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| My Zevon collection, or a cross-section... |
A few notes as background to my contribution to this podcast about Crystal Zevon's 'oral history' biography of her ex-husband the songwriter Warren Zevon,entitled I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, which she compiled at his express request
following his death from cancer in 2003. The host is the superb Backlisted site
run by Andy Miller and John Mitchinson, an invaluable resource for all lovers
of good books young and old (and by that I mean both listeners and books...)
1. Zevon was, in Bruce
Springsteen’s view and mine, 'one of the great American songwriters.' Listen to anything of his and you will quickly pick up on the bite, erudition and humour of someone who understood the secret badness of
the world and could still make it sound uncommonly elegant.
2. If you’ve never listened to Zevon previously you can start
with this top ten that I compiled as a Spotify playlist. Full disclosure: the
inclusion of Werewolves of London is rather a sop to it being his Greatest Hit –
if headed to a desert island I would prefer Renegade from the Mr Bad Example
album. I’d take Werewolves, though, were it Zevon’s live version circa 1980 in
which he would re-jig the lyrics to name-check Mailer’s Executioner’s Song and
Brian De Palma’s movie Dressed to Kill, wearing his cultural smarts proudly in
the manner for which we loved him.
3. The reason I heard that live tape, and umpteen other such
rarities, was thanks to a woman called Diane Berger who ran one of the internet’s
early WZ fanpages under the moniker of zevonfan1, and who sent me all sorts of
dubbed copies in the mail from the US circa 1996 – great generosity born of shared enthusiasm.
4. If I’m a little less of a Zevon fan today than I was then,
it’s because I have never quite gotten over reading Crystal Zevon's book. Anyone
who teaches Creative Writing and has recourse to the canon of great American
short stories will know that sinking feeling when for the umpteenth time while
stood before a group of undergraduates you are forced to observe, ‘Of course
his life and work were greatly affected by his addiction to alcohol...’ Thus
Fitzgerald, Cheever, Carver et al. And thus Zevon.
5. I had known Zevon was a very bad drunk during his lowest
personal ebb, and yet his extraordinary gift for a rueful love song and the
melancholy beauty of his turn of phrase tended me to see him as a man who had
been more often ill-used than using, more hurt than hurting. Well, Crystal's
book sure turned my head round on that score, notably from the point where she
first describes Warren punching her in the face... She forgave him, at length
and over time, and of course the credit and debit sides must be carefully
balanced by those who weren't there. But still, talk about a nail in the
coffin of the myth of the romantic troubadour. Goodbye to All That, as they say.
6. I’ve written two oral histories myself: Alan Clarke and Sean
Penn: His Life and Times. The form demands a subject who’s lively, who inspires
the telling of tales, even – or especially – contradictory ones. It can be
useful if that subject was a bit of a hellraiser - though raising hell can get
wearying to read about, just as it can be to observe, and even to participate in. Crystal Zevon’s book arguably has a shade
too much of Zevon’s worst behaviour. Regarding the work, while it’s great on the 1970s period which its author knows intimately, and on where Zevon’s songs
came from at that time, it’s a little less satisfying about the body of work
from 1987-2002, which I think includes most of his best stuff.
7. A confession: I’ve never really listened much to The Wind,
the album that Zevon made at great speed with assorted collaborators in the
period between his cancer diagnosis and his death. As artists sometimes do, he
tried to direct the way he went out, to set-design his final curtain; but his
work had always been coloured by the black wisdom that ‘everybody’s headed
for a hole in the ground.’ To wit, this observation from a 2003 interview in
the New York Times:
8. Favourite
Zevon lyrics? Too many to mention. But the following staves just seem to me an
unusually brilliant run to have inserted in a pop song: namely Porcelain
Monkey, which is about the life of Elvis Presley, a subject Zevon characteristically
dismissed as ‘a very sad story, and not an interesting sad story.’ Zevon, in
fact, made plain that in 1977 he was more upset by Robert Lowell’s passing than
by Presley’s. But to which of those two gentlemen can Zevon’s accomplishment be
more usefully compared?
From a shotgun shack singing Pentecostal hymns,Through the wrought iron gates, to the TV room,He had a little world, it was smaller than your hand,It's a rockabilly ride from the glitter to the gloom.Left behind by the latest trends,Eating fried chicken with his regicidal friends,That's how the story ends,With a porcelain monkey...
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