I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon

by Crystal Zevon

When Warren Zevon died in 2003, he left behind both a fanatical cult following and a rich catalog of dark, witty rock-n-roll classics that includes "Lawyers, Guns, and Money," "Excitable Boy," and the immortal "Werewolves of London." He also left a trove of misadventures and anecdotes, a veritable rock opera of drugs, women, celebrity, high times, and hard ways. As Warren once said, "I got to be Jim Morrison a lot longer than he did." I'll Sleep When I'm Dead is an intimate and unusual oral history of one of our most original and distinctive rock-and-roll antiheroes. Narrated by his former wife and longtime co-conspirator, Crystal Zevon, the book draws on over eighty interviews with the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Stephen King, Billy Bob Thornton, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, and countless others who came under his mischievous spell. The result is a raucous and moving tale of love and obsession, creative genius and epic bad behavior. Told in the words and images of the friends, lovers, and legends who knew him best, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead captures Warren Zevon in all his turbulent glory.

Genres: Music, Biography, Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography Memoir, History, Rock N Roll

452 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2007

Reviews

[karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

maybe biography month was a bad idea.

it's just making me angry at people i used to like. not so much byron - but with him i'm in love with the mythology, and that's the whole point of byron - you know what you're getting into. but it turns out warren zevon was rather unpleasant, too, both in the obvious drunken blackout wife beating way, but also in the name dropping/writing down all the funny things he said that day in his journal like a self-involved teenager that makes me a little queasy/shy.

and make no mistake - if anyone ever set about to write my biography - it would be clear that i, too, am an asshole, without any of the explosive talent that zevon had. so i guess that's the end of that complaint. thanks for working through it with me.

reconsider me has been in my head on a more or less constant loop since i decided to read this. and it's as good a place to start as any when discussing warren zevon. because the song really shouldn't be as good as it is - it should be cheesy. lyrically, it's a standard take-me-back song with a little heart, but a little greeting-card in it, too. the only thing that makes it stand out is some inventive key changes throughout - unexpectedly dipping and rising against the typical pop song formula. he manages to elevate this song until it transcends the simple love song it is at its heart. and i've always liked it without knowing why, because its not a standard caustic-humor zevon song. but see now that i've read the book, i can only associate it with this horrible thing he did to his daughter, and how it's probably one of the saddest memories of her dad and it just makes me feel bad for people i've never met. and that's all i need - must purge these feelings.

when i was in high school, pretty much all i listened to was leonard cohen and zevon. i mean, there was the smiths and the cure and depeche mode and chris deburgh (yeah - go ahead and say something, i dare you), but i would always come back to those two. this, and marching band, made me wildly cool in high school. when zevon announced his diagnosis, suddenly he was everywhere, and every celebrity was trying to tell me (on teevee - i'm still too wildly uncool to be hanging out with celebrities) how great and underknown warren zevon was. where were these people when i was in high school, i wonder? at first, all the publicity was ghoulish to me - these vultures circling a still-warm body, but i'm grateful now that the same ghoulishness allowed him to finish and finance the album that is probably one of the best and saddest albums of all time.

when i found out he had died, i was out and about and i went to tower records (this is back when there were actually places that sold music in new york), and of course they had his new album at the listening station and of course i had to go listen to it and have me a good public cry. and it wasn't even keep me in your heart, which is such an obviously moving "i know i'm about to die so i wrote this" song-song, it was indifference of heaven. and this is why:

I had a girl
Now she's gone
She left town
Town burned down

there has never been a more perfectly warren lyric. only he would go that extra mile and have the fucking town burn down.

this is worth a read, but i think i'm personally going to stop reading about people whose work i admire - the less i know about their fallible bits, the better.

come to my blog!

[brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

zevon goes to the doctor b/c he's short of breath and is given two months to live. fear fear fear anger cynicism a return to alcoholism and drug addiction. shit smeared walls, floors littered with porn and empty bottles, and then he hits the studio and records a final album. and dies. jeez. as he wrote in 'life'll kill you':


'The doctor is in and he'll see you now
He don't care who you are.
Some get the awful, awful diseases,
Some get the knife, some get the gun,
Some get to die in their sleep,
At the age of a hundred and one.

Life'll kill ya.
That's what I said.
Life'll kill ya.
Then you'll be dead.'


he wrote that BEFORE he was diagnosed.
from the same album:


'Well, I went to the doctor
I said, "I'm feeling kind of rough"
"Let me break it to you, son"
Your shit's fucked up."
I said, "my shit's fucked up?"
Well, I don't see how-"
He said, "The shit that used to work-
It won't work now."

That amazing grace,
Sorta passed you by.
You wake up every day,
And you start to cry.
Yeah, you want to die
But you just can't quit
Let me break it on down:
It's the fucked up shit'


i think about death with the frequency that that stupid statistic says the average male thinks about sex (freud was half right: there is something at the core of all we are, all we do... it just ain't the eros part, chap) and i obsess on the details. in the case of those 'awful, awful diseases' i think about that cellular tipping point: you're walking around and the fucked up shit is building and clustering and festering and then one day BLIP!, it's cancer. that millisecond at which it hits the point of no turning back, that millisecond when you're eating or laughing or shitting and it's BLIP! determined that yup, you're gonna be dead in a few months. it might be building up in my body right now and when i'm on a plane taking off or a too-slow elevator or some other shit, i swear i can feel it in there and my body just feels like a fleshy bag holding all these precious precious perpetually rotting organs that are just a BLIP away from blowing out into cancerous bloodbags. and if i croak out in two months y'all will read these words with the same air of dread and prophecy with which i listen to zevon's 'life'll kill ya' album; again, recorded less than two years before he was handed the death sentence.

the final verse from the final song on the album:


'Don't let us get sick
Don't let us get old
Don't let us get stupid, all right?
Just make us be brave
And make us play nice
And let us be together tonight.'

