Warren Zevon..bad news
Posted by: woodface on 20 September 2002
I read in todays Guardian that Warren Zevon has terminal lung cancer. I must confess that I don't recall ever having heard any of his music but he has been on my 'investigation' list for some time. I am sure there are a number of people who will be saddened by this news.
Posted on: 20 September 2002 by colin thomas
Tune in to the Andy Kershaw programme on Radio 3 tonight 10:15, Warren's Radio 1 session from 2000 is being broadcast.
Posted on: 20 September 2002 by Former member
Bummer. I'd recommend "Sentimental Hygene" to hear blue-collar rock with wit.
Posted on: 20 September 2002 by Mark Dunn
I have all his albums. They're funny, energetic, cynical, cutting, protesting and with great musicians.
This is a real downer.
Best Regards,
Mark Dunn
This is a real downer.
Best Regards,
Mark Dunn
Posted on: 20 September 2002 by samo7
Waddy, Jackson, Linda, Glen Don, Bearnie and Randy etc...played once hear years ago(Ottawa, Canada) but was to drunk to finish the show...
I have or had most of his stuff but I would recommend a live album called "Learning To Flinch".Excellent production with a minimum of instuments...
I have or had most of his stuff but I would recommend a live album called "Learning To Flinch".Excellent production with a minimum of instuments...
Posted on: 24 September 2002 by Former member
That is awful news. I went to a show of his during the tour that gave rise to the 'learning to flinch' album (the Sydney leg -- unfortunately -- didn't make it onto the album!). It was so good that I went back the following evening for a reprise. Had never done that before (or since). Truly a class act. Lee Ho Fook (a Chinese restaurant in London) will forever be associated with werewolves for me as a result of Warren. To the original poster -- pick up whatever you can find ... it will not disappoint!
Posted on: 27 September 2002 by Ron The Mon
I heard a recent radio interview with a local Detroit "rock insider" (Gary Graff), and when asked if he was really OK with cancer, Warren responded, "the only downer for me is I won't be able to see the new James Bond flick".
Says it all really.
I first heard of Warren from Linda Ronstadt's Simple Dreams record. My two favorite cuts on it are Poor Poor Pitiful Me and Carmelita. When I noticed they were both Zevon compositions, I bought his record Warren Zevon (self titled) which I thought was his first record. I saw that the record featured musicians from Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles, The Beach Boys, Bonnie Rait, The Everly Brothers, Jackson Browne (who also produced it), etc. I thought to myself, "Who the Hell is this guy?"
Right now the song Carmelita, which is my favorite, is on and I'm still thinking, "Who the Hell is this guy".
Ron The Mon,
Needle-Freak
Says it all really.
I first heard of Warren from Linda Ronstadt's Simple Dreams record. My two favorite cuts on it are Poor Poor Pitiful Me and Carmelita. When I noticed they were both Zevon compositions, I bought his record Warren Zevon (self titled) which I thought was his first record. I saw that the record featured musicians from Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles, The Beach Boys, Bonnie Rait, The Everly Brothers, Jackson Browne (who also produced it), etc. I thought to myself, "Who the Hell is this guy?"
Right now the song Carmelita, which is my favorite, is on and I'm still thinking, "Who the Hell is this guy".
Ron The Mon,
Needle-Freak
Posted on: 02 October 2002 by Former member
bad news
This is the report from The guardain
Dead man singing
Dying words of LA's master of 'song noir'. Plus: showdown for the makers of High Noon
John Patterson
Friday September 20, 2002
The Guardian
Here's one for the wannabe obituarist: how do you sum up the achievements of a great artist when he's not dead yet? How do you write a decent obituary when the corpse-to-be is doing such a good job of it himself?
Warren Zevon was right. His last album, released in 2000, was called Life'll Kill Ya, and in his case it has - or soon will. His next, already out in the UK, will be his last, in a terminal sense. It's called My Ride's Here, and, yup, it's parked right outside, with the meter running backwards down to zero: Zevon is dying of inoperable lung cancer. Titles from his work take on an eerie resonance with the news of his approaching demise: Don't Let Us Get Sick; Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead. Then there's that photo on his Rhino anthology: a skull in sunglasses, smoking a cigarette.
