#Warren zevon life will kill ya professional#
#Warren zevon life will kill ya mac#

and Tom Petty's Heartbreakers queueing up to participate. The cast of guest stars alone confirmed Zevon's status as the connoisseur's delight, with Neil Young, Bob Dylan and members of R.E.M.

Zevon's tenure with Asylum lapsed, and the superb Sentimental Hygiene album (1987) came out on Virgin records. Looks like another threat to world peace/ For the envoy.' Stand In The Fire (1980) was a live album of rare ferocity, while the title song of The Envoy rings as true today as it did 20 years ago - 'Nuclear arms in the Middle East/ Israel's attacking the Iraqis. Not that this made his music any less fascinating. While 1980's Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School also made the top 20, it signalled the end of its author's period of commercial visibility. On board as producer was Jackson Browne, who became one of Zevon's closest friends and also produced his follow-up album, Excitable Boy (1978), another batch of powerful and alarming songs, outlining the career of a murderous rapist in the title tune and including his only hit single, Werewolves Of London.Įxcitable Boy hit the American top 10, but despite several covers of his songs by Linda Ronstadt, Zevon's work was too dark and perverse for mainstream tastes. I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, for example, was a saga of booze, guns and suicide likewise, Carmelita recounted the tale of a junkie on the skids.

#Warren zevon life will kill ya mac#

His Asylum debut, Warren Zevon (1976), bristled with west coast rock deities - including Glenn Frey and Don Henley, of the Eagles, and Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, from Fleetwood Mac - though he seemed hell-bent on sabotaging the hedonistic myth of the golden state. He recorded the little-noticed album Wanted Dead Or Alive (1969), but it was signing to Asylum records in the mid- 1970s that lit the blue touch paper on his career.

#Warren zevon life will kill ya professional#

He even got to know Igor Stravinsky, then living in the Hollywood Hills.ĭespite his lifelong interest in classical music, Warren's first professional involvement was as one half of the boy-girl pop duo, Lyme and Cybelle. Zevon would have taken gleefully to the role of grizzled, geriatric curmudgeon his approach to his work always had more in common with a detective or a crime writer than with some flouncing showbiz wannabe.īorn in Chicago, he moved with his family to California as a child, and though he described his father as a gangster and gambler, William Zevon took his parental responsibilities seriously enough to sign his son up for formal tuition in classical piano.