Philadelphia Weekly

Share this Story:

�

�

"The phone don't ring
And the sun refused to shine
Never thought I'd have to pay so dearly
For what was already mine."
--"Accidentally Like a Martyr," Warren Zevon

It's the kind of tragedy you can set your watch by: Man smokes. Man gets cancer. Man dies.

Happens every day. Sorry to hear it. Please take a number. Except this smoker is Warren Zevon, who was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer back in August, and he does his dying on David Letterman, who is a fan. Letterman recently devoted a whole show to Zevon's farewell, his way of saying Adios, pal, and thanks for everything.

Besides the dying-man-on-television angle, the fact that Letterman dedicated an entire show to Zevon is fairly remarkable, because outside of auto racing Letterman doesn't really fawn over anything. Zevon's brilliance is tuned to a low-key frequency, which means his admirers tend to be a select group of lifers, more a conspiracy than fan club. People like Hunter S. Thompson, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, R.E.M. and Bob Dylan--all of whom have collaborated with him over the years.

Mention the name Warren Zevon to most people under 30 and they look at you like a dog shown a card trick. Most people over 30 know him for his song "Werewolves of London," if they know him at all. He's never been much of a singer, and he ain't so pretty anymore. Never was, really. His records sound dated in a way that will most likely never become retro-chic. Still, his songs have managed to avoid becoming landlocked by time: Early on in his career he was enmeshed in the 1970s El Lay soft rock scene--along with Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt, all of whom covered his songs or performed on his albums--but his sardonic wit ensured that he would later be embraced by the punks as well, and the indie rockers that came after them.

Shot through with sublime drollery, self- lacerating wit and comedy black as tar, his songbook is built on the unfashionable notion that the words are the songs. Zevon's noirish lyrics--haunted by werewolves in tailored suits with perfect hair sipping pina coladas, headless mercenaries ready to kill for the highest bidder, boxing champs on their way to Palookaville and a regular cast of beautiful losers and lost beauties--have a habit of loitering on the dark end of the street.

Songwriting is like comedy: Either you kill or you don't kill. And Zevon could be deadly. Death has always been his most reliable muse, figuring prominently in song and album titles: Life'll Kill Ya, "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" and "Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead," which inspired the 1995 Andy Garcia movie of the same name. And so it is somehow fitting that death should come early and chauffeur him through a last-minute blaze of glory on the way to the final exit.

Born in Chicago in 1947, the son of a professional gambler father and a Mormon mother, Zevon has lived most of his life in Los Angeles. As a young man he befriended Igor Stravinsky, who lived in the Hollywood Hills. Years later, Zevon would tell WMGK DJ John DeBella that Stravinsky was his Elvis.

His primary influences as a songwriter were hardboiled, proto-gonzo writers like Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In the mid-'60s he wrote and recorded as one half of the trippy folk-rock duo Lyme and Cybelle.

After his 1969 solo debut, Wanted Dead or Alive, died in the cutout bins, Zevon found work as the Everly Brothers' musical director. His friend Jackson Browne got him signed to Asylum, and produced his 1976 self-titled album and the 1978 follow-up, Excitable Boy, which would, albeit briefly, make him a rock star at 31.

More than a dozen albums would follow, but commercially speaking, it's been pretty much downhill ever since. Zevon is a songwriter's songwriter, which these days means you pretty much have to die to get the general public's attention. Hell, it always has. The trail of rock history is littered with the wind-worn bones of the likes of him, and he's known this for a long, long time--ever since the hits stopped coming in the late '70s and the labels stopped calling, after the bottle and the damage done, the divorces and the rehabs--and he's never once complained about it.

"If you can't take the punches, it don't mean a thing," Zevon once sang. Maybe that's why Philadelphia--a city that's never had much time for complainers--has always had a soft spot for Zevon. And for a while in the early '80s, he was in fact one of us: a card-carrying brother in the City of Brotherly Love.

He came here at the tail end of 1983, looking for love and hoping to shake his demons off the trail. But they caught up with him, as they so often do, and it was here in Philadelphia--in the Rittenhouse Square high rise apartment he shared with his then-fiancee, a WYSP disc jockey named Anita Gevinson--that he would bottom out for the very last time.