But the real path was longer and more twisty than that. Few had his eye and intellect, both of which seemed to surface fully formed here. It firmed Zevon's status as one of the era's best but often neglected artists, while also turning a mirror on both artist and his scene.
That 1976 album was a bellwether moment in many ways.
His next album, Excitable Boy, again produced by Browne and featuring an all-star roster of friends, climbed to the Top 10 – thanks in part to the fluke hit "Werewolves of London." But he never got there again with the almost dozen records he made before his death in 2003. But like the protagonists of the opening track, "Frank and Jesse James," Zevon was the eternal outlaw, " ridin', ridin', ridin'."Īnd that's the overriding spirit of Warren Zevon that more or less shaped the rest of his career. Don't the sun look angry at me?" That about sums it up. In the album-closing "Desperados Under the Eaves" he sings, " Still waking up in the mornings with shaking hands. His characters were drug addicts, alcoholics, prone to violence and gambling with their lives in ways that just happen to also affect those around them. And he wrote about some truly abhorrent people. Unlike so many of his peers and contemporaries (especially Browne, perhaps his biggest supporter and the prince of '70s singer-songwriterisms), Zevon wasn't a particularly sensitive soul, even if his melodies occasionally pushed toward that direction. Listen to Warren Zevon's 'Frank and Jesse James' Some of music's biggest names were already behind Zevon, and the album's track listing now reads like a classic lineup of some of his greatest songs. But Warren Zevon served as announcement of a new singer-songwriter whose voice and songs were worth hearing. 189 and staying on the chart for just two weeks. So, expectations weren't all that high, and, frankly, the album didn't sell all that well, peaking at No. Even Ronstadt's celebrated covers of several Zevon songs – "Hasten Down the Wind," "Carmelita" and "Poor Poor Pitiful Me," all from this LP, among them – wouldn't arrive until after Warren Zevon's release. Although he was well known among his songwriter peers and the music industry at large, Zevon really had no presence at all in the public eye. Intro I said this before, and I'll say it again There's a song I'd like to play for ya That I wrote a decade ago, just about And this is the song that came along and intervened between myself. Many of Los Angeles' greatest session musicians of the era were also present, but even with all that star power surrounding him, Zevon remained the center of things, supplying piano, guitar, arrangements and 11 songs to an album that sounded like a lifetime coming.Īnd in many ways, Warren Zevon was indeed that.
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