TAC correspondent Mike Long writes about the late musician Warren Zevon, a talented fiend.

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon, by Crystal Zevon (Harper Collins, 452 pp., $26.95)

Reviewed by Mike Long 

Warren Zevon enjoyed a condition common among 20^th century entertainers: he was as popular for his lifestyle as for his talent. More precisely, he spent most of his time drunk, stoned and mean while producing entertainment that a lot of trendsetters liked. He was the suffering, self-destructive, somewhat successful artist—the ultimate in cool.

The problem, of course, is that the pose is a lot more fun to envy than to experience.

And Warren Zevon, according to his friends, was a self-loathing narcissist with an ear for melody and catchy progressions; a knack for poetically describing characters, casual scenes and profound emotion; the far-ranging curiosity of an autodidact; and a near-insatiable appetite for grim excess.

In other words: beyond occasional moments of nobility, Warren Zevon was a fascinating jackass.

The son of a sometime-gangster and an abused mother, Zevon was a sarcastic, dramatic kid whose musical abilities first appeared when his father came home from a poker game with a Chickering piano (alluded to decades later in the 1993 song “Piano Fighter”).

Zevon was a near-prodigy in the technical aspects of composition. By age 13, his session player-music teacher introduced him to Russian composer-conductor Igor Stravinsky, who analyzed scores with the boy while sharing his daily ritual of caviar and scotch. (In a preview of things to come, the 13-year old “Mr. Zevon betrayed no effects from the liquid,” wrote composer Robert Craft, a protégé of Stravinsky who was there.)

By his late teens, he had attempted a career as an eccentric pseudo-folkie, half of the ridiculously-named duo “lyme and cybelle”—Zevon was “lyme” and wore all green, all the time, even off-stage. The recordings were weak but the songwriting was strong, and served as his entrée to the budding Los Angeles drugs-and-music scene of the late 60s and early 70s.

He bounced around for most of a decade as a talented unknown until his friend Jackson Browne helped him get a record deal. His 1976 self-titled album, also his first major label release, contained the best of a decade’s worth of his writing—autobiography and character studies—tightly produced and played.

Though he maintained such high quality in all his later recordings, he never issued another collection as consistently smart and enjoyable as this one. The melodies are engaging without being treacly, the arrangements and production are crisp, and the lyrics suggest a sensibility more suited to a poet than a pop singer:

She’s so many women
He can’t find the one who was his friend
So he’s hanging on to half her heart
He can’t have the restless part
So he tells her to hasten down the wind.

Author Crystal Zevon avoids self-conscious tales of the “story behind the song” in favor of incidental appearances of the mundane sources that are many artists’ inspiration.

This is far more revealing of the relationship between Warren Zevon’s musical efforts and his life: The gonzo motto, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” came from a car-ride conversation with friend. The song and album title “Mutineer” came from a Florida bar. Another song title, “Seminole Bingo,” came from a phrase on a tourist brochure. The now-famous line “Send lawyers, guns and money” was offered by a friend as an ad hoc solution to a tight spot.

Though credited as author, Zevon’s ex-wife Crystal was primarily a fact-gatherer and editor for the volume, interviewing dozens of the singer’s family members and friends. With few exceptions, everyone she spoke with had a story of some sudden and random altercation with the singer.

So why tell the story of the typical talented jerk? Because that story is rarely told with the nostalgia stripped away. Virtually no one Crystal Zevon interviewed attributes Zevon’s talent to his excesses, but no one gives him a pass for his behavior on account of his talent, either.

Mrs. Zevon’s interviews reveal a guy who generally got what was coming to him. He alienated himself from his children. He could not sustain a romantic relationship. He was self-destructive, self-loathing, and had little personal discipline in the areas where it might have helped him the most. He was vain and insecure, even though he had the admiration of the sort of “smart people” whose attention he coveted.

The lesson here is that while most self-destructive celebrities are rewarded with cash, fame and attention (see Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Kate Moss, etc), the far more common outcome is ending up nearly broke, miserable and alone. Talent won’t save you—a sad but fair enough truth.

Zevon’s story had a temporarily happy ending. By the mid-1980s he got off of drugs and alcohol through rehab and became pals with his idols, some of the smarter (or at least more interesting) figures in popular culture: authors Carl Hiaasen, Dave Barry, Mitch Albom, actor Billy Bob Thornton and comedians Richard Lewis and David Letterman. He also recorded more very good songs, though only his last album sold a significant number of copies.

Toward the end of his life, this most literate and articulate of rock-and-roll songwriters struggled to pay the bills, at times getting by on touring out of his own car for a few thousand dollars a night and selling T-shirts and autographed CDs.

Eventually his songwriting royalties provided him with a modest middle-class income, though it was nothing compared to the fortunes of his more responsible friends. Zevon could afford only a modest apartment, not a rock-and-roll mansion.

In the end, his insecurities and irrational fears cost him his life. It was the only doctor he trusted, his dentist, who insisted that Zevon seek treatment for the coughing and exhaustion that turned out to be the symptoms of late-stage lung cancer.

He died at age 56 on September 7, 2003, having lived almost a year past his doctors’ predictions, and long enough to see his grandchildren born. It was also long enough to, in his own words, cash in on his now-sad notoriety and thus cement his reputation and help provide for his grown children.

Zevon seldom lived inside reasonable lines, but he did not blame his difficulties on others. That alone makes him highly unusual among modern men, and a singular case among rock-and-rollers. His response to that life was to write songs mixing humor with disappointment and sarcasm with gratitude, which is surely the most honest reaction to life that any man can have.

Michael Long is a director of the White House Writers Group.