Warren Zevon
Unflinching songwriting genius.
“HE MADE RANDY NEWMAN SEEM NORMAL.” Bonnie Raitt
“There’s no way the mainstream could be hip enough to appreciate Warren Zevon,” said Bonnie Raitt. “He was our everything. Our Lord Buckley, our Charles Bukowski, our Henry Miller. He made Randy Newman seem normal.” For better, and for worse, Raitt’s words ring brilliantly true. In his 30-odd years as a songwriter and performer, the Chicagoborn Zevon soared above the plains of the popular, with his literate, hard-boiled songs of romanticism, cynicism, and life-and-death poetry. Simultaneously, he scraped rock bottom with a personal life thrown out of register by alcoholism, drug use, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and, when drunk, physical violence against his loved ones. Making Randy Newman seem normal wasn’t necessarily the best life-path. Raised by warring parents, Zevon buried himself in music and dreams of fame. His high school music teacher introduced him to Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft and, at the age of 16, the young pianist left Los Angeles to become a New York folk singer. He worked as a jingle writer and session musician, and in the early 1970s as arranger and bandleader for The Everly Brothers while he accrued a wealth of LA friends – Jackson Browne, David Lindley, Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Linda Ronstadt – who all appeared on his first two Asylum long-players. But despite a big radio hit in 1978 with Werewolves Of London, and high-profile celebrity support from Stephen King, David Letterman, Springsteen and Dylan, Zevon’s commercial career never took off. He quit drinking in 1986, but the high-profile hit album never came until, with dark Zevonian irony, the singer was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer in 2002, and a farewell album, The Wind, introduced him to an appreciative new legion of fans. Not all of Zevon’s studio LPs are perfect, but all give up gifts. With that in mind, we’ve concentrated solely on the studio recordings for the Top 10 choices.