel, who sat quietly in the corner waiting for the singing to stop.
Nearly every page of I'll Sleep When I'm Dead contains some kind of similarly mortifying episode. And yet there isn't an ounce of hatred in its three hundred plus pages. Instead, beneath its scabrous and bruised surfaces, the book vibrates with the contradictory but passionate affection its subject had once described on “Accidentally Like a Martyr”: mad love, shadow love, random love, and abandoned love. If Zevon was a martyr, it was to his own cause—and hardly an accident—but the blend of voices, Crystal's included, singing his praises alongside his faults contradicts that song's belief that “the hurt gets worse and the heart gets harder.” Zevon's deathbed insistence that his ex-wife tell his story unredacted smacks a bit of bad-boy narcissism—a degenerate's last wish to get everything on the record—but it also betrays the voracious emotionalism of the man who wrote “Reconsider Me” and also “Keep Me In Your Heart,” with their plaintive unspoken subtext that the singer knows he might not otherwise be welcome in such a tender organ. I'll Sleep When I'm Dead duly inventories Zevon's various rivalries (including a fractious encounter with Billy Joel) and vendettas (he briefly considered not having a funeral just to keep Don Henley from attending), while also alluding to the deep, devastating fears that shadowed his final days: the suspicion that spending his life in step with the distancing effect may have succeeded all too well.
For all her candor in I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, Crystal Zevon never comes out and says the obvious: that death effectively domesticated her lycanthropic soulmate for listeners and loved ones alike—the monster humbled and redeemed in the revelation of his own frailty, like David Naughton, splayed and naked at the end of An American Werewolf in London (1981). For some, that terrible vulnerability could be interpreted as a form of existential penance—the “Bad Karma” Zevon worried about on Sentimental Hygiene. For real dyed-in-the-wool moralists though, the good press and good vibes around Zevon's battle with cancer signified something more insidious—the unearned redemption of an abuser.
“What do we do about the terrible people in our lives?” asks Claire Dederer near the end of her new book Monsters, an incisive, open-hearted study of Pablo-matic virtuosos from Picasso to Polanski, with cameos by Miles Davis, Raymond Carver, and Doris Lessing—but not Warren Zevon, who doesn't rate a footnote. Her answer paraphrases no less than 2021's Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees REO Speedwagon: “mostly, we keep on loving them.” She's right, of course: the book's thesis is that when it comes to artists, as with our families, friends, and ourselves, emotional attachment is an involuntary and hypocritical impulse. We love whether or not we want to, or whether or not we can justify it on some moral/intellectual axis to others, or to ourselves. In a nifty act of rhetorical jiu-jitsu expanded from her 2017 Paris Review essay “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men,” Dederer slyly invalidates her own line of inquiry by taking the weasley implications of “we” out of the equation. “We is an escape hatch,” writes Dederer. “We is corrupt. We is make-believe. The real question is this: can I love the art but hate the artist? Can you? When I say ‘we,' I mean I. I mean you.”
I love Warren Zevon, which is probably the only thing I have in common with Billy Joel, and if I'm being honest, from where I'm sitting—in Toronto, at a distance—it's a pretty uncomplicated love. I love him for his humor, his intelligence, and his talent: in other words, for all the things that he, as a ranking monstrous artist of his generation, used (or that were used by others) to contextualize, justify, or apologize for his abhorrent behavior. In Zevon's case, the rationalizations were even trickier insofar as his best songs often seemed to be inspired—or channeled—by said abhorrence. What's that they say in fiction workshops? Write what you know? That'd be boozing (“The French Inhaler”); addiction (“Carmelita”); satyriasis (take your pick). Poor, poor, pitiful him. “Zevon imagines his tricksters, blackguards, and flat-out psychotics as individuals,” wrote Robert Christgau in 1987. “In fact, he fucking inhabits them, for better and worse.” But let's be honest: that sense of inhabitation, of possession (demonic or otherwise), was always for the better, because Zevon's art was reckless abandon and collateral damage. The episode in “Exictable Boy” where the (anti)hero rubs pot roast all over his chest was autobiographical; the bit where he rapes and kills the homecoming queen before building a cage with her bones was not. But, crucially, it didn't sound like he was telling tales out of school.
That potent, toxic cocktail of excess—spiked, but not diluted, by drips of poetry—is Zevon's signature; that it ultimately proved too strong for the Rock Hall is just as well. In the end, despite Billy Joel's eloquent advocacy, the voters kept their hearts hardened towards Zevon, excluding him from a class that featured Kate Bush, Sheryl Crow, Willie Nelson, George Michael, and Rage Against the Machine. Rather than suggesting which of these admittedly diverse (and, in their own ways, meritorious) acts should have been left off to make room for Zevon, I defer to my own favorite track off Mutineer, “The Indifference of Heaven,” which, as per Dylan's observation, unfolds as three separate songs in one: a crime-scene confessional in which the singer contemplates his own endless, existential rap sheet; a lament for a lost lover (maybe Crystal Zevon, or maybe another woman who was too good for him); and, in between, a pithy bit of music criticism targeting the Top 40 superstars peddling life-affirming platitudes on his radio:
They say “everything's alright”
They say “better days are near”
They tell us “these are the good times”
But they don't live around here
Billy and Christie don't
And Bruce and Patti don't
They don't live around here
“Billy and Christie,” of course, are Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley, and “Bruce and Patti” are Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa. “Around here,” in Zevonian terms, is a lonely place, far from the primo real estate occupied by his peers. It's the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel of "Desperados Under the Eaves” which the narrator fully expects to remain standing, even as California slides into the ocean, until he's paid his bill. It's the fatal Graceland of "Porcelain Monkey,” where The King, “left behind by the latest trends,” waits out his own obsolescence in a fugue state of fried chicken and despair. It's a purgatorial stint in "Detox Mansion," a sweaty stint in “Prison Grove,” and a majestic exile in "Splendid Isolation.” I'll go to my grave wondering whether the phrase “the vast indifference of Heaven” is meant to evoke a universe in which crimes and misdemeanors—including Zevon's own—are calmly judged by a higher power, or one where there's nothing over the horizon. If there is a Heaven, I doubt Warren Zevon is there; if he finally went to Hell like so many people advised him during his lifetime, it'd be fair enough. Either way, he isn't in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with Billy and Bruce and Bob and everyone they know; he doesn't belong there anyway.