Warren Zevon

About

Warren Zevon had spent a decade scuffling around the Los Angeles music business prior to the release of his self-titled 1976 album. The Chicago-born Zevon—the product of an unlikely marriage between a Jewish gambler/gangster father and strict Mormon mother—had been a childhood piano prodigy, written songs for The Turtle, played in a boy-girl folk duo called lyme & cybelle, and made ends meet penning jingles for Gallo wine and Chevrolet. Zevon’s first shot at a solo career came in the late-’60, under the guidance of Sunset Strip Svengali Kim Fowley. His psych-flecked debut album, <i>Wanted Dead or Alive</i>, was released in 1970 by Liberty Records and promptly flopped. Zevon went on to become the bandleader for The Everly Brother, struggled to find another record deal, then entered a kind of professional exile in Spain. He was performing nightly in a Sitges bar in 1975 when his old pal, singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, sent a postcard urging Zevon to come back to America, promising to get him a contract with David Geffen’s Asylum label. The resulting 11-track <i>Warren Zevon</i> album—enriched by years of personal struggle and infused with bits of deeply felt autobiography—would prove an uncommonly powerful song cycle. Zevon’s finely etched portraits of the Hollywood demimonde—the hustler, junkie, rogue, and bit players—came alive in jaw-dropping detail in songs like the desperate addict elegy “Carmelita,” the brutal barroom kiss-off “The French Inhaler,” and the apocalyptic self-examination of “Desperados Under the Eave.” While a keen student of rock ’n’ roll excess—captured vividly in “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” and “Poor Poor Pitiful Me”—Zevon also proved a fine writer of emotional ballad, with the album’s “Hasten Down the Wind” among his most affecting. Produced by Browne and colored by Waddy Wachtel’s lead guitar work, the album sessions would attract the top names in the LA music scene, with the Eagles’ Don Henley and Glenn Frey, Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nick, the Beach Boys’ Carl Wilson, Bonnie Raitt, and J.D. Souther among those who contributed. .

via Apple Music

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