Announcements that he was dying were accompanied with the kind of quip that Zevon's admirers revere him for: "Really, the thing I want is to last through the winter so I don't miss the new James Bond movie," he told the LA Times recently. "And I want to wear sweaters, a scarf, the overcoat, the whole thing, like a Winona Ryder movie."
A classically trained prodigy, Zevon hit Los Angeles in the late 1960s, arranged and conducted the orchestral sections on his own albums, but also had a keen ear for meathead rock riffs like the one in Lawyers, Guns and Money. In the singer-songwriter boom of the early 1970s, Zevon found himself not in the platinum-sales column of the ledger, but bracketed with the difficult, superliterate, LA-specific talents like Randy Newman, Tom Waits, Steely Dan and, at a pinch, Zevon's mentor Jackson Browne.
It was Browne who first nailed Zevon's musical universe: "He's the first and foremost proponent of song noir." Zevon's songs teem with losers, drunks, failures, killers, rapists, and garden-variety Tinseltown psychotics - all the debris that gets swept out of the Hollywood bars at 2am. The French Inhaler mourns a failed, drunken beauty ("Your face looked like something Death brought with him in his suitcase"); Carmelita is an LA junkie's midnight reverie ("I pawned my Smith-Corona/ And I went to meet my man/ He hangs out down on Alvarado Street/By the Pioneer Chicken stand"), and one of his poetic masterpieces, Desperadoes Under the Eaves, contains perhaps the best couplet of his career, and one of the best ever written about LA's underside: "And if California slides into the ocean/As the mystics and statistics say it will/I predict this motel will be standing/Until I pay my bill."
Somewhere in the middle distance, you can hear Randy Newman's Little Criminals gearing up to rob that gas station. Meanwhile the Nighthawks at the Tom Waits Diner growl dementedly to themselves, Steely Dan's Show Biz Kids are "makin' movies of themselves/ Cuz they don't give a fuck about anybody else", Ry Cooder goes "Down in Hollywood" (a sleazy, scary trip), and Browne asks plaintively, "How long have I been drifting away?" This is the midnight Hollywood they all once trod, then rendered in song, and of which Zevon was the honorary mayor.
Intimidatingly well-read, Zevon can quote Kierkegaard at will, knows his pulp fiction backwards, and draws a goodly number of his songs from the headlines. His latest album is full of songs co-written by writer-fans who have become his friends. They include Hunter S Thompson, an anti-role model for the younger Zevon, novelist Carl Hiaasen, whose Florida is a parallel noir universe to Zevon's Hollywood, and Irish poet Paul Muldoon. I'm guessing none of these guys will show up on the next Jewel album.
But let's not feel sad, because the corpse-to-be doesn't. "I feel the opposite of regret," he says. "I was the hardest-living rock on my block for a while. Then for 18 years, I was a sober dad of some amazing kids. I feel like I've lived a couple of lives - and now when people listen to the music they'll say, 'Maybe the guy wasn't being so morbid after all.' "
Musical genius, gifted writer, indubitable king of narcotic and alcoholic excess, Zevon now shows us that, in the face of oblivion, he also has balls the size of cantaloupes. You've just gotta love this guy - but do it while you still can
this is a copy of the report from The Guardian
This is the report from The guardain
Dead man singing
Dying words of LA's master of 'song noir'. Plus: showdown for the makers of High Noon
John Patterson
Friday September 20, 2002
The Guardian
Here's one for the wannabe obituarist: how do you sum up the achievements of a great artist when he's not dead yet? How do you write a decent obituary when the corpse-to-be is doing such a good job of it himself?
Warren Zevon was right. His last album, released in 2000, was called Life'll Kill Ya, and in his case it has - or soon will. His next, already out in the UK, will be his last, in a terminal sense. It's called My Ride's Here, and, yup, it's parked right outside, with the meter running backwards down to zero: Zevon is dying of inoperable lung cancer. Titles from his work take on an eerie resonance with the news of his approaching demise: Don't Let Us Get Sick; Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead. Then there's that photo on his Rhino anthology: a skull in sunglasses, smoking a cigarette.
