'Spokesperson for the Doomed': a Backlisted podcast on the oral history of Warren Zevon

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...

English Soul: Steve Winwood

BBC4 has been building up a superb library of documentaries about rock ‘n’ roll music, and has just aired another one, English Soul, devoted to the career of Steve Winwood. Still, I’m struck by how many of these docs tell the same sociological story, i.e. how in 1960s England a lot of young lads – mainly working class or petit bourgeois, mainly from the north and the midlands (or, yes, the outskirts of London) – wanted very much not to do what their Dads had done. That willed difference is an old story, yes, but in the 1960s it had a brand new outlet in popular music.
Moreover, these lads’ Dads (or Mums) quite often had musical instruments about the house – the working-class way of making your own entertainment and all that. But whereas Mum & Dad were raised on music-hall and might conceivably have appreciated Lonnie Donegan or Cliff Richard, the key to the needful difference was these lads' youthful worship of black American music and musicians, the love of blues and R&B, the desire to imitate its sentiment, its feel, its authenticity. Thus Eric Clapton in the BBC4 doc, remembering how he marvelled at the vocal skill of the young Steve Winwood – that he could sing like that, as opposed to what must have been his actual life experience. He ‘sounded black’, ‘like Ray Charles.’ (The doc went on to reveal that 60-ish Steve now talks with the clipped vowels of a long-time multi-millionaire country gent, whereas his brother Muff is still a cast-iron Brummie.)
When I was at the age (17) that one has a ‘favourite song’, quite often something a bit moody/melancholy, the one for me was ‘Can’t Find My Way Home’ by Blind Faith (which I first heard over the end credits of Kevin Reynold’s terrific movie Fandango, sadly neglected now as it was then.) The song was written and sung by Steve Winwood. When Winwood was 17? Well, he was enjoying knocking The Beatles off the top of the pop charts with ‘Keep On Running’, recorded with The Spencer Davis Group. And – you get my theme – when I was 17 Winwood was enjoying a solo US number one with ‘Higher Love’, a pop-'soul'/dance tune that rhymed ‘fire’ and ‘desire’ and was packaged in the Arif Mardin mode of the day whereby everything – keyboards, horns, drums – sounded programmed and spring-loaded and utterly inorganic… except for the voice.
After ‘Higher Love’ for Winwood came ‘Roll With It’, another sing-a-long hit that, if I remember right, was licensed to advertise Michelob beer. I well remember Keith Richard giving his hoarse opinion of the ambition of that record to Rolling Stone at that time: ‘Ahh, come on, Steve...’ In English Soul Winwood talks half-apologetically about ‘going along with things’ for commercial reasons at various points in his career. He was a prodigy, so he was doubtless offered at least as much as he could initiate creatively. What size of an artist has he been? The definitive answer is presumably in the new box set Revolutions. For my part I confess I prefer a master songwriter/musician who sings his/her own stuff, however flawed (cf. Warren Zevon, who actually covered Winwood’s 'Back in the High Life', albeit a little awkwardly) to a great singer who settles too much into familiar grooves and co-authored lyrical clichés. But for Winwood’s Blind Faith songs alone – also ‘Sea of Joy’ and ‘Had to Cry Today’ – on top of all the Traffic stuff and the solo material – I admit I remain a keen fan.

Michael Jackson & the Porcelain Monkey

I'm just old enough to have a fairly strong visual/sensory recall of the day that Elvis died, and the attendant mournfulness of that day's media coverage. I had only seen one or two of his movies on telly, but let's face it, one had never seen anything quite like Elvis, (and that, of course, includes his legion of professional 'imitators'.)
Still, even at my tender age in 1977, I'm pretty sure I had already picked up on the feeling that there was something sad, creepy and even sinister that had settled like a grim black pall over the image and reputation of the Late, Great & Beloved Entertainer. A few years later in the early 1980s I heard Alan Bleasdale talking on the radio about his utterly passionate adoration of Elvis, and I struggled with this reverence from the author of Boys From the Blackstuff toward the slobbish junkie who offered himself as a narcotics czar to Richard Nixon. Later, in 1989, came Chuck D... But I suppose that when it comes to the Great Ones then you hold on to the memory you prefer.
Today I'm remembering buying Michael Jackson's Thriller in Woolworth's on the day it was released in 1982. The lead-off single, the Paul McCartney duet 'The Girl Is Mine', had been wretched beyond belief, of course, but I was just a pop music fan and I reckoned Thriller had to have at least some stuff on it similar to 'Don't Stop Til You Get Enough' or the Jacksons' monumental 'Can You Feel It?' And indeed it did.
Doesn't the legend have it that Thriller was near as dammit recorded and mixed and ready to go when a perturbed Quincy Jones sent Jackson back to the drawing board to come up with a couple of much-needed floor-filler hits? And Jackson came back with 'Billie Jean' and 'Beat It'...?
Jackson circa 1982 is how I (and I suspect millions of others) would prefer to think of him, in the video for 'Billie Jean' or his celebrated performance of same at the Motown tribute concert that same year: an amazing-looking young black man with talent just pouring out of his fingers and toes. Not very long after that, it all turned sad and creepy and even sinister.
Of all the hundreds of songs written about Elvis,the one I think cuts hardest is 'Porcelain Monkey' by Warren Zevon, and its lyrics ran round my head again this morning as soon as I heard that Jackson was dead:
Hip-shakin' shoutin' in gold lame,
That's how he earned his regal sobriquet,
Then he threw it all away
For a porcelain monkey...