[Bob Mayer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoy some of his music. I always find it interesting to learn about creative people and their process. I respect Warren for telling his ex to have people tell the truth about him. We need more of that.

You learn a lot about the people commenting on him as you do about him. Bruce Springsteen comes of as very flat.

The artist community of the time is inspiring-- I doubt that exists these days when everything is a corporation. One thinks he should have stayed in Spain-- Roland the Thompson Gunner time. That song was our unofficial dirge in 10th Special Forces.

[Diann Blakely]

As deliciously exhaustive as this biography remains, even after a second and third reading, you wish Zevon’s process weren’t scanted, and that there were more pages devoted to the formation of his songwriting’s verbal genius and how it has sustained itself as a growing, if still largely underground, influence. “He raped and killed her / Then he took her home,” he wrote in a single line of “Excitable Boy,” satirizing the horror genre, conventional dating mores and male sexuality, including his own. The last is particularly important, as during his later 18-year period of semi-sobriety, Zevon transferred his death-defying consumption of alcohol to sex. Addictions provided him with a means of avoiding love, and yet love’s lack, beginning in his insufficiently parented childhood, and his rage against it, produced some of our era’s best songs. Many aren’t even recognized as Zevon’s, like “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” and “Hasten Down the Wind,” which Linda Ronstadt made famous.

Zevon’s lifelong sense of darkness, plus his incomparable musicianship, transformed a diagnosis of mesotheliomia into THE WIND, arguably his masterpiece. Ry Cooder, Bruce Springsteen, Emmylou Harris, Jackson Browne and Billy Bob Thornton are among Zevon’s co-players and/or -writers here, we’re told in I'LL SLEEP WHEN I'M DEAD’s foreword, composed by one of the literary friends Zevon cherished, Carl Hiaasen.

Largely an autodidact, Zevon–whose first music lessons were from Stravinsky—possessed a spookily high IQ and loved quoting Schopenhauer. He wanted to be known as a writer, not just a songwriter, thus he was more than elated when Tom McGuane, Hunter Thompson and recently appointed New Yorker poetry critic Paul Muldoon became longtime fans, friends and even collaborators. At the very end of his life, when Zevon tumbled off the wagon, he nonetheless remarked with typically sharp-minded drollery that his death from terminal cancer might make him—finally—“really famous.” Zevon’s unforgettable appearance on a David Letterman show devoted entirely to him accomplished that, and I'LL SLEEP WHEN I'M DEAD continues to spread the word. The book induces us to see past the alcohol, OCD, sexual insanity and just plain looniness—for a long while he would only wear gray, seizing upon Calvin Klein T-shirts as particularly lucky and buying dozens—in Zevon’s life. We’re irresistibly lured back to the funny, mordant, powerful, brilliant, informed, scary and ultimately wise music.


(originally published in the NASHVILLE SCENE in 2007; since then I've found two quotations I used as sources that might add to others' understanding of what remains, with Martin Amis's EXPERIENCE; Jill Bialosky's HISTORY OF A SUICIDE; Frederick and Steven Barthelme's DOUBLE DOWN; Larry Brown's ON FIRE and BILLY RAY'S FARM; Andrei Codescu's NEW ORLEANS, MON AMOUR, a collection of essays and NPR broadcasts that may well be read as a memoir itself; Joan Didion's THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING and BLUE NIGHTS; Mikal Gilmore's SHOT IN THE HEART; Meghan O'Rourke's THE LONG GOODBYE; and Patti Smith's JUST KIDS, among the best memoirs published in past years--and my study is currently being painted, so forgive me, please, those I've omitted! By the same token, I've reviewed many of these books, and the pieces can be located here on NBCC/Goodreads.)

 "In the '60s," Zevon explains, "I couldn't have conceived of owning a gun. Now in the '70s, I feel that nobody's going to mess with me. You go from mindlessly believing in peace to arming yourself to learn how to have it."

"But in order to do what he did, he had to jettison anything extraneous, to limit himself. He couldn't spend time bidding farewell to the many people that wished they could spend time with him. He told me he wanted to be there for the birth of his grandchildren. And he was. He wanted to finish this record. And no matter how much we celebrate the album and the people who came around to do it with him, making a record is real work. He had to retreat into his most personal, essential friendships. I have no problem saying that we were much closer a long time ago. And my admiration and affection for him has never diminished." Jackson Browne
�

[Stiv_Matters · Rating 4 out of 5]

I grew up listening to Warren Zevon, bought all his records when they came out, and saw him live several times throughout his career. He is one of my favorite performers. Personal information about Warren was always hard to come by. I knew he had a legendary drinking problem back in the 70's/early 80's and he spent a lot of time getting on the wagon and falling off again. Rarely were there any specifics. This book gets specific about nearly all phases of his life and kind of beats you over the head with just how very flawed Warren was. Over the years as I listened to his songs I built up an idealized image of who he was and how he spent his time and this book effectively crushes any illusions. The book is fascinating and heartbreaking at the same time. Former wife, Crystal Zevon, interviewed most of the people who knew and worked with him during his career and this book is a chronicle of his life told through these interviews with occasional narrative from Crystal. The good news is that the book provides a detailed look at the 70's Southern California rock scene with lots of great stories involving Jackson Browne, various members of The Eagles, Bonnie Raitt, and many of the musicians who played on some of the biggest records of the 70s. The book also tells the origins of many of Warren's songs and offers lots of behind the scenes stories about the recording of various Zevon albums. Over 80 people were interviewed for the book and it's well documented just how much Warren was respected not only by fellow songwriters and musicians, but also by noted novelists, actors, and politicians. Much of Warren's humor and charisma come through in this book. The bad news is that Warren had a difficult childhood, which made him grow up to be a difficult adult. He suffered from OCD, had an addictive personality, and was extremely selfish and self-absorbed. He spent much of his drinking years in blackout. During these blackouts, he sometimes became a violent, dangerous person who punched his wife more than once. He neglected his children and was wildly promiscuous. When he stopped drinking in the mid 80's, he appears to have filled the void of alcohol addiction with an insatiable sex addiction while still attempting to maintain serious long-term girlfriends. His OCD manifested itself in many strange personality quirks and he was extremely superstitious.

