Bad Example (1991), Mutineer (1995) and Life’ll Kill Ya (2000), which featuring beautiful ballads (like “Mutineer”) along with obsessive musings on death and failure (“Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead,” “My Shit’s Fucked Up”). The album also featured music by R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry, with whom Zevon would later record an album as the Hindu Love Gods in 1990. The album boasted a bigger sound and songs like “Detox Mansion” and “Trouble Waiting to Happen” that addressed his alcohol addiction and media coverage of it. Zevon struggled with alcoholism and had kicked the habit before releasing The Envoy in 1982, but a fall off the wagon and its ensuing publicity would prompt a five-year hiatus before he sobered up again and released Sentimental Hygiene. The larger-scale popularity of his previous album began to wane, but Zevon had established a foundation for cult fandom that would keep him in business for the next two decades. Two years later, Zevon issued Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School, which reached Number Twenty on the charts. by Jackson Browne, who produced Zevon’s self-titled 1976 album, which included “Hasten” in addition to other favorites-to-be like “Desperados Under the Eaves,” and “Poor Pitiful Me,” which Ronstadt covered and scored a hit with in 1978 (she has also put her stamp on Zevon’s “Carmelita” and “Mohammed’s Radio”). Zevon had been living in Europe at the time and was talked into returning to the U.S. Though Zevon initially had no luck putting his own music over, Linda Ronstadt made his “Hasten Down the Wind” the title track of her 1976 album. He threw himself into musical odd jobs, including writing jingles (for Ernest and Julio Gallo wines, to name one) as well as songs for the Turtles (“Outside Chance”) and serving as pianist and bandleader for the Everly Brothers. In 1969, Zevon recorded his debut album, Wanted: Dead or Alive, which generated almost no interest. After meeting composer Igor Stravinsky, he began to study music in junior high and started a few local bands in high school. Zevon was born in January 1947 in Chicago, the son of Russian immigrants, and grew up in Arizona and California. Bad Example, on Giant Records.A year after learning he had an inoperable form of lung cancer - and more than twenty-five years after he began obsessing over death in song - Warren Zevon passed away in his Los Angeles home on Sunday he was fifty-six. Bad Example," Zevon was an artist's artist, one whom Mountain Stage was fortunate to welcome to the program twice before his death in 2003 at the age of 56.Īt the time of this 1991 performance, Warren Zevon had just released his eighth studio album, Mr. His stoic vocals and gallows songwriting led to critical acclaim and popular success, eventually leading to his 1978 hit "Werewolves Of London." Although he could certainly be "Mr. Born in Chicago but raised on the West Coast, he began his music career as a classical piano student before broadening his admiration of Stravinsky to The Everly Brothers, folk and pop. Zevon was a beloved cult hero in the world of rock music. 17, 1991, at the Culture Center Theater in Charleston, W.Va. From Mountain Stage's archives, the original tape of Warren Zevon's 1991 performance.įrom the Mountain Stage archives: a little-heard performance from gifted singer-songwriter-rocker Warren Zevon, recorded live Nov.
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