Review by New York Times Review
"I GOT to be Jim Morrison a lot longer than he did," the wild-man Southern California singer-songwriter Warren Zevon liked to brag in his abbreviated later years. So we learn from Carl Hiassen's foreword to this effusive, seamy - effusively seamy? - oral biography assembled by Zevon's ex. Short on perspective it may be, but "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" definitely piles up enough horrendous behavior to back the title's claim. Still, as even Jimbo might agree from his resting place in Père-Lachaise, being Morrison with self-knowledge is a painful contradiction in terms. Come to think of it, "wild-man Southern California singer-songwriter" doesn't exactly trip off the tongue either. Zevon, who died at 56 in 2003 after the cancer diagnosis that inspired his Grammy-winning final album, "The Wind," wasn't much on fitting into categories. Not pop ones, anyway, the reason his reputation always topped his sales even at his peak, 1978's "Excitable Boy," which included Zevon's only hit single: the goofball, irresistible "Werewolves of London." His joke about Morrison jumps out because he seldom compared himself to any rock 'n' roller. Despite his iffy choices of Ross Macdonald as Zeus and Hunter S. Thompson as Hermes, literature was his Olympus. If anything, he was the terminus - the last great literary drunk, marooned not under the volcano but just left of the Hollywood sign. Never the voice of a generation, Zevon was a recognizable figure to one of its subsets: the wouldbe hard-boiled eggheads who dreamed of being the son Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald had never had. Luckily for him, just about every other rock critic in the male-dominated 1970s had spent college nursing ambitions of melding T. S. Eliot and Raymond Chandler, with "April is the cruelest month" engraved on the long barrel of an imaginary .44. Compared with Zevon's ebullient inside track on this stuff - the erudite vein of macho fantasy - Elvis Costello was a piker. If you recognized the affliction, it was disconcerting but exhilarating to hear your private fetishes mocked and championed by a recognizable fellow prisoner, usually simultaneously. Because he couldn't help being funny about what mattered most to him, my hunch is that Zevon will ultimately be remembered as a wit. That's why one of the oddest sounding encomiums to Zevon in "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" - "the Dorothy Parker of rock 'n' roll" - ends up being surprisingly acute. After all, Parker doesn't belong to literature so much as she plays the part of our fantasy kvetcher and aspirant rolled into one. So did Zevon. Remember, this is a man whose greatest line - the "April is the cruelest month" of '70s L.A. rock - is a mock-Hemingwayesque report on a werewolf drinking at Trader Vic's: "His hair was perfect." According to his partner in the folk duo he formed in his teens, Zevon's eccentricities were "early and fabulous." Born to a Jewish father and a Mormon mother - a recipe to stimulate Norman Mailer's imagination - he later claimed he'd had "the highest I.Q. ever tested in Fresno," and proved it by getting out early. Dad was a gambling man with shady connections; once, collecting a high school friend at the Los Angeles airport in a spiffy Corvette and a new "Steve McQueen-style" haircut, Zevon cheerily explained, "My father's a gangster." All this is very evocative of the quiddities of SoCal life in the Beach Boys' heyday, including young Warren's encounters with the elderly Igor Stravinsky - less epochal than he let later profile writers assume, but initiating a lifelong propensity for hero worship just the same. Too ambitious to make a convincing hippie, Zevon scuffed around for years: writing the B-side of the Turtles' 1967 hit "Happy Together," doing a stint as the Everly Brothers' bandleader. Most decisive was the expat summer he spent singing in an Irish bar outside Barcelona called the Dubliner - more fodder for Mailer - where he befriended a former mercenary who was the inspiration for and cocomposer of "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner," one of Zevon's signature tunes. He came into his own in Los Angeles's mid-'70s rock scene, an environment so freefloating its incongruities were its congruities. Sardonic songs like "Desperados Under the Eaves" put Chandler through a Tom Lehrer sieve: "And 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." But Zevon's main recordbiz benefactor was the ultra-wimpy Jackson Browne, who produced "Excitable Boy." Meanwhile, Linda Ronstadt - who, unlike Browne, offers no testimony here - kept him in royalties by covering his more mawkish compositions, like "Hasten Down the Wind." Failing to heed one of the funniest epigrams in his own journal ("You don't have to firebomb Dresden to prove you can fly a plane"), Zevon was also a raging alcoholic by his 20s. "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" documents the results in predictably appalling detail. Prone to slugging his wife - married in 1974, they divorced in '81 - he stayed a compulsive womanizer even after he kicked the sauce, inelegantly justifying his promiscuity by comparing sex to a trip to the bathroom. While Crystal Zevon doesn't appear to grasp it any more than the dozens of witnesses she's rounded up, what's grotesque about this excess of torment is how willed it all sounds - as if, having come across the moldy fig of the artist as sacred monster, Zevon saw debauchery as proof of greatness. Since Crystal Zevon is convinced of her ex-husband's genius, she doesn't bother asking his fellow musicians to make a case for it. Zevon's music was, above all, idiosyncratic; the melodic facility that drew Ronstadt was at once