Zevon has prepared for this crossroads for thirty years, on more than a dozen albums. I gave him the verses, and he loved it: ‘We’ve got something!'”Īnd the original line? “He has to take these painkillers,” Calderón explains, “so he was saying, ‘I’m as numb as a statue, so beg, borrow or steal some feelings for me.'” Then he called me while he was walking to the video store, because he can’t drive anymore. Calderón describes a recent evening when he and Zevon nailed a new song on their cell phones: “He’d given me a line out of a conversation the other day, so I wrote a few verses. He’s already got a title song for the album: “My Dirty Life and Times.” A gold-plated list of pals has lined up to help out, including Ry Cooder, Don Henley, Dwight Yoakam and Bob Dylan, who is playing Zevon covers nightly on his current tour. He enjoys being in charge of his own epitaph. “I’ll probably wake up tomorrow, too,” he declares optimistically.
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Dressed in loose gray pants and a wool sport coat, with a full head of dirty-yellow hair and a strong smile, Zevon does not look sick or dying, only a little tired - and that’s because he was up late the night before, working on his music. “But the nature of destiny is that I’m alive today,” Zevon says cheerfully after that menu finally arrives.
Can you help her with her coupons? Can we speed this up a little?’ Zevon professes not to care about the numbers except, he cracks drily, “in line at the market: ‘Excuse me, I have terminal cancer. Zevon’s doctors initially gave him three months to live but later backed off from a specific figure. He left with a death sentence: diagnosed with mesothelioma, a rare, inoperable cancer that had ravaged his lungs and invaded his liver. In late August, Zevon went to a cardiologist, complaining of shortness of breath. “At a time like this,” he says with an arched eyebrow and a low, rumbling laugh, “you really get the feeling of time marching on.” were just a few of the people who worked with him.Warren Zevon is sitting at a table in a Hollywood hotel cafe, patiently waiting for someone to bring him a menu. His magnetic personality attracted an astonishing array of collaborators over the years: Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, David Gilmour and R.E.M. But he was also charismatic, funny and more often than not the smartest guy in the room. He was vain and combustible, egotistical and petty.
The 80s and 90s were equally erratic, commercially and personally, and although in the early 00s he underwent a mini-renaissance, it was soon cut terminally short.īy all accounts, Zevon wasn’t an easy man to be around. The 1978 single Werewolves Of London propelled him to fame, but it remained his sole hit – something that proved a source of frustration and amusement to the man behind it. His underwhelming 1969 debut album, Wanted Dead Or Alive, proved to be a false start, and it would be another seven years before he released a follow-up. Zevon’s career was anything but predictable. “But I don’t get depressed and I don’t get bored.” I have problems,” he told one interviewer. He gravitated towards life’s losers, underdogs and addicts, maybe because he saw something of himself in them. Born in Chicago but coming of age in 60s Los Angeles, he could easily have carved out a successful career as a straight-down-the-line piano man like Elton John or Billy Joel, were it not for his caustic wit, chemical-induced instability and general contempt for the world. But then Zevon was never your typical singer-songwriter.
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