Released 15 years ago, Zevon's second album, "Excitable Boy," with its juxtaposition of polished L.A. Zevon recorded a self-titled debut, and Linda Ronstadt wound up covering four of his songs, including "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me" and "Hasten Down the Wind."
While in Spain, the expatriate eccentric got a call from his pal Jackson Browne, relaying a recording offer from Asylum Records - it was the mid-'70s, and the Southern California Singer-Songwriter Sound was in full swing. Sounds exactly like a Warren Zevon song, doesn't it? But I kind of got sidetracked - I did time as an inept session player, television jingle writer and band leader for the Everly Brothers before running away to Spain, where I sang Irish folk songs in a tourist bar on the Costa Dorada." "Craft says that since I, unlike everyone else, never claimed to have a relationship with Stravinksy, my word could be trusted. "That was a great thrill, being a footnote in classical music," Zevon says, and laughs. Before picking up a guitar and tackling blues and folk music, Zevon was befriended in his early teens by musicologist Robert Craft, who introduced him to mutual Hollywood Hills neighbor Igor Stravinsky.Ĭraft recently quoted Zevon in his biography of Stravinsky.
Though he hasn't abandoned his reputation as "the Sam Peckinpah of pop," Zevon has embarked on a new career of sorts, composing film scores for Michael Mann's TV movie "Drug Wars" and HBO's "Tales From the Crypt." Now he's at work on the remake of the 1960-64 TV series "Route 66," which will air this summer on NBC.
"I've promised myself a bonefishing trip right after this tour is over." "They told me it was trout fishing heaven there."
He says he "drove them crazy with the cover art," insisting on including such idiosyncratic niceties as a photograph of Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini in the CD booklet and a picture of his fishing license - a Tasmanian fishing license. "This is the first record I've been totally responsible for, everything from the recording to the production to the cover," says Zevon, who now records for Giant Records. I'm improvising and jamming away for as long as the audience can bear it with my little Keith Jarrett-esque interludes." "I'm having some fun with the music, though, as you can see on 'Roland '. "But I did the record this way last year, and now I have to go out on this map-and-hot-dog tour and do it all over again," he says, mock-grumbling in a dark, sardonic voice like a "Dragnet" cop. "When I started doing these solo tours, it was mainly out of financial necessity that I played alone," Zevon says. Sounds like the beginning of a Warren Zevon song. "I call it 'heavy metal folk,' " Zevon says, calling from somewhere in South Jersey - "I can't see where I am the fog just rolled in and showed its edges." "And playing solo also gives me more opportunity to improvise." "Traveling light enabled me to play 'Graham Greene' gigs in faraway lands," Zevon says. "Learning" was recorded live, direct to digital audiotape, all over the world, from Manhattan's Town Hall to the Gluepot in Auckland, New Zealand.
Zevon's 11th album, "Learning to Flinch," is a foray into Billy Bragg territory, as a solo Zevon ventures lean and mean versions of his (only) hit song, cult favorites and new tunes in an acid-etched voice, armed only with an electric guitar or a piano. Bad Example" and "Trouble Waiting to Happen" is now 46 and settles for titles like "Piano Fighter" and "Worrier King," musing more on "The Indifference of Heaven" and millennial anxiety than on jungle wars and headless Thompson gunners.Īs Zevon said in one of his lyrics, "I'm too old to die young and too young to die now." The self-described "rebel-iconoclast-buffoon" who once identified with song titles like "Mr. Thompson of the decidedly un-macho field of singer-songwriterdom.Ī former Angry Young Man (and Angry Older Man), Zevon's now sounding at least saner, if not resigned. WITH HIS RAUCOUS, reckless odes to rebels, ruggers and Republicans, and his own legendarily cyclic saga of ruin and recovery, Warren Zevon is the Hunter S.