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| Ten Thousand Motels |
CDs: Release of rarities and biography shed light on Warren Zevon
By Sean Piccoli
Pop Music Writer
Posted May 1 2007
Sun Sentinal
Warren Zevon: Preludes -- Rare and Unreleased Recordings (New West).
Warren Zevon had limited use for the adjectives that people applied to his songwriting. Take this exchange, from a 2000 radio interview on the new odds `n' ends collection Preludes -- Rare and Unreleased Recordings (New West):
"Songwise, does Warren Zevon have a split personality, the sensitive balladeer versus the arch narrator?"
"Well, if I had a split personality, I'd only know it half at a time, wouldn't I?"
Zevon was saying that nobody lives -- or works -- in clean, separated compartments. Everything bleeds into everything else, and one sentiment is always shaded or undercut by another. It's a point that Zevon made over and over in his songs. The marauding Excitable Boy (1978) is never happier than when he's murderously acting out his torments. The suitor of Carmelita (1976) is clinging to love as only a wrecked soul can.
Zevon, who died of cancer in 2003 at age 56, carried his own baggage with more flair than most. We should all have this much fun exploiting our gifts and our curses -- that's the lesson of the two-CD set Preludes and its companion book, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, an anecdotal memoir compiled by Zevon's ex-wife, Crystal Zevon. There are more definitive collections of his halfway-sentimental ballads and rock 'n' roll folk songs, such as a 1996 Rhino Records package also named for the Zevon tune I'll Sleep When I'm Dead. And it's sometimes hard to be fully absorbed by a book of fragments -- excerpted interviews with friends, family and collaborators.
But as a primer on this talented, hard-living musician, the music and the text work well together as a songs-from-the-attic anthology with book-length liner notes. Disc one of Preludes contains 16 songs: 10 alternate takes of past recordings and six songs never before released in any form. Zevon's son, Jordan, found these songs -- and dozens more -- a few months after his father's death, on tapes locked in a storage warehouse.
What's clear from hearing them now is that Zevon was a pretty scrupulous editor of his own work. Nothing here will replace the definitive versions. The outtake of 1978's Werewolves of London, recorded some years earlier, sounds like Zevon and band impersonating lounge lizards for kicks. Zevon does play an intriguing, Jimmy Page-style drone guitar on a solo-demo version of The French Inhaler. A troupe of backing singers gives I Used to Ride So High the feel of a Gram Parsons song: country rock on acid.
A solo piano version of Tule's Blues -- named for Jordan Zevon's mother, whom Warren never married -- is the most affecting and stand-alone-complete of the 10 alternates.
The six new entries are a mixed blessing. Studebaker, also played on piano, sounds like a building block for later, better-known songs such as Hasten Down the Wind and Play It All Night Long. Going All the Way might be Zevon's wide-of-the-mark shot at cushy Brill Building pop. Empty Hearted Town and The Rosarita Beach Café ring truest of the six: Sung with minimal accompaniment, they are vivid portraits of people stuck in one place.
The second disc contains three songs from Zevon's undervalued 2000 album, Life'll Kill Ya, and segments of an Austin, Texas, radio interview he did to promote it. He fields questions almost as artfully as he writes music. "You have to understand," he says of his work ethic, "I've been motivated to take a break since 1965. I'm not a real ambitious person." He turns aphorisms on the fly: "There's more of an exchange, a human exchange of ideas and feelings, to be had in the bus stop than over the phone with your accountant, and if you're rich you spend a lot of time on the phone with your accountant."
It's also interesting to hear him sparring with, if not contradicting, assertions made by friends and family in the book. In the foreword, author and pal Carl Hiaasen writes, "That his own work was underappreciated has always been ... a source of bitter frustration for him." In the interview, Zevon says, "I don't think about what other people's perception of me is, at least not any more ... than anybody in any field does."
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| Martha |
I dig Warren's music.
Nice read.
Thanks TTR!
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