I find it hard to recommend this book to anyone who is not familiar with Zevon's music and even then, I'm reluctant. The book is heavily weighted with the negative aspects of his character and actions. Reading this book, it really doesn't come through why his friends and family loved him and overlooked or tolerated (and enabled) his behavior. The final chapter comes close to capturing why everyone loved him but I can imagine a lot of people who are not familiar with his wonderful songs, reading this book and coming away with the impression that he was just a monumental asshole. Even for me, a huge fan, many of the stories related here are just heartbreaking. The darkers aspects of Warren's life were indeed dark. The man had a lot of demons and every single one of them is documented in this book. If you're a fan, this book is a dark and scary but vastly entertaining chronicle of Warren's life. If you're not familiar with the songs of Warren Zevon, your time would be better spent listening to some of his records. This book is exactly what Warren would have wanted but it fails to capture his heart and spirit. For that, you gotta listen to the songs.

[Charlene · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have no idea how much of my rating is the result of Zevon's biography as told in this book or the fact that my son asked me to read with him so we could discuss. I suspect that I would have thought it was a mediocre book. However, after exchanging literally 100s of text with my son as we read each chapter, listened to the songs, and watched videos, this somehow became one of my favorite reading experiences.

The book is pretty confusing emotionally because Zevon is such a narcissistic sadists but also talented. What really confused my emotional brain was reconciling how sad I felt about his death while being repulsed by who he was as a human being. Though, I have to say, I like books that create opposing views within my own mind.

This book is a tough read. It opens with Zevon's death and goes into detail about what the last few months were like for him once he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I am not sure what the experience would have been like reading this alone. Reading it with someone I love so much, and someone who is far away (he is across the country finishing law school), made me feel connected despite the physical distance and I love analyzing Zevon's life with him. The stories are pretty outrageous and there are lots of famous people who weigh in on their friendship with Zevon (Jackson Brown, Springsteen, Billy Bob Thornton, and more). The book also told the backstory of how many of his songs came to be. We really enjoyed that, and now that I am finished the book, I will really miss it because I will miss discussing it.

Be warned, you might start out liking Zevon but end up liking him a lot less after you read about his treatment of just about every person who ever cared for him. Reading about his experiences was a bit like when Dorothy pulled back the curtain and realized that the Great Oz was merely some dude whose biggest accomplishment was finding a secluded spot and learning how to use a microphone. Zevon's diary was less introspective that I would have imagined. He seemed a lot more shallow than I had guessed. I expected some sort of insanity. I mean, just listen to his songs. Their insanity and disregard for social niceties is what makes them so great. So you have to allow that the writer of those songs will be a bit "off". I just didn't imagine he would be so mean to everyone or that he would lack the emotional depth and complexity I had previously thought he possessed.

I sort of felt a similar disappointment (the falling of a god) after reading Stevie Nicks' bio. I realized how much of who I thought she was ended up being an act. I get that is what most people want. And it's naive of me to imagine otherwise, but it was a turn off. Zevon's bio was far more repulsive; and yet, it elicited far more emotion in me than Nicks' bio.

If you read the book, I highly recommend paring videos and songs with each chapter. It really does make a huge difference.

[Dan Secor · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would have given this book four stars - I'm a big Warren Zevon fan, and it was well-written - but frankly this book depressed the living hell out of me. Zevon was a train wreck all his life. I remembered reading an interview with him in Rolling Stone years back about how he quit a bad drinking habit (two bottles of vodka, straight, every day), but this book shows his other excesses never really left him. He had tons of very close friends, but for some reason he sabotaged many of his friendships because of his temper and his antics.

The sad story of the circumstances around his death did nothing to bring any redemption to his life story, but it is a good warning to never take anything for granted and to be moderate in all things.

[Kyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

more accurately 3.5 -- took me a long time to finish this -- don't know why but i have some theories -- #1 i guess is it wasn't what i would term compelling, but #2 would be that i didn't want it to end either -- i always respected zevon though before reading this i wouldn't have called my self a huge fan -- i am now -- i am glad i familiarized myself with his life and more of his music than i had before -- quite an enigma -- one of those guys who is his own worst enemy -- at times hated him, loved him, admired him, pitied him, the list goes on -- this was the first for me of i guess what youd call an oral history -- i enjoyed that, but also could've used a little more exposition -- editing seemed non-existent in that some successive quotes were complete non-sequiturs -- weirdly organized so a little distracting --but much like the robert peace bio, if the goal was to tell the truth, the whole truth, including the "ugly, awful parts" then the book appears to have achieved its goal -- more importantly, even after reading it all, you will find yourself with a deeper appreciation for warren zevon,the artist and affection for warren zevon, the man -- recommended for the most die-hard to even just the curious/interested fan --

[Daniel Polansky]

Constructed from interviews and scrap of Zevon’s journal, this is as down and dirty as you’re going to get – every petty rivalry, debauched episode, every misbehavior of a brilliant artist with some very serious character issues. Despite which, Crystal Zevon manages an enormously impressive even-handedness, particularly given that Warren seems to have beat the hell out of her a couple of times. A ravenously engaging read, the best rock and roll biography I ever read, hands down.

[D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The risk you run with biographies is that there's really only two ways to respond to them. Upon completion of the book, you either say, "Wow! What a life!" and your enjoyment of that artist's work is enhanced. SOCIETY'S CHILD by Janis Ian is a good example, as is JUST KIDS by Patti Smith. On the other hand, there's the book where you finish and you say, "Woah. What a jerk. What a broken person," and you find yourself struggling to separate the artist's work from the way they treated people and the selfish way they lived their life. PAPA JOHN by John Phillips is a good example of this type of book.

