A few days after his visit to Thornton’s house, Zevon flew to New York City to appear as the only guest on a historic episode of the Late Show With David Letterman, wryly bantering about his impending demise with his most famous fan. But in time, Zevon would burn nearly all of those bridges, eventually retreating to Philadelphia in the early ’80s for an extended lost weekend that dragged on for several years.īut in death, Warren Zevon was ennobled as a brave battler of the great existential void, a tough guy with a heart of gold who “kicked death right in the balls,” to quote Zevon’s friend, the humorist Dave Barry. Zevon’s talent had made him one of the most admired musicians and songwriters in Los Angeles - Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, and members of the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, and the Beach Boys all lined up to back him on his classic self-titled 1976 breakthrough. In his personal life, Zevon was a womanizer who raved maniacally (and sometimes violently) through alcoholic blackouts, terrorizing his wife, Crystal, and scarring his two children, Jordan and Ariel. Throughout Zevon’s prime in the ’70s and ’80s, he was very much the epitome of the “problematic” artist - in one of his best-known songs, he sings gleefully about an “excitable boy” who rapes and kills a woman and then takes her home. The public nature of Zevon’s final months with terminal cancer forever changed how his life and work were perceived, softening his rough edges and sentimentalizing an artist who could be brutally un-sentimental. In the end, Zevon outlasted his initial prognosis by 10 months - long enough to witness the birth of his twin grandsons, Gus and Max, as well as the unlikely renaissance of his career and reputation. Almost immediately, he began assembling the songs that composed his elegiac swan song, The Wind, one of the most commercially successful and lauded releases of his 34-year recording career, released just two weeks before his death at age 56 on September 7, 2003. Doctors gave him just three months to live. Two months earlier, Zevon announced to the world that he had been diagnosed with pleural mesothelioma, a form of cancer that affects the membrane surrounding the lungs and chest. I went from super excited to really sad.” “He was moving slow, and you could tell he didn’t feel good. “I remember I went, ‘Oh my God, that’s fucking Warren Zevon,’” Gorman recalled 16 years later. music legend recently brought down to human scale by a terminal illness.
Late that Sunday night, an unexpected guest stopped by - a larger-than-life L.A. Eventually, they would stumble into the Snakepit each night for a session that lasted until dawn.īut Gorman wasn’t awed by the presence of the Sling Blade star. (Thornton’s house had previously been owned by Slash of Guns N’ Roses.) But for most of the time, the assembled musicians hung out, drank, and watched the hometown Anaheim Angels finish off the San Francisco Giants in the World Series.
Jackson Browne, who had gotten Zevon signed to David Geffen’s Asylum in the first place, later recorded his own version of the song – with help from Raitt - on the posthumous Zevon tribute album Enjoy Every Sandwich: The Songs of Warren Zevon.The then-37-year-old drummer spent the last weekend of October 2002 at Billy Bob Thornton’s Beverly Hills home with the ostensible purpose to lay down tracks for the Academy Award winner’s prospective solo album, down in his Snakepit recording studio. Zevon’s own version had appeared on his absolutely classic Asylum Records debut album the year before, which unfortunately had failed to make commercial inroads despite the involvement of Jackson Browne as producer and guests like Stevie Nicks, Lindsay Buckingham, Glenn Frey, Bonnie Raitt and Phil Everly. Most people probably heard Warren Zevon’s songwriting for the first time when they heard Linda Ronstadt’s hit version of this great sardonic rocker, which was included on her huge 1977 album Simple Dreams. ILYOS looks back at some of Warren Zevon's classic songs as covered by some of his many friends and champions from the West Coast scene, including Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, Stevie Nicks and David Lindley. The iconoclastic Californian singer-songwriter – he of “Werewolves Of London” fame – passed away 15 years ago this month. Warren Zevon, 1978 (Photo by Paul Natkin/Getty Images)
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