It's Tuesday, so ordinarily I'd recommend some new DVDs, but instead I've got to talk about one of my hereos, Warren Zevon.
Today sees the release of the book I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life And Times of Warren Zevon, an oral history of the singer/songwriter compiled by his ex-wife, Crystal. Zevon charged her with this project shortly before he died of lung cancer in 2003. He instructed his friends to tell her everything, to censor nothing. Certainly the book is full of shocking tales of drunken rampages and gun-wielding assaults, paranoiac self-loathing and casual abuse of those he loved most.
But it's also the story of an artist, one of the greatest songwriters who ever lived, and how his demons and his art came from the same place. There is absolutely no moral excuse for many of the things Zevon did in his life--and yet for the man who wrote Desperados Under the Eaves ("Don't the sun look angry through the trees? Don't the trees look like crucified thieves?") or Accidentally Like A Martyr ("The hurt gets worse and the heart gets harder") or The French Inhaler or Poor, Poor Pitiful Me or Mohammed's Radio or Finishing Touches ("You can screw everybody I've ever known/But I still won't talk to you on the phone") or Keep Me In Your Heart, the achingly beautiful song he wrote about his own impending death ("Hold me in your toughts, take me to your dreams/Touch me as I fall into view"), for this man, anything is excused.
When he learned he was dying, he refused any kind of treatment, and instead started work on one final album--and started drinking again, after seventeen years of sobriety. Zevon hated turning to this particular medicine, and his friends were angry but not surprised--they knew the monster and the artist were as one.
I was driving to work very early on September 7th, 2003 when I heard on the radio of Zevon's death. Part of me wanted to turn around, go somewhere, anywhere, to get away from such mundane matters as jobs and paychecks, to get drunk or write poetry or just live life on my own terms.
Instead, I pulled the car over, cried for several minutes, then went on to work. Unlike Warren, I just didn't know how to say, "Fuck it."
