Finished Mo 2/17/25
I bought this as an ebook on Kindle. It's a fantastic look at the life of a madman and the interviews were compiled by his ex-wife. She was one of the few people who had some kind of control over this wild & crazy singer/song writer.
Warren told his adult son to get rid of his porn collection. The son thought he meant commercially bought adult films, but no. These were films that Warren had made with other women over the course of his life.
When he was given the death sentence of lung cancer, he went back to drinking and drugging. Why not?
From 'A Greenman Review.com':
"The Warren Zevon who emerges from these pages is even more of an enigma than he would appear to be just from listening to his songs. And that’s saying a lot for a man who wrote songs that included “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” about a ghostly mercenary who takes revenge on those who double-crossed him; “Excitable Boy,” about a demented young serial killer; “Mohammed’s Radio,” about low-lifes in L.A.; and “My Shit’s Fucked Up” and “Life’ll Kill Ya” about the perils of facing one’s own mortality.
It should come as no surprise that Warren Zevon was one fucked-up dude. But the extent of his weirdness is, at times, staggering. It’s nearly impossible to even draw up a rough outline of his life, so multi-faceted and bizarre it was. The son of a reticent Mormon and an even more shadowy Jewish mobster, Zevon grew up in California in the ’50s and ’60s. He showed musical talent from the start, considered a career in classical piano, and spent some time in the California home of Igor Stravinsky. He was also a serious reader and writer, and seemed to know from an early age that he’d live or die as an artist.
He was on the fringes of the California folk-rock scene that included The Turtles, The Eagles, Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne. He toured and played with The Everly Brothers. He early on discovered alcohol and drugs, and always used them to excess. There were many hard years in the early 1970s, when he and Crystal lived hand to mouth, in other people’s homes, and for a time in a Spanish resort town. But he continued to believe in himself and to work on his songcraft, and eventually had his first album produced by Jackson Browne. It was his second album, which included his most popular hit “Werewolves of London,” that made him the most money and brought him briefly to the public’s attention. It also increased his intake of intoxicants and began a long slide, or series of slides, that lasted until he finally got sober in the early 1980s. His career never recovered, though, his albums selling progressively fewer, until his final, The Wind, recorded as he was under a death sentence from lung cancer, which won several Grammys.
In addition to his substance abuse, Zevon was a sex addict and a self-diagnosed victim of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He was constitutionally unable to be monogamous. He was for most of his life barely a presence in the lives of his two children (by different mothers). He was bizarrely superstitious. He abused those closest to him, personally and professionally. But he was also highly regarded by nearly everybody who knew him, most of whom seemed to have felt it was worth putting up with his flaws.
When writers like Stephen King, Carl Hiaasen and Gore Vidal, and musicians like David Crosby, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan all refer to the man as a genius, you have to take him seriously. He could be darkly hilarious and deeply sentimental, sometimes within the same breath. He saw through society’s facades and wrote songs about the dirty underbelly that were by turns wry, poignant and irreverent. He laughed in the face of death, and cried on the shoulders of former lovers.
I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead isn’t a perfect book. But it’s a compelling portrait of a difficult, multi-faceted, contradictory and deeply creative human being. Highly recommended."
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