Revisiting Zevon

I don't care if it's superficial.

Yeah, that’s right. Scandal. Another night up late with Warren Zevon. Another musical and literary walk of shame. In a 2019 piece that I wrote in Oxford American, I spoke the quiet part loud: “Like so many women, I can’t resist a half-handsome smart guy with a ready and witty remark.” I said that and a lot of other stuff. Not every evening can be Stockhausen and Woody Guthrie. Sometimes you just want someone to buy you a hamburger and speculate in horrifying ways about the real money behind corporate-backed mercenary armies sowing violent chaos throughout the Third World. Maybe I’m just a soft touch in my girlish prime. Anyway, you should check out the piece. 

I’m amazed by Zevon as a songwriter, while always feeling reluctant to engage with some of his psycho-love-truth-pilgrimages like “Mutineer,” or “Accidentally Like A Martyr.” I like the way they sound I guess, but I also don’t want to be gaslit. He is a prolific apologizer in his music, but not a very persuasive one. There are many things he’d prefer not to discuss: what the air conditioner said when it hummed, what really went down with the lady at the Riot House, the years 1974 through 1982. 

This is a tweet I wrote about Sentimental Hygiene — on many days my fave of his full-lengths. 

(You can also check out my full-length musings about Sentimental Hygiene on its 35th anniversary right here at Lawyers, Guns & Money).

In hindsight we can readily recognize that Zevon’s long-running plan was to make the greatest comeback record ever recorded in order to restart a career he would only shortly abandon again — a vertical chess game of next-level-perverted postmodernism. Grasping, halting, retreating, Zevon is jocular and uncomfortable on Sentimental Hygiene. But the power and creativity required to draft the young REM into his orbit to back him up seemed to be accomplished with Russian mob efficiency.

We can discuss or not discuss “Numb As A Statue,” his scariest song, but having had brought it up I guess the rubicon is crossed. Recorded near death, it is a dying junkie's last confession, a perfectionist-narcissist emotional larceny and the big reveal is that having one last chance he would change nothing at all: “I’m going to beg, borrow and steal/ So I can have some feelings too.” Once a werewolf, always a problem.

Another choice photo of me and my Zevon-as-realized-by-Ed-Hamell.