I'LL SLEEP WHEN I'M DEAD falls into the second category, although I don't think anyone who is even remotely familiar with Zevon would be all that shocked by most of the stories told in the book.

There's little doubt that Zevon was a musical genius, and the book is filled with references to the people he hung out with: Jackson Brown, Bonnie Raitt, and many more share their thoughts about Warren, and share their anecdotes about times spent together.

A good section of the book is also taken directly from Zevon's journals, and it's there that readers see just how self-centered he was, as he casually recounts numerous stories of infidelity and drug and alcohol abuse, not to mention the snubs of family and friends.

There's no doubt that Zevon was a world-class musician, and that he didn't get the success he probably deserved. In the end, though, Zevon comes off as a really broken person, who pretty much sabotages his career at every opportunity, then whines about how he isn't as successful as he should be. Still, he shows at times that he tried to rise above some of his brokenness, especially once he was avoiding his alcoholic excesses.

[CD · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somehow, I have this weird feeling that Warren isn't sleeping even now. Too much going on in his head for there to be any solitude.

A story shocking in the page after page of details, even for those familiar with his story, of his debauchery and unsocial behavior.

It is missing much if any insight into the motivation behind Zevon's genius unless we just write it all off to that fine line that in some separates genius from madness.

Anecdotes sprinkled through the book add some substance and on occasion levity to make this book more readable. Without them it could quickly dissolve into just another memoir of an ex-spouse and the grievances that remain. Some of the stories highlight how certain lyrics developed and illustrate a few cultural touchstones. The origin of a scene from the Belushi/Ackroyd film the Blues Brothers, is mentioned not from the film, but from the event that obviously inspired a barroom and beer bottles crashing into chicken wire. Guns, drugs, sex, and all other things rock-n-roll abound.

A book for the fan and not the meek.

comment from time during reading book (Using the hit and miss approach to random reading. Open the book and find a chapter not yet read and just read it.)

[Rex McCulloch · Rating 1 out of 5]

Two in a row. Gotta stop reading these bios of asshole musicians. I'm usually pretty good at divorcing the artist from the person, but this book was about 85% loathsome human being and 15% sometime-genius. It might not have been so bad if so many of those closest to him hadn't tolerated Warren Zevon to such an extent because he was "clever," or "artistically brilliant," or just famous. The people who speak most highly of him tend to be fellow artists and celebrity friends who didn't have to put up with him day-in-and-out. Though he quits drinking and stays "sober" for decades, he's clearly what his AA friends would call a "dry drunk," continuing his addictive behavior unabated. By about 1990, I was wishing for him to die already, so the book might end. Yet I read on. Content aside, it's a brutally honest bio (although it only hints at the worst), though the art tends to end up downplayed.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my word! Probably the best non-fiction reading experience I've had. Written like the script of a documentary, it features everyone who was prominent in Mr. Zevon's life for better or worse as well as snippets from his journal.

Finding out what was behind the writing of a few of his songs was quite interesting. I won't look at Tenderness on the Block quite the same now, but it is still one of my favorites.

Page 399 is of note for my fellow former Borders Books and Music employees.

If you are a student of music and the California scene in the 1970s, you will love this. If you are a WZ devotee, you will cry when you finish it and have his songs going through your head even more than usual.

[Cormac Zoso · Rating 5 out of 5]

When you read rock-and-roll books as often as I do, you find one overbearing commonality for most of them: They are just not very good. That's the truth of the matter. Most are written on a 3rd grade level and most have glaring mistakes or omissions that even the middle-range fan can spot them and, at bottom, they lack any kind of professional composition or editing. In particular, this is applicable to the "tell-all" subset of this group. Think of "Hammer of the Gods" and you'll understand my point. Every silly, twisted little story that can be included is included. Frankly, it gets very tiresome and as far as Led Zeppelin is concerned, the subject of "Hammer", it is next to impossible to find a book concerned with the music of the band rather than the "red snapper" story (by the way, you can a "real" history and examination of the work of Led Zeppelin in Keith Shadwick's "Led Zeppelin: 1968-1980").

So it's all the more amazing that Crystal Zevon's "oral history" of her late ex-husband's life and musical career works so well and is so effective. Taken from interviews of family, friends, and fellow musicians and entertainers, as well as his own diary entries that he faithfully kept for years apparently, the book lays out his life in stark relief and though it includes all the sexual and substance abuse stories any gossip could want, it does so in a way where it simply isn't there for spice. It illuminates the man behind some of the most important music of the last quarter of the Twentieth Century. And while that man was deeply flawed in many, many ways and he purposefully at times it seems took an axe to his career and relationships, Warren Zevon still can't be dismissed as a musician who had one small hit and never got his career back up there again. When you start reading comments from Neil Young, Jackson Browne, and many more well-known musicians, you strat to realize what an impact Zevon had on their music as well as music in general. He was a musician's musician and while his fan-base was narrow, his fan's her dedicated.

I am a good example of such a fan and I should mention it by way of full disclosure. It doesn't mean this review will be biased since, believe it or not, bad books about people I admire are very annoying to me and I am happy to point them out to other fans before they waste their money on one of them. But when I discovered Zevon in 1976, I was a frehsman in high school and wandering through the coolest record store ever ... at least the coolest within a short distance of where I lived and grew up. Looking through the records with money from lawn mowing and hay baling tucked in my pocket, I saw the cover of his first album and the look of the man on the cover intrigued me. I picked it up and started reading the back of the album. I remember I could afford one album and this was a big decision. Then one of the long-haired guys that worked there walked past me and stopped and mentioned that it was a great album, at least in his opinion.

So I trusted him and walked out with that album in my hands. I don't think that the album left my turntable for the next six months. It was a stunning album. I'd never heard music like it really. It was rock but then it had so much more woven through the threads as well. Of course, there's the Copland-esque feel of the opening number ("Frand and Jesse James") and then continues through hard rockers and ballads but yet, again, the lyrics are like none I'd heard before. Odd and yet words that reached deep inside and turned on switches here and there that I hadn't known were even there. It was a life-changing experience and I was hooked. I was a Zevon fan and it seemed that once that happened, there was no changing it.