undermined and individuated by his ham-fisted rhythmic sense and ungainly voice. But aside from some interesting anecdotes about his magpie gift for spotting lyrical inspirations in unlikely places, we don't learn a lot about his, you know, art. At least until the making of "The Wind," when this prankishly death-obsessed songwriter movingly tested his mettle against the real thing. BY then, Zevon had been sober for 17 years, sticking to it even after he made the classically Angeleno discovery that his A.A. sponsor was a drug addict. His gifts hadn't deserted him, but he'd lost his playground: the oblivious world a satirist needs. Similarly, John Waters stopped being outrageous once the special set of references that had energized him went from privileged to common and dated; Zevon was to self-conscious macho what Waters was to camp. But unlike Waters, he never mastered turning avuncular. After the doctors' verdict, he reached for the bottle again, somewhat marring the heroic spectacle of his final months for his children. When he died, his son had the job of getting rid of his porn stash; the videos turned out to be homemade and to star Zevon. Once a narcissist, always a narcissist - but then, I didn't have to "wrangle" him, to use the telling term of his long-suffering collaborator Jorge Calderon. Nonetheless, while 450 pages makes for plenty of wallowing, the gems aren't other people's insights; they're Zevon's own quips. Told that his presence added cachet to a television show, he answered, "Cachet - isn't that like panache, but sitting down?" If that crack was off the cuff, even Dorothy Parker might have stood up to hold his chair. Zevon claimed he'd had 'the highest I.Q. ever tested in Fresno,' and he proved it by getting out of town early. Tom Carson is a columnist for GQ.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Warren Zevon was greatly admired for writing some of the most intelligent and literate songs in rock. Probably best known are the darkly humorous Werewolves of London and Excitable Boy. He was a rock 'n' roll wild man, whose unconventional life his ex-wife Crystal's oral-history-style biography makes as iconoclastic in the telling as it was in the living. Among the tellers are members of Zevon's family, and friends and colleagues including Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bob Thornton, Dave Barry, and Stephen King. They comment on his often dissolute lifestyle, his drinking and subsequent sobriety, his off-the-wall humor, the diagnosis of the inoperable lung cancer of which he ultimately died in September 2003, and, of course, his remarkable songs. His behavior was not always laudable--for example, he was a notorious womanizer--but he remained true to himself. This often searing, humorous, and brutally honest book captures him at his best and his worst. Another appropriate friend, crime novelist Carl Hiaasen, contributes a foreword. --June Sawyers Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
For those who know them, the brilliant, dark songs of Warren Zevon (1947-2003) inspire nothing short of adoration; for those who don?t, this stunning biography of the irrepressible rock ?n? roll singer/songwriter should send them sprinting to the nearest record store. By taking an unexpurgated, oral-history approach to Warren?s life, his former wife and lifelong friend Crystal has crafted a sharp, funny, jaw-dropping rock biography that?s among the best of the sub-genre. Provocative and unflinching, her account distills Warren?s journal entries and the author?s exhaustive interviews with 87 family members, business associates, band mates, fellow musicians and former lovers into a chronology ranging from Warren?s ancestry to his death, at age 56, from lung cancer. The impetus for the book was Warren himself-he implored Crystal to tell his story and to "promise you?ll tell ?em the whole truth, even the awful, ugly parts." The awful, ugly parts turn up often: Warren?s addictions (to alcohol, drugs and sex), personal demons (intense obsessive-compulsion and commitment-phobia) and paternal shortcomings (to him, kids were nuisances) all get plenty of play here. But so does Warren?s music, for which peers like Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen and Paul Schaffer offer plenty of insight. This top-notch biography is a must-read for fans, and a highly rewarding read for anyone interested in a close look at the life of a modern rock icon. (May) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.
Review by Library Journal Review
When Warren Zevon died in 2003, the rock world lost one of its most raucous "excitable boys" and a brilliant singer/songwriter. Zevon's many memorable songs, ranging from "Werewolves of London" to "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead," poke fun at the rock'n'roll lifestyle and offer raw, cynical commentary on late 20th-century society. Interweaving the remembrances of Zevon's many friends with entries from his own journals, Crystal, his widow, presents an intimate look at Zevon's wild life of drugs, women, and music. Among others, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Bruce Springsteen, Carl Hiaasen, Stephen King, and the Everly Brothers, with whom Zevon got his start, share reminiscences. A former girlfriend, Merle Ginsberg, captures Zevon best: "The happiest I ever saw Warren was when he was in the recording studio. He came alive and he was a different person." One day there might be a definitive biography that analyzes Zevon's music, but for now this quasi memoir brings him back to life in all his dazzling genius. All pop music collections need this book.--Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Evanston, IL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
