I never harbored the bitterness, and he ended up being one of my best friends.” Jordan finds that forgivable: “Yeah, he’s not playing catch with me in the park, but I knew his position in the world - sitting among so many thousands of people as the center point. When his dad, a Russian-immigrant gangster from Brooklyn, asked him to help with a letter, he “wept with joy.” Yet when Jordan, then 8, was ushered into his presence for a rare get-together before a major gig at the Hollywood Bowl, Zevon had little to say. His itinerant parents’ early divorce made Zevon’s childhood troubled. He could be “cruel for cruelty’s sake” (as confessed in “The Sin”) and during blackout drunks was physically abusive toward Crystal. He was the tough guy who wore his heart on his sleeve.”įrom that same nest of contradictions came Zevon’s valedictory body of work, both in his final album, “The Wind,” and in earlier work, like the 2000 “Life’ll Kill Ya” album, which seems eerily predictive of his fate.īut to read Crystal Zevon’s unstinting compilation is to swing between admiring and abominating the man. As Goldberg says in the album notes, Zevon “combined sensitivity, intellectual acuity, macho sarcasm, wit, crudeness and aggression.
#WARREN ZEVON ARCHIVS HASTEN DOWN THE WIND PRO#
The accompanying 36-minute interview disk, done circa 2000, displays Zevon’s eloquence in answering even pro forma questions.
ballad “Carmelita,” an emotional rendition in which we hear the original line, “Well I pawned my Smith & Wesson, and I went to meet my man,” which was later to be replaced by the much more writerly - in the most literal sense - ".
Perhaps most intriguing is the demo of the mournful East L.A.
#WARREN ZEVON ARCHIVS HASTEN DOWN THE WIND SKIN#
45-caliber ammo and T-shirts and cassettes (“Dad would shed a skin every few years, and it was all in there”), he found the real trove in the form of “a floppy, green vinyl suitcase, very ‘Death of Salesman,’ full of reel-to-reel tapes.” Jordan Zevon, who’s become an activist against his father’s form of lung cancer (mesothelioma, blamed on asbestos), was careful to wear a mask when he delved into the storage areas. Goldberg believed in the worth of exhuming Jordan’s pick of about 150 tracks that Zevon left behind and compares him to John Lennon and Bob Dylan: “I think you could count on the fingers of one hand those songwriters that created an original, distinctive, long lasting and important body of work as Warren,” Goldberg said. (Three of those LPs, never available on CD, were recently released by Rhino in expanded, remastered editions.) It’s clear from these 16 tracks, mostly demos of well-known songs, that the performer’s classical music grounding made him a deft arranger of his compositions - and also clear, as he growls his way through, that his producers must have worked hard to get some more tuneful barking and crooning out of him for the finished records. Released simultaneously with the book is a two-CD set (from the small-label Ammal, headed by Zevon’s late-career benefactor Danny Goldberg), which has been compiled from carelessly stashed recordings by Zevon’s son with Tule, musician Jordan Zevon, 38. “As I say in the acknowledgements, I fell in and out of love a lot of times.” Going through his microscopic daily notations, she noted in a recent interview, “There were many times where I said, ‘I can’t do this, I don’t want to read another word, let alone put us all out for public consumption.’ Then I’d run across some great line or the moment when a song trigger came to him, and I’d say, ‘The story has got to be told.’ It’s a compulsively readable oral history composed of brief narrative blocks, a wealth of personal anecdotes from her husband’s friends, lovers (including his first wife, Marilyn “Tule” Livingston), and collaborators, and most importantly, Zevon’s journals. Now living near her (and Warren’s) daughter, Ariel, in central Vermont, two decades after the breakup that helped send her and Ariel spiraling through years of addictive behavior, she’s touring the country to promote the book, which came out this week.
One thing that can definitively be said of Crystal Zevon, whose new memoir “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon” is that she’s forgiving. “It was very painful,” recalled former wife Crystal Zevon of that spell leading to his death on Sept. That resolve would last 17 years - until, in a small tragedy engulfed by the larger tragedy of his slow decline from lung cancer, he temporarily succumbed to drugging and boozing again. Zevon, who had strained a nerve in rehearsal, was on painkillers and steroids, and the rebirth he cited that night would soon give way to half a decade of heavy boozing and drug abuse that finally yielded in 1986 to a rededication to sobriety.
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