But reading this book, even a die-hard fan would be shocked by some of the tales here. Zevon's drinking and drugging were legendary when he appeared on a Rolling Stone cover for an article detailing his first attempt at rehabilitation (it would take several more tries before it "took" but then he finally went through a 17 year stretch of sobriety ... the only thing that saved his life in order to contract the cancer that eventually killed him in 2003). It was the last major article on him until his cancer was announced roughly a year before his death. The stories of his substance abuse of course were even greater than one might have guessed, once he was sober, sex took the place of substances and dominates his life along with his work until the end.

For an ex-wife with whom his friendship never ended, to go through his diaries and to hear the interviews with the women he spent time with must have been a difficult task to say the least. The stories are laid out without hesititation or editing to save anyone any pain. It is completely presented in the most honest fashion. The stories will make one flinch at times but then we all need to learn that.

In the end, and I know it's been a rambling review, this is the most honest rock and roll book ever written and I can't recommend it enough.

[Jay French · Rating 4 out of 5]

I became a fan of Warren Zevon’s music when I was in high school and Werewolves of London came out. His “Excitable Boy” songs appealed to the teen boy in me, reading Soldier of Fortune magazine. And his earlier “Warren Zevon” album appealed to me through intelligent lyrics and pop sound. I became a big fan after reading the Rolling Stone cover story on his life and his alcoholism and intervention. I keep a copy of that 30+ year old story – it showed Zevon as intense and the act of an intervention as being intense. The article showed Zevon’s love of Ross MacDonald books, and the author became his friend. I started reading MacDonald’s books because of that article, and read them all (but one, just waiting for the right time). I watched all his Letterman appearances over the years, including those after he knew he was terminal. I’ve even asked them to play Zevon’s “Keep Me In Your Heart” at my funeral, it seems fitting. I have spent a lot of hours of my adult life listening to Zevon’s music and reading the books he read. And this book really surprised me.

A lot of what you know about a rock star is from afar. It’s filtered, often by the star and his machinery. That appears to be the case here. Zevon comes across here as quite a jerk, with occasional moments of kindness sprinkled throughout his life. It’s hard to decide the cause of the darkness in him, was it his personality to begin with, was it the alcoholism, or the OCD that seems to control him later in life? Or was it the environment that rock stars inherit? There are plenty of demons here, and the book describes them quite well. The book (and Zevon’s life) seems longer than it is, working through the dark stuff – the infidelity, the capriciousness, the obsessions, the violence, the drinking and drugs. Mixed in with these episodes you read about how some lyrics came about, or how a song was written and performed, and you get a sense of genius in the midst of his normal, mostly self-inflicted turmoil.

The book was written by his ex-wife and consists of interview fragments from dozens of friends, family, and ex-girlfriends as well as notes direct from Zevon’s diary. For the way it was constructed it could have fallen apart, and I wasn’t a fan at the halfway point, but overall it really told the story in a way that worked. It’s a book you give in to. Warren asked Crystal to write the true story warts and all, and that seems to be what you get here. I wished at times for more about the Rolling Stone article or Ross MacDonald, but it seems the sources were deceased and therefore didn’t fit as readily in this format. This leaves the door open for a more traditional biography, and I hope someone does that.

This format raises an interesting question for me. If someone were to write my biography by just asking people I was friends with at different points in my life about me, would it read as negatively as Zevon’s story? Would they remember the bad times more intensely than the good times? Would the compilation of these stories leave readers thinking that I, too, was a real jerk? Quite possibly, even though I am only partially a jerk, hopefully very rarely. This format certainly can have a negative impact on the resulting story. I think that added to the darkness of Zevon’s story, but there’s plenty of darkness there to begin with.

[Annetta Ribken · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm about halfway through this book, and wow. I have been a fan of Warren Zevon since the late '70s -- his music has had a profound influence on me. I saw an interview of Crystal Zevon in which she stated Brother Z wanted his story told unvarnished, and that's exactly what you're getting here. He was a musical genius, a total asshole and a unique personality. It's a fascinating story about a fascinating artist. I can't wait to see what the second half of the book holds.

I really like the format -- it's told in snippets from the people around him who loved him best and were closest to him. They don't pull any punches. And that's exactly how Warren Zevon wanted it.

****

He was a terrible husband, a philandering boyfriend, a horrible father for the most part, and by all accounts, one of the biggest assholes that ever walked the planet. He had weird personality quirks that drove people crazy; he could be very cruel to those who loved him most and he gave a new dimension to alcoholism and drug abuse. But, that's only part of the story of Warren Zevon. If he was such a total prick, why was he so loved? Why were people so eager to work with him, get involved with him?

Because he was special. That doesn't excuse any of his behavior, but in this book by his ex (and only) wife, Crystal Zevon, you get a picture of one of those rare people who shine so bright they burn out early. The true picture of Warren Zevon, however, is in his music. I can't judge his lifestyle, his choices or the way he lived his life because the heart and soul of Zevon was in his music. It seems he just didn't have enough left over for the people in his life. It's a sad, shocking, fascinating look at a man who had the soul, intelligence and sensitivity few people are blessed (or cursed!) with, and he had a way with lyrics and musical arrangements that will grab you on a visceral level and never let go. Yes, he was a total asshole right to the very end. He lived balls out or nothing. But he was a lot more than that.

He was vastly underrated by the masses, but other artists in the music industry and his devoted fans knew what a genius he was. If you only know Warren Zevon through "Werewolves of London" or "Excitable Boy", you are missing out. Try "Mutineer". Listen to "Accidentally Like a Martyr", "Mohammed's Radio", "Keep Me in Your Heart", "Reconsider Me". Hell, pick one. His sardonic wit, extreme intelligence and unique perspective on life is all there. All the pain, joy and confusion one life can hold.

