![]() It would be convenient to report that Zevon’s career has just received a kickstart, that maybe old friend Springsteen has recorded an album of Zevon songs or that Mr Bad Example has finally gone top 10 in the States. “Yeah, we gots lotsa of time,” he laughs. The dark, deep voice is measured and precise, the long pauses between phrases appropriately disconcerting and the humour with a sardonic edge is intact. Yet in his apartment in West Hollywood he sounds just fine, thank you. ![]() Try this from his album, Mr Bad Example, the song Model Citizen: “torment the mailman, terrorise the maid, try to teach ‘em manners, whip ‘em into shape.down in the basement I’ve got a Craftsman lathe, show it to the children when they misbehave.” Preconceptions are inverted and the clown has a dark heart.Īge doesn’t seem to have mellowed him much as this “unapologetically harsh, nasty, ironic and really rather terrific” singer-songwriter (Time, late 91) still spins out a weird lyric. Like Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons, Zevon’s songs offer skew-headed humour with an undercurrent of disturbing distortions of reality. You suspected Zevon wasn’t in the rock encyclopaedias simply because he didn’t quite fit. Nor does it allow for years of alcohol addiction (seven in all, the result of stage fright), his reputation for erratic and dangerous behaviour (put him at the top of stairs and he’d dive off to see how it felt was the usual story) or for the boy who loved Stravinsky growing into the man who would pen those classic, desperate lines “send lawyers, guns and money, Dad, the shit has hit the fan.” ![]() Time to move on to the Zombies.īut that doesn’t quite explain a song like Excitable Boy, about a guy who rubbed pot roast on his chest, sank his teeth into the leg of an usherette, raped and murdered a girl at the junior prom, then built a cage with her bones. Include the words “psyche” and “disturbing” and you’ve probably got “Warren Zevon (b Chicago 24 Jan ’47)” down into a few neat paragraphs. Ī few album titles down the subsequent years and the occasional quick quote to round out his career. That he played piano for the Everly Brothers, wrote a few jingles, penned Poor Poor Pitiful Me and Hasten Down the Wind which Linda Ronstadt turned into hits in the mid-70s, was part of that Eagles/Jackson Browne LA clique and scored his own one-off hit with Werewolves of London. He got a snippy microscopic reference in the 91 New Illustrated Rock Handbook (“well-established but usually hitless”) and a massive tome from the same period by Phil Hardy and Stephen Barnard didn’t mention him at all.Ī few others get to the usual stuff. In short, we sometimes have to lose things to reveal who we really are.The various encyclopaedias of rock don’t do justice to Warren Zevon. But recognizing that this is not meant to be and letting these things go allows us to perhaps find our truer selves. We often hold onto things–people, ideas and hopes and dreams– that don’t truly fit with who we are with the thin hope that things will somehow change to match our perceptions. There is something bittersweet yet liberating in this idea that sometimes things are just not meant to be. I see this in this painting with the Red Tree reluctantly holding onto those leaves as they struggle to depart on the wind even though it knows that it has to be this way, that they must leave. The song is about the end of a relationship, where the girl recognizes that nothing is working for them any more and the guy finally grudgingly admits it as well, telling her to leave, to go hasten down the wind. I just always loved the imagery in that phrase– hasten down the wind– and thought it fit well with this piece. If that sounds familiar you probably remember the old Warren Zevon song from the the 70’s most famously covered by Linda Ronstadt on her album with the same title. It’s 10″ by 30″ on canvas and is titled Hasten Down the Wind. ![]() This is a painting that I finished over the weekend.
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