From: owner-oppositeview-digest@smoe.org (oppositeview-digest) To: oppositeview-digest@smoe.org Subject: oppositeview-digest V4 #233 Reply-To: oppositeview@smoe.org Sender: owner-oppositeview-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-oppositeview-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk oppositeview-digest Saturday, September 14 2002 Volume 04 : Number 233 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: OV: No Dels - Zevon ["Jen Woyan" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2002 09:39:37 -0500 From: "Jen Woyan" Subject: Re: OV: No Dels - Zevon Here's a really cool article on Zevon from The Guardian from when his last CD, the ironically-titled, "Life'll Kill Ya" was released... Though he has never really been a top-ten hitmaker, anyone who follows these things or has been on the road with him knows he's one of the hardest working men in music. Can't wait to see what he comes up with over the next few months... Poor, poor, pitiful me Warren Zevon has all the makings of a rock legend. His father was a gambler, he used to be an alcoholic, and he wrote beautiful songs about drugs and death. So why has he been through such a tough patch? Adam Sweeting Wednesday May 17, 2000 The Guardian So your new album's all about old age and disease, then? Warren Zevon waits several moments before replying. "I think it has more to do with death," he decides, in his gravelly baritone. " 'Timor mortis conturbat me.' You know that poem?" Er, no. Zevon gives a ferocious leer, flashing two rows of evenly spaced, impossibly white teeth. Just because he doesn't sell many records these days, that doesn't mean he can't afford deluxe California-style dental care. "It's a medieval Scottish poem by William Dunbar. It means, 'The fear of death just fucks me up.' " His face creases up and he emits a deep, leathery laugh. Warren Zevon's latest album is called Life'll Kill Ya, and it's a record he didn't expect to make. After the blistering career-best brilliance of his 1987 disc Sentimental Hygiene, Zevon spent the 90s subsiding gradually into a quicksand of popular indifference. It didn't matter that 1991's Mr Bad Example was beyond the wildest dreams of the average singer-songwriter, nor that 1995's Mutineer, though not a masterpiece, deserved far better promotion than it got. Logic led Zevon to the conclusion that he was, to all intents and purposes, retired. He concocted his latest batch of songs without a recording contract, and feeling no particular urge to find one. He made up his own demo tapes to play in his car. "Jackson Browne and I were having dinner and driving around Santa Monica and I was playing him the new songs, and he asked me what I was going to do. When I told him I had no idea, he suggested calling Danny Goldberg - he's known not to be allergic to artists over 30 or 40 or 50." Goldberg, something of a rockbiz legend in his own right and Nirvana's former manager, heard Zevon's tapes and promptly offered him a deal with his new record label, Artemis. It seemed churlish to refuse. Somewhat to his bemusement, the 53-year-old songwriter found that his career had spluttered into life again. Life'll Kill Ya is a fine addition to the Zevon canon, all the better for its stripped down and frequently acoustic arrangements. In the past, Zevon has occasionally been guilty of LA sludge-rock bluster, but these songs flash back to the rough simplicity of his original inspiration, Bob Dylan. Despite the morbid tone of the title tune, or I Was In The House When The House Burned Down, and the terror of medical crises that palpitates through My Shit's Fucked Up or Don't Let Us Get Sick, Zevon's black, ironic delivery manages to suggest that there are still a few more twists left in these tales. His unexpected cover of Steve Winwood's Back In The High Life Again suggests both the painful transience of fame and Zevon's indifference to it. But doesn't he get angry that people don't buy his records? "Uhhh, not really," he answers. "I wish they'd buy a few more - it would help in many ways. Doesn't seem to be much I can do about it. But I love it when the cult kind of artists say, 'Well, I could change to sell records.' This from, like, a 58-year-old man. 'Yeah, I know how to make a commercial record, but I won't.' " Zevon roars with malicious laughter. "Like they ever knew how in the first place. Or if anybody knows how." It's disorientating to recall the rocket-assisted ascent of Zevon's career in the mid-70s, when he became the toast of the West Coast with his albums Warren Zevon and Excitable Boy. The cream of the Los Angeles session-man elite queued up to work with him, and Linda Ronstadt covered his songs Poor Poor Pitiful Me and Hasten Down the Wind. Zevon was signed to David Geffen's Asylum label, the centre of California soft rock, and even had a hit single with the deranged Werewolves of London. Geffen founded Asylum as a tasteful boutique label and once boasted that he never wanted to sign more artists than could fit into the sauna in his home. "I was never in David Geffen's sauna," says Zevon firmly. "Geffen wasn't particularly hands-on with my career. He was gracious enough. You'd play him a new song and he'd encourage you, but I'm not a great intermingler. It's not an accident that I'm a solo performer at the age of 53. I'm a deeply anti-social person. So the fact that I've had a few sustaining friendships over the fullness of time is the anomaly, not the rule. And remember, I was also dead drunk for 27 years, so although I had a sauna, I wasn't in as many saunas as some." Yet he was rubbing shoulders with some of the biggest acts of the era. A more calculating artist would undoubtedly have hustled his way into multi-platinum heaven alongside them. "I remember Glenn Frey from the Eagles calling me, and he said, 'You got a shitload of those songs like Hasten Down the Wind?' I thought I would have, and then Linda Ronstadt covered it, and it was a good time. But I didn't know all those people as well as popular myth would have you believe. I knew Jackson Browne and John David Souther better than anybody." A hard drinker who drank even harder when he was hired as musical director to the Everly Brothers in the early 70s, Zevon was sucked into alcoholism. He later detailed his rehab experiences in his song Detox Mansion. Zevon has always viewed the world more as a film-maker or crime novelist would (several of his eclectic circle of friends are writers, and, as Jackson Browne puts it, Zevon "is the first exponent of song noir"), and the role of drunken loner sat well with the caustic observations of his writing. To his disgust, the Philadelphia Enquirer once described him as "the Woodstock Liberace", presumably having overlooked the drugs, death and decapitated mercenaries that rampage through his songs. The fact that his father was a gangster and a gambler adds more fuel to the Zevon psychodrama. "My father was a wonderful guy," says Zevon. "But I can't imagine him going to a therapist, which is the premise of that TV series The Sopranos. A gangster at the therapist? I don't think so." He leans forward menacingly. "Sensitive gangster? Just a little oxymoronic, I think." Yet having dragged himself free of addiction (he looks startlingly bronzed and fit) he can detect no difference in his approach to songwriting. "It's exactly the same," he rumbles. "Writing a new song is like making a little movie or something. There has to be some kind of deal, and the deal is I get the idea, I hear it in the air and I say, OK, that's gonna be my next song. Am I gonna have to go on location? Will I have to shave my head? How am I gonna make enough sense out of this song to write it? "I don't like talking about it I'm ashamed to say this, but I even declined to speak at my daughter's college about this. I don't want to take it apart. I think it's a journalist's thing sometimes. They want to take the mechanical sculpture apart and see which way the spring is wound. And I don't know." Zevon obviously takes little interest in the fleeting picture-show of pop. "As Penderecki, the Polish modernist composer who writes spectacular two-hour requiems, said, 'I'm in the fine art business.' That's what I say." And we should encourage him to keep saying it.  Life'll Kill Ya is on Artemis Records. ------------------------------ End of oppositeview-digest V4 #233 **********************************