This book is raw and bleeding. Exactly the way Warren Zevon lived his life.

[David Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Warren's Weird, Wacky, Warped, Wondrous, Wicked, Wasted World

Within the confines of our celeb saturated universe where every peccadillo is scrutinized under a microscope, it was not surprising to me that Zevon's ex would write a no holds barred biography on her somewhat famous, cult favorite former husband. What did surprise & luridly fascinate me was that Zevon was a bigger creep than I thought possible. I mean this guy emerges a total, complete jerk. Okay, perhaps I'm being a little too harsh. He was only a creep & a jerk most of the time. He managed to infuse his seriously flawed personality with displays of generosity, kindness & warmth enough so that he maintained a gaggle of friends, lovers & worshipers throughout his life till the bitter end. Ms. Zevon (quite interesting that she kept his surname more than 30 years after their divorce)recognizes his flaws well enough so that after repeated attempts & failures to leave him, she finally does. Fascinatingly enough, Zevon gains a promise from his ex that she will write a biography that peels back the dermis of any press agent's ersatz rock infused cocoon, delivering instead a totally candid portrait, regardless of how humiliating or painful.

Yet, despite the brutal honesty that prevails throughout this searing autopsy, I was still struck by the excuses his friends & colleagues invented for him, excusing his terribly repugnant behavior. His misogynistic, bed-hopping fervor is dismissed much in the say way we might write off a facial tic. The fact that he treated his closest colleagues with disdain, except of course when he needed something from them is pardoned as well as the eccentricities of an insecure, extremely talented musician whose grasp for the brass ring fell short. The ugly reality is that the most poetic, beautiful accomplishment of his life was dying of cancer while completing an album that would outsell any of his previous releases. The saddening lesson from Ms. Zevon's paean to the departed rock legend is that we are all too willing to forgive & gloss over the flaws of our most talented, as if their gifts grants them some special dispensation. Unfortunately, the analysis rings all too true.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Warren Zevon. I think he's just the best. Even when he was alive, his voice sounded kind of like how a ghost might sing - all wiggly and sad and weird and funny. Though he undoubtedly would have been fun to have a drink or two with, I feel bad for the people who had to spend any significant amount of time with him, since, as this biography, not to mention his own lyrics, will often attest, the guy behaved like a drunken asshole most of the time. I simply do not care. He never did anything to me, other than provide me with practically half my favorite songs. He could have drop-kicked his newborn infant off a cliff (in a perhaps rare moment of forethought, he did not do this) and I'd still be into him, and that's if the only thing he ever wrote was "Carmelita".

The book does a good job stressing that Zevon was well worth knowing when he was at his best, but doesn't shy away, at all, from his less-dignified moments, of which there are apparently many to select from. I'm typically not too fast a reader, but I blew through 450 pages in about an hour and a half. It's one of them deals where a bunch of people who knew him take turns relating various incidents and takes on things, like that SNL book awhile back. It's an approach that seems to mesh well with tales of celebrity indiscretion.

I would recommend this more for people who already knew they liked Warren Zevon. Otherwise, the albums "Excitable Boy" and "Life'll Kill Ya" are probably better intros. If you were to read this book knowing nothing of him, you might come away thinking he's just a weird dick, as opposed to a weird dick who made beautiful songs.

[Todd Jenkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I checked this book out from the library after pianist Michael Wolff mentioned that he had been interviewed for it. I was a huge fan of Zevon's work in the 80s but kind of lost track after a while. After picking up "Mutineer" and "Life'll Kill Ya" on Wolff's suggestion, I kicked myself for not staying on the bandwagon.

That said, this book presents a most compelling picture of Zevon's life. Well, maybe "compelling" isn't quite the right word. It's like a car crash rendered in print; some of the details are hideous, but you just can't turn away. Warren Zevon came close to epitomizing the rock'n'roll excessive lifestyle. Now I don't know that I could have brought myself to shake his hand if I'd ever met the man. But the book sheds fascinating light on the relationship between his life and his songwriting, as well as the professional and personal associations he waded through over the years.

I love the oral-history format of the book, presenting the direct words of those who knew Zevon best with little or no glossing. And I really admire Crystal Zevon's openness in detailing her relationship with her ex-husband and talking with so many of the women who came along in her wake. It's rare that someone will take on the mantel of "former wife and lifelong friend", but no doubt that special relationship made a huge impact on the way this book came out. Highly recommended for fans and the curious.

[Byron · Rating 4 out of 5]

The problem with reading books about artists, especially musicians, is that you never get to listen to their work without thinking of the story of the human that produced the music. This book, told from the viewpoints of the people who knew him, is an almost horrifyingly vivid tale of what it means to be human, especially a gifted one.

The scrutiny of eighty people exposes all the depravity, weakness, struggle and self-doubt as well as the bond, the uniqueness of the person who was Warren Zevon.

As I read this book, I was disappointed in Warren, then angry with him, all they while feeling a sympathy and intense admiration. I don't think I was ever allowed to experience just one emotion about any episode described here. All I really knew for certain was that I wanted him to find some peace and happiness.

An intense work of documentation which has affected the way I listen to his music, the way I view my role as a father, and my understanding of recovery from addictions.

[Kim · Rating 1 out of 5]

Only because of my respect for Warren Zevon as a writer and performer did I finish this book. Aside from the fact that this is just an utterly self-serving testimonial to the supposed martyrdom of Crystal Zevon, it is unenlightening, boring, repetitive, disorganized, hardly edited and lacks any content with regard to Zevon's artistic history. By the use of the "testimonial snippet" form of presentation, there is no narrative and no unifying force to the book whatsoever. You can imagine how the requests for participation in the book were presented to the surviving celebrities: "Well, Warren's dead and Crystal's alive, so what the hell?" They dug up his grave and made a cage with his bones.

