![]() On a late October night, two months into his diagnosis of three months to live, Zevon was the show’s sole guest, performing a series of songs.ĭuring the interview portion, Zevon’s answers contained the sentence associated with his final days. Letterman even guested on the song “”Hit Somebody! (The Hockey Song)” from Zevon’s 2002 album My Ride’s Here, yelling the song’s title. Zevon would serve on multiple occasions as substitute bandleader for Paul Shaffer. Letterman went beyond making sure Zevon was booked whenever he had a new album to promote. He also had a final stop on the Late Show With David Letterman, a show hosted by Zevon’s biggest celebrity booster over the years. Enough of those bridges were still passable and repaired enough that numerous big names crossed them to appear on it - Jackson Browne (who’d helped Zevon get his major label deal over a quarter-century earlier), Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Joe Walsh, Ry Cooder, Tommy Shaw, Mike Campbell and Don Henley to name a few.Ī documentary crew was brought in to film the record Zevon’s working life through the recording process for an eventual VH-1 special. His label gave him an increased budget to record his final LP, The Wind. He opted not to go for medical treatments that he felt would slow him down. Zevon, meanwhile, took the opposite route. Indeed, the fact that Bowie was recording at all was kept under wraps. Some years later, almost concurrently, David Bowie and Leonard Cohen kept their pending deaths quiet while recording what they knew would be their final albums - Blackstar and You Want It Darker, respectively. The diagnosis was cancer of the lining of his lungs and it was terminal.ĪUDIO: Warren Zevon “My Shit’s Fucked Up” He was persuaded, finally, by his dentist, to see a doctor. Having been sober for 17 years and smoke-free for eight plus in the best shape he’d been in for a long time, he started to feel consistent shortness of breath. Zevon had a longstanding phobia of doctors. ![]() Zevon, who hadn’t exactly shied away from darkness and mortality in his writing, accidentally predicted the fate that soon awaited him three-quarters of the way through his 2000 album Life’ll Kill Ya in the song “My Shit’s Fucked Up.”Ī little over two years later, that’s exactly what happened. Realistically, it would have to play as a dark comedy. ![]() To date, there’s no biopic, understandable as it’s no doubt difficult to come up with a script centered around a lead character that, while talented, could be unlikable for a fair share of the running time and, even with the final act concluding with the album being made by a man facing his extremely imminent mortality, couldn’t be wrapped up in a tidy, crowd pleasing bow. His behavior–be it the anger, the abuse, the untrustworthiness in relationships–led to bridges being burned down or at least charred to the point where crossing became more difficult. It was news – literally sickening news – to him that he’d done such deeds.” Warren Zevon on the cover of Rolling Stone from Ma(Image: Warren Zevon’s website) In a 1981 Rolling Stone profile, writer and friend Paul Nelson detailed an intervention done on Zevon, saying, “One of the things that really rocked me back on my heels at the intervention was the fact that Zevon had been in an alcoholic stupor for so long that he couldn’t remember wrecking hotel rooms, punching people out or waving a pistol in a close friend and fellow songwriter’s face. There was also that bit of rebellious “What, here? That?” response when his better angels would have told him not to go somewhere or do something. ![]() Like too many others since the invention of alcohol, Zevon was the type of alcoholic who became more abusive and violent when he drank and drank in such volume that he couldn’t remember what he’d done. To start, Zevon, like no shortage of his music contemporaries of that age, had problems with addiction. When his ex-wife Crystal started work on his biography, Zevon, who knew he was dying of cancer, told her not to censor herself in what she wrote. It might have taken a crime scene cleanup crew (or at least top-shelf spin doctors) to sanitize parts of his life. Zevon specialized in so many songs about disreputable characters, none more disreputable at times than himself. Warren Zevon, who would have been 75 years old today, still resists an easy, smooth canonization, not that he’d want one in the first place. The man who wrote and sang, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” has been sleeping that way for over 18 years. ![]() Warren Zevon would’ve turned 75 today (Images: Discogs) ![]()
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