Dirty life and times

In my report on my summer reading below, I forgot to mention "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon," an oral history of Zevon's life complied by his ex-wife Crystal Zevon. I can't say I was a dyed-in-the-wool fan of Zevon's, though his album Excitable Boy was one of my favorites during my first years out of college. An ex-boyfriend from that time got a particular delight from singing the line about Lon Chaney Jr. walking with the Queen (from "Werewolves of London") and the particularly nasty lyrics of "Excitable Boy" ("He dug up her grave and built a cage with her bones," for example). Zevon was a musical It Boy for a short time, between the runaway success of "Werewolves" and Linda Ronstadt's recording of a couple of his songs ("Poor Poor Pitiful Me" and "Hasten Down the Wind"). But he more or less dropped out of the media spotlight until he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 2002, when, according to this book, he made a concerted effort to get back in the game, if only to get a last brief shot at fame, and he succeeded--an entire hour on Letterman, a top 10 album issued just a week before his death.

This book shows just what a jackass Zevon was: abusive to his women, dismissive of his children, often unkind to his close friends and musical associates. Some of his behavior was undoubtedly due to his drinking and drug problems, which cropped up just as he was hitting the big time and led to his inability to keep the steamroller of success going, but even when he got cleaned up in the 90's, he was still kind of a jackass. Almost every song on Excitable Boy still holds up, especially the tender "Accidentally Like a Martyr" and the hilarious "Lawyers, Guns and Money," but I didn't care for its follow-up, Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School (despite the cool title) and from what I've sampled from his later catalog, he never regained the heights of his early years. I may check out his last album, The Wind, from the library. What a depressing read, almost as depressing as the Carpenters bio, and "Papa John," the John Phillips autobiography which is the single most depressing bio I've ever read. If rock stars can't have some fun, what hope do us workaday peons have?