[Murray · Rating 4 out of 5]

The more I read this, the more it grew on me. I never really knew much about Warren Zevon, and this book was filled with one rock n Rollin' escapade after another. Although it hints at Zevon's creative process at times, I would have liked to have read more. The witnesses- and Zevon's diary entries- reveal vey honest depictions of a troubled man who knew how to write songs and live hedonistically. And, man, he sure had a lot of girlfriends.

I loved reading the book with Spotify nearby so I could listen to any song as it was being discussed.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 4 out of 5]

To the extent you have heard of Warren Zevon, it is probably because David Letterman devoted an entire episode of "Late Night" to him when Zevon was dying, in 2002. That appearance shined up Zevon’s star, which had faded greatly since his glory days in the 1970s. It was not the mere fact of Zevon’s appearance, it was his sardonic humor about his own looming death from mesothelioma, combined with the fact that he was going down like a man, refusing any treatment and instead finishing his last album. Such bravery, a virtue of the old school, combined with VH1’s simultaneous soft-focus documentary on his life, gave Zevon an aura of virtue. This book seems to have been designed, with his consent, to mostly dispel that aura.

I’ve always liked Zevon. He probably counts as my favorite pop singer, and since I have zero appreciation for any classical music, I guess that makes him my favorite musical artist (although a few others might be it instead). But until I read this book and did some other research, I knew very little about him. (I also absolutely loathe his most famous song, “Werewolves of London.”) I don’t typically buy much music, but even in the 1990s I had bought several of his albums, to which I regularly listened. I used his 1996 double-album compilation, also titled “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” as play-on-repeat music on transatlantic flights, when portable CD players were the height of technology. Apparently I was one of the very few people buying his music then, showing, once again, that I have long been out of tune with the Zeitgeist.

This book is an oral history, offering the voices of scores of people who knew and worked with Zevon, most of them his friends (and some of whom are famous, like Bruce Springsteen and Billy Bob Thornton). Combining these with journal entries from Zevon himself was done by Crystal Zevon, who was married to the singer from 1974 to 1979, but who remained intermittently close to him, and was the mother of one of his two children. He wanted a “warts and all” depiction, and he got it. Among many other vices, Zevon was a terrible father, a drunk who effectively abandoned his children when they were young, though in the manner of many such men, he developed a relationship with them when they were adults and he had sobered up.

It’s not that Zevon was a monster, just that he was enormously defective, defined in most things by a deep and desperate selfishness, exacerbated by living in a milieu where he never had to answer for his vices. He was pathologically afraid of responsibility and thus desperate to avoid having any more children; he ghosted long-term friends to avoid unpleasant confrontations; he dodged debts. And he totally lacked the discipline that characterized more successful rock singers, such as Springsteen, which is probably why after initial success and extensive critical acclaim, he never became rich or all that famous.

Such, perhaps, is a typical minor rock star’s life. Zevon certainly had an interesting family background. He was the son of a small-time Ukrainian Jewish gangster, part of Mickey Cohen’s Los Angeles mob. Born in 1947, trained in classical piano (he was a sometime acquaintance in his teens of Igor Stravinsky), by 1965, Zevon went to find his fortune as a musician. It took him nearly a decade of working for others, primarily the Everly Brothers, to hit the (modestly) big time. After a couple of well-received albums in the mid and late 1970s, from 1980 onwards his career was dim. He had been an extreme drunk for years, among other things often beating his (very many) women and waving guns around. That didn’t help his career either. By 1986 he sobered up, cold turkey, but his career did not revive, even though he kept releasing music, and for years often made rent by playing tiny provincial venues or corporate lobby gigs. His productivity was not helped by fairly extreme obsessive-compulsive disorder (one reason he bonded with Billy Bob Thornton), such as only wearing gray clothes (compulsively buying and wearing only gray Calvin Klein T-shirts), and, especially in his last days, mysteriously classifying everything, from days of the week to cans of Diet Coke, as lucky or unlucky. Only when he was dying did his music start selling again, an irony not lost on him, especially since many of his songs touched on death. His music, at least, only became lucky when he died.

What made Zevon different from most rock stars is that he seems to have been a genuinely extremely intelligent man. That comes through in his interviews and his journal (though there’s plenty banal in there too, even in the excerpts chosen for this book). His favorite activity when killing time before a show in a new town was to visit bookstores, and pictures of his apartment show it stuffed with books. And while he’s known for clever and acerbic lyrics, several of his songs show a quite deep history grasp, such as one from his 2000 album “Life’ll Kill Ya,” which, again ironically, was his last album before he got cancer. It has a song sung, in part, from the perspective of a knight of the First Crusade, which begins “We left Constantinople in a thousand ninety-nine / To restore the one True Cross was in this heart of mine.” The song itself is about pilgrimage, and the hope of the knight to return to Rhodes (true, the Hospitallers, associated with Rhodes and after Malta, were formed later, but maybe he was just a random knight who lived there). It’s a rare rock song that mentions the Crusades, much less casts them in a positive light. I’m betting this is the only one, and that says something about Zevon.

Still, he will never, in the foreseeable future, be lionized. In these days of #MeToo, a womanizing wife beater isn’t likely to join the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He’s never even been nominated, though he’s been eligible for years. Reading some recent articles on him, the term “toxic masculinity” kept popping up (in the articles, not in my mind—I’d never use that term myself without vomiting). Moreover, and probably the reason Zevon was frowned on by the Hall of Fame prior to #MeToo, he was relentlessly unpolitical, refusing the attempts of close friends like Jackson Browne to involve him in whatever was the cause of the moment. His detached, jaundiced eye probably wouldn’t let him. When his daughter tried to interest him in her service of “underprivileged kids,” he dismissed it as “working with the little brown children.” He wasn’t racist; he just thought it was silly, or maybe he couldn’t himself to care about others. It’s hard to say; Zevon’s personality seems protean, or at least slippery. As one of his friends says in this book, “I’m not sure what the psychological classification of Warren would be. When someone who is an alcoholic plays at being a sociopath, it’s hard to know when playtime is over.”