Unquiet Men: Martyn, Mailer, Zevon, Clarke

I've become quite a fan of John Martyn's, albeit very belatedly, since the poor beggar had to die first to stir me out of 25 years of paying the barest attention to his musical gift. What finally grabbed me was BBC4's very fine documentary about Martyn, made in 2003-4, first aired a couple of years ago, but screened again in recent weeks to mark Martyn's passing in February. BBC4, it should be said, have set the bar very high for excellence in the making of docs about rock, and the Martyn film is among the best for the advantage of access to its subject, not least at a time in life when he was about to suffer the amputation of one of his legs. As the doc showed us, 'health problems' dogged Martyn through his life, because he habitually raised hell: he wasn't sufficiently kind to himself, and - though ostensibly genial and lively as a person on top of his creative gifts - he wasn't always kind to others either, including loved ones.

In the doc Ralph McTell spoke feelingly about the emotional content of Martyn's music, and Martyn confirmed the intention, speaking of 'an intrinsic sadness in any creature.' Fine words. But McTell also winced when he referred to some of the things he wished he didn't know about Martyn's personal life, and wasn't going to share with the viewers. And Martyn's ex-wife and collaborator Beverly, mother of his kids, was also on hand to prick the mood of male soulfulness: 'You can sing the blues and make people cry', she remarked with a certain rising anger, 'but it's what you do as a human being that counts.'

Of course, the lives of many eminent creative men are littered with instances of dismal and disreputable behaviour, domestic heartbreak and discord; and critics and biographers tend to require that these be dragged into the complete reckoning of the individual. And readers, listeners, audiences - they, we, want to know this stuff too, understandably. We're only human, right? So are our heroes - human, all too human, whatever their access to higher powers.

Martin Amis once (in the mid-80s) took Norman Mailer to task across a sequence of interviews and reviews, commenting in a dismissive write-up of Peter Manso's brilliant oral history Mailer: His Life and Times that the 'common background noise' of the book during accounts of Mailer's stormy conduct in the 1960s was that of 'screaming children'. Fair comment, maybe. But Amis has surely now lived long enough to realise that judgement of one's fellow practioners in these delicate matters should be exercised with a little sympathy and self-awareness.

Of course, women, ex-wives in particular, can be piercingly acute dissecters of masculine boorishness. As a longterm admirer of Warren Zevon's music, I have never quite gotten over reading Crystal Zevon's oral history I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, which she compiled at her ex-husband's request following his death in 2003. I had known Zevon was a very bad drunk during his lowest personal ebb, and yet his 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...

One of the best insights into this vexed matter of male-female relations as complicated by the call of the creative life came to me back in 1998 when I interviewed the poet Jehane Markham for my book on Alan Clarke, with whom she had a relationship in the wake of the breakdown of his marriage. For Jehane this was a romantic transport that turned sour somewhat once she realised the extent to which Clarke required the company of male friends/accomplices and was unwilling to ever put his work into second place. Moreover, the milieu of Clarkey and his mates was boisterously proletarian, very different to where Jehane came from. She can say the rest in her own words, and I think she sums it up:

"It was old-fashioned, working class, patriarchal, it wasn’t good. And I was a silent woman, a young woman. There was a lot of anger that would come out of Alan, often when he was drunk. So I didn’t enjoy all that, it made my life with Alan quite separate, and that isn’t a good sign. Because if someone is going to be part of your life, you kind of integrate them with your friends and family, and I couldn’t. He did love his work, he was a workaholic, maybe too much so. In my dreams of him he was always working and I would think, ‘I can’t reach him’. When we worked together years later on [the BBC play] Nina, that was resolved. But I think he knew the balance of his life was wrong, he couldn’t get the personal thing right. Obviously, he was very scared of being trapped and contained and held back by a woman or women, he had to be free and unencumbered, and I think that was a battle within him. I don’t know if he regretted that, whether he felt we could have shared a life together while also being independent artists. It’s a lovely idea, but it takes a bit more than wishes, and it wasn’t to be."

Hunter S Thompson: Nothing Vicarious

At some point soon I hope to write properly and at length about Alex Gibney's documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, which I saw this evening. For the moment I would only say that it sure stirred up some ghosts for me. The final credits run to the tune of Warren Zevon's 'Lawyers, Guns and Money'. The moment in my sluggish adolescence when I first made the connection between what these two men were up to as artists, and liked to in common and indeed together - sometime around the publication of Thompson's The Curse of Lono and the release of Zevon's Sentimental Hygiene - was a fairly vital one for me. Zevon, too, has been gone for some years now. And men like Thompson and Zevon, they really shouldn't die. And on another level, they clearly should. Not by fading away neither.