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Warren Zevon and Werewolves of London
I’ve assembled a great Spotify Halloween playlist. The flagship song? Werewolves of London.
There’s a great tribute to Zevon and the song here (I thought Zevon covered Linda Ronstadt’s Poor, Poor Pitiful Me, not the other way around).
Zevon was an interesting guy. Part-Mormon, part-Jewish, he was the son of a Ukrainian gangster in the mob of Mickey Cohen (whose arrest catalyzed the entire narrative of L.A. Confidential). He was a drunk until he sobered, he liked to waive guns around, and he beat women (that’s a bad thing, Andrew Tate). He wasn’t obsessed with money or fame and often paid his rent by playing corporate gigs and little venues. See this podcast episode (link contains a transcript of the episode . . worth reading).
My guess is, he was a man instinctively rebelling against modern life, just like another cultural renegade, Jack Kerouac, but unlike Kerouac, Zevon wasn’t also chasing the Tao. Just my hunch.
Final observation from Bill Kauffman’s Poetry Night at the Ballpark and Other Scenes from an Alternative America
From Crystal Zevon’s warts-aplenty 2007 portrait of her ex-husband, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, comes this account of the Zevons’ child-custody dispute: “Warren got on the phone; he was obviously drunk. . . . He said, ‘I’m to the right of your father and Ronald Reagan and if you think I’m going to let my daughter be raised by some f***ing Communist hippie, you’re sadly mistaken.’”