I don’t think there are any large lessons to be drawn from Zevon’s life, other than the cliché that everyone acknowledges but rarely practices, to be kind since one never knows how hard the road is that another person is on. Yes, Zevon could have done himself and others a favor by striving harder to behave better, but who knows what demons drove him? And whatever his vices, he seems to never have been deliberately cruel, or consumed by those cold vices that C. S. Lewis identified as flowing from pride and as far worse than the sensual vices. Zevon was proud of his music and sensitive to criticism of it, real or imagined; he was not proud in the sense of lording it over others. Was he a good man? Not really. But at the very end, he played the hand he was dealt, without bitterness or complaint, praying only to make it to the birth of his first grandchildren, boy twins. Which request he was granted, so if that is a mark of divine favor, maybe beyond the very end luck finally stuck to him, and he has squeezed through the strait gate to enter the bright land from whence the shadows come.

[shosh! · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is there to say? My roommate/best friend read this before me, so I've read snippets, but to read it in its entirety is such an immense experience. I think Crystal did an amazing job in the way she compiled, presented, and ran with the information. It made me hate Warren, and it made me love him so, so much more. He's one of my favorite musicians (I'm 26 so the closest I got to experiencing his music live was when I went to one of Shooter Jennings and the Werewolves of Los Angeles shows) and I've really attached myself to his music, because of also having OCD and more literary sensitivities (?). I don't know. This was just really special. What a gift it is to exist in a world where it was possible to make Warren's music a reality, just genuinely a miracle. Also I want to kick his ass. I feel like Crystal and Ariel and Jordan are such cool people, also. I don't know. I just loved this book so much.

Around 94 pages in, I decided to take note of every single book or author that was mentioned for some reason, so here's a very incomplete list:

Graham Greene short stories, etc., Ross MacDonald, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Mickey Spillane, Warren being the "Dorothy Parker of rock and roll", The Great Gatsby, Warren read Eliot's Four Quartets annually, Hunter S. Thompson, Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West, Jay Cocks, Thomas McGuane, Dancing Bear by James Crumley, Gravity's Rainbow, Linda Moore, A Quiet Little Life by Wallace Stevens, Jim Crumley, Carl Hiaasen (of course!), Faye and Jonathan Kellerman, Norman Mailer, "[Warren] was in his Hemingway mode", Eve Babitz, Time's Arrow by Martin Amis, Nabokov, Iain Banks, Julian Barnes, Book of the Tao, Heidegger, The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro, Paul Bowles, Dave Barry, Stephen King (another of course!), Amy Tan, Roy Blount Jr., Mitch Albom, Ridley Pearson, Vicki Hendricks (misspelled), Dr. Zhivago, Warren received a signed, numbered Finnegans Wake fragment from 1930 for his birthday in 2000, Horace, Paul Muldoon, Lord Byron['s luggage], Charles Bronson, "He was our everything, from Lord Buckley to Charles Bukowski to Henry Miller." -Bonnie Raitt

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was reintroduced to the music of Warren Zevon when I heard the song “Desperados Under the Eves” used in an episode of Ray Donovan. It brought back my youth and the time, in a drunken stupor, I sang the chorus of “Werewolves of London” at the lip of the Old Waldorf stage in San Francisco with the maestro himself. I was too fucked up to realize he was as fucked up as I was and merely consorting with a fellow reprobate.

That memory caused me to delve into his catalogue beyond the two bestsellers I had owned on vinyl when he was in his prime. What sort of person wrote such wickedly funny, witty, and sardonic lyrics and ripping melodies? Well, I was about to find out.

This book is an unvarnished tome, written by his former wife, who had unbridled access to all the players—musicians, lovers, collaborators, and enablers who accompanied this remarkable talent throughout his life. Ever colorful, never pretty, it reflects the journey of a flawed genius who never really got his full due, and who wanted the truth about his experience, warts and all, to be laid bare. There’s a lot of roadkill on this highway, but the road-trip is worth the drive, whether you’re a fan or just a voyeur curious about the human condition—a condition that is forever terminal and, in this case, terminally interesting.

[Jerry Oliver · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heart wrenching, expansive memoir told through Zevon’s own words via his journal entries, interviews with his friends and associates and narration from his former wife Crystal. A fascinating story but I can’t say it was exactly uplifting and inspiring except when it came down to his shear musicality and artistic independence. A gifted but very troubled and complex personality who suffered OCD, alcoholism and sex addiction, while possessing an almost shamanistic literary, and musical wisdom. Sometimes the information in this book almost felt like more than I bargained for. But it did cause me to complete my collection of his entire discography of which I have no regrets.

[Kenneth Starcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Going into this book, I was a bit apprehensive. I knew Warren Zevon lived a wild life, and I was afraid the book might change my opinion of him and his music. Quite the opposite happened! Warren Zevon was a fascinating individual and an immensely talented artist. This book was exquisitely constructed in such a way that it felt like a documentary, told through interviews and stories by those who new Warren throughout his life. This book is a must for any Zevon fan.

[Shane Kaler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easy 4/5: Too many of Warren’s journal entries are out of context or edited beyond coherency, and more than a few are noticeably non-chronological. It brings the reliability of the author (his ex wife) under heightened scrutiny. Still, there’s a wealth of nuggets from other sources to keep me in awe, and I have sentimental ties with the subject. Yes, I cried by the end. #readingrainbow

[Dkolacinski · Rating 5 out of 5]

The excitable boy

The wind blows, the werewolves howl, the good, the bad , the ugly. Tears and scotch , Chinese menus . Told by many who saw and didn't see.

[Eric Dirker · Rating 4 out of 5]

I strongly recommend listening to his albums as they appear in the book. The added context transforms and elevates both the musical and literary experiences.