Announcements that he was dying were accompanied with the kind of quip that Zevon's admirers revere him for: "Really, the thing I want is to last through the winter so I don't miss the new James Bond movie," he told the LA Times recently. "And I want to wear sweaters, a scarf, the overcoat, the whole thing, like a Winona Ryder movie."
A classically trained prodigy, Zevon hit Los Angeles in the late 1960s, arranged and conducted the orchestral sections on his own albums, but also had a keen ear for meathead rock riffs like the one in Lawyers, Guns and Money. In the singer-songwriter boom of the early 1970s, Zevon found himself not in the platinum-sales column of the ledger, but bracketed with the difficult, superliterate, LA-specific talents like Randy Newman, Tom Waits, Steely Dan and, at a pinch, Zevon's mentor Jackson Browne.
It was Browne who first nailed Zevon's musical universe: "He's the first and foremost proponent of song noir." Zevon's songs teem with losers, drunks, failures, killers, rapists, and garden-variety Tinseltown psychotics - all the debris that gets swept out of the Hollywood bars at 2am. The French Inhaler mourns a failed, drunken beauty ("Your face looked like something Death brought with him in his suitcase"); Carmelita is an LA junkie's midnight reverie ("I pawned my Smith-Corona/ And I went to meet my man/ He hangs out down on Alvarado Street/By the Pioneer Chicken stand"), and one of his poetic masterpieces, Desperadoes Under the Eaves, contains perhaps the best couplet of his career, and one of the best ever written about LA's underside: "And if California slides into the ocean/As the mystics and statistics say it will/I predict this motel will be standing/Until I pay my bill."
Somewhere in the middle distance, you can hear Randy Newman's Little Criminals gearing up to rob that gas station. Meanwhile the Nighthawks at the Tom Waits Diner growl dementedly to themselves, Steely Dan's Show Biz Kids are "makin' movies of themselves/ Cuz they don't give a fuck about anybody else", Ry Cooder goes "Down in Hollywood" (a sleazy, scary trip), and Browne asks plaintively, "How long have I been drifting away?" This is the midnight Hollywood they all once trod, then rendered in song, and of which Zevon was the honorary mayor.
Intimidatingly well-read, Zevon can quote Kierkegaard at will, knows his pulp fiction backwards, and draws a goodly number of his songs from the headlines. His latest album is full of songs co-written by writer-fans who have become his friends. They include Hunter S Thompson, an anti-role model for the younger Zevon, novelist Carl Hiaasen, whose Florida is a parallel noir universe to Zevon's Hollywood, and Irish poet Paul Muldoon. I'm guessing none of these guys will show up on the next Jewel album.
But let's not feel sad, because the corpse-to-be doesn't. "I feel the opposite of regret," he says. "I was the hardest-living rock on my block for a while. Then for 18 years, I was a sober dad of some amazing kids. I feel like I've lived a couple of lives - and now when people listen to the music they'll say, 'Maybe the guy wasn't being so morbid after all.' "
Musical genius, gifted writer, indubitable king of narcotic and alcoholic excess, Zevon now shows us that, in the face of oblivion, he also has balls the size of cantaloupes. You've just gotta love this guy - but do it while you still can
this is a copy of the report from The Guardian
Posted on: 06 November 2002 by bdnyc
I too was saddened to hear the news that one of "popular" music's most gifted songwriter's was faced with a shorter term lease than many of us would hope for. As late night TV's David Letterman, and his band leader Paul Schaeffer had been consistently host to Warren I was not at all surprised to see Warren listed in the schedule for a show last week. What was an unexpected bonus, and a really touching tribute, Letterman only had Warren on that night. Warren spoke, with humor, and good cheer about his life, admiting at one point that in retrospect he did not feel that his twenty year avoidance of any doctors was such a good strategy. He went on to play three songs in what I can only say was a riveting performance. He also made it clear that he has been working very hard to try and complete more new work beyond his excellent CD "My Ride's Here". It was another good reminder to try and appreciate those gifts life offers up before we too lose our lease.