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And Zevon was as fearless as his bravura characters in his squaring with these emotions. Songs as beautiful as ‘ The French Inhaler’ and ‘ Accidentally Like A Martyr’. raids and depraved debauchery there is an elegantly vulnerable, melancholically lost ballad.

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From Frank and Jesse James to boxer Ray ‘Boom Boom’ Mancini, from hockey goons and intrepid diplomatic envoys to the undead mercenary ‘ Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner’, the Zevon catalogue is full of desperate aggression, given an extra edge with details from Zevon the political animal.īut there was the other side of Zevon’s songwriting. It’s best encapsulated in ‘Rottweiler Blues’’ flat refrain: ‘Don’t knock on my door if you don’t know my rottweiler’s name’. Reckless and paranoid, trapped and surly, drinking itself away. An embattled masculinity that was iconic as it recognised it was untenable. Like novelist Martin Amis, the theme Zevon kept returning to was masculinity and violence. A woozy and centreless, 117 second cover of doomed ‘70s songstress Judee Sill’s ‘Jesus was a Cross Maker’? Flinch’s rollicking ‘Piano Fighter’ given a studio incarnation backed with chimes, accordion and no piano? How weird does it get? Try the stalking and queasy allusion of ‘ Something Bad Happened To A Clown’. Mangled processed guitars, twinkling music boxes, meandering synths and brittle drum machines. Oddly, the stripped down Flinch preceded the apotheosis of Zevon’s bizarre experimentation – 1995’s one-man-band studio album, Mutineer. It’s hard to think of an opening line more striking than ‘Grandpa pissed his pants again, he don’t give a damn’. After a raft of highlights, it’s crowned with the petulant nihilism of ‘Play It All Night Long’.

Reduced by a decade of inconsistency and hard drinking to touring solo, Flinch allows him to simultaneously strip back his greatest compositions while displaying his virtuosity on both piano and guitar. The best place to start is his 1993 live album, Learning to Flinch. He was on occasion capable of consistency (1978’s Excitable Boy, his 2000 masterpiece Life’ll Kill Ya) but I sometimes find myself in the position with great songwriters – Leonard Cohen and Nas among them – of revering the songwriting while wanting to ask, really? That’s the backing you’re going with? The eighties were a decade of badly dated synth tones and studio tinkering for Zevon. His one hit single was ‘Werewolves of London’, ably performed here by Adam Sandler. When it comes to quality and consistency, I’d rather have three transcendentally great tracks on an album of filler than an hour of consistent mediocrity – and Zevon certainly fell into the former camp. Perhaps only Neil Young’s David Crosby-featuring ‘ Revolution Blues’ of a couple of years earlier – channelling the psychic aftermath of the murder in Laurel Canyon, by Charles Manson’s ‘family’, of Roman Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate – is as unsettlingly sinister, but not as grotesquely funny. Musically pleasantly inoffensive, ‘Excitable Boy’ is lyrically a pre- American Psycho tale of rape, murder and graverobbing. He may have sounded superficially similar to his ‘70s songwriter peers – not least on his Jackson Browne-produced, eponymous proper debut, featuring the masterpiece our opening lines are drawn from – but none of the Laurel Canyon scene could have written ‘ Excitable Boy’. The hellraising son of an LA gangster, Zevon composed serialist music in his youth and would visit the home of Igor Stravinsky. Not to say this scene was without mavericks (I mean Zappa lived there!) or that these artists and their associates were lacking in a dark side or excess – just ask James Taylor’s psyche or David Crosby’s liver – but Warren Zevon stood apart.

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Acts like Joni Mitchell, The Eagles, Jackson Browne and Fleetwood Mac combined breezy melody with earnest introspection to sell shit-tonnes of vinyl. So why haven’t you heard of him?Īt the turn of the 1970s, a leafy LA suburb called Laurel Canyon had become the centre for a scene of singer-songwriters. Thompson and preeminent postmodern poet Paul Muldoon. He had recorded with Emmylou Harris and Jackson Browne, Billy Bob Thornton and David Letterman written songs with Hunter S. He could count Stephen King among his fans. Like the mystics and statistics say it willĪt the time of his death, ten years ago today, Warren Zevon’s songs were being performed by Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.