It took a push from Jackson Browne, a megastar at the time, to get Zevon a second chance at a solo career. His debut solo album, "Wanted Dead or Alive" (1969), was pretty much a disaster, and he spent a lot of years handling musical odd jobs, like writing commercial jingles and working as the Everly Brothers' musical director. At 16, lore has it, he drove away from the unsettled life of his then-divorced parents in a Corvette his father had won in a card game. Zevon's father was a professional gambler, not the stablest of occupations and one that kept his family on the road a lot, outrunning creditors in towns around California and Arizona. His temperament was no doubt shaped by a picaresque youth. In Norway, Zevon was dubbed "the rockabilly Ibsen." People like Norman Mailer, detective novelists Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler and film director Sam Peckinpah inspired the guy. You had to rummage well beyond music to fathom all of Zevon's influences. His wife "made an amazing pot roast, and I just opened my shirt and smeared it in on my chest." Asked why the psycho-killer of "Excitable Boy" rubs a pot roast all over his chest, he told Rolling Stone in 1978 that he understood the urge. Occasionally, he merely drew from his own ill-mannered life. He once claimed to be working in the tradition of old-school blues tunes, which have their share of unhappy endings, but nobody bought that. Zevon had a few explanations for the cocktail of doom and wit in his music. "His hair," Zevon deadpans, jumping out of the song's meter, one of his signature moves, "was perfect." One is spotted preening and drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic's. Scads of werewolves, it turns out, are prowling London and mutilating the elderly. Gonna get himself a big dish of beef chow mein He was looking for a place called Lee Ho Fook's Walkin' through the streets of Soho in the rain I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand Like the absurdist tale of carnage and narcissism told in his one big radio hit, "Werewolves of London." It opens: His best songs are noirish, studded with geographic details and proper names to lend reality to the mayhem. You can dance to it, though midway through the tune you realize you're twisting and shouting to the musical equivalent of a crime scene. He made you sing along to bloody murder, putting perky '50s-style doo-wop singers on the title cut of "Excitable Boy," which recounts the exploits of a high school kid who slaughters his prom date and later, after a stay in an insane asylum, makes a cage with her dug-up bones. Zevon will be remembered longest, though, for the wry, mordantly humorous voice that was utterly his own. A recovered alcoholic, he was only too familiar with rock bottom and regret, which is glisteningly clear on ballads like "Accidentally Like a Martyr" from 1978's "Excitable Boy" and the title track of "Mutineer" (1995). Zevon could do tender, and his catalogue is loaded with rending testimonials about his failings as a husband and a man. He brought that training to the Southern California singer-songwriter scene of the mid-'70s, a place inhabited by tender souls like Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne, a longtime friend and sometime producer. "Stravinsky was my Elvis," he once said, referring to the modern classical composer, whom Zevon actually met and befriended through a teacher in high school. Zevon was a piano player with classical training and a rocker's heart. Laugh now, people, he seemed to be saying, because ultimately we are the punch lines. One of his last studio albums was titled "Life'll Kill Ya." His personal logo was a human skull smoking a cigarette. With a novelist's ear for dialogue and character, he detailed the lives of deranged murderers, British werewolves, avenging mercenaries, detox divas, a murderous boxer, a hockey goon and a host of suicides. The body count on his albums runs to numbers you associate with gangster films, and nobody expires in a peaceful sleep. He spent years imagining grimly innovative exits from this world. That kind of gallows bonhomie was second nature to Zevon, who died Sunday at age 56. He also said he'd changed his eating habits to a steady diet of eggs and bacon. Last year, not long after doctors told him of his inoperable lung cancer, he was quoted in the Los Angeles Times saying that he had a final wish: to hang around long enough to catch the new James Bond movie. Through 14 albums and three decades, he wore the smirk of a man beyond the shock of tragedy, a connoisseur of worst-case scenarios and fatal surprises. No rock musician was better braced for a death sentence than Warren Zevon.
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