*Ø* Blogmanac | "Goodnight, Warren, we'll see ya." -- Dave Letterman


Warren Zevon is running out of life, but not inspiration
By Barry Gilbert, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
08/22/2003
[Written prior to Zevon's death September 7, 2003]

"How can I complain?" singer-songwriter Warren Zevon said to his son, Jordan, after being diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer [Mesothelioma, associated with inhaling asbestos. -v] about a year ago. "I got to be Jim Morrison for the first half of my life and Ward Cleaver for the second."

"And that's absolutely true," Jordan Zevon says of his father's two lives, one marked by alcohol and drug addiction, and a sober one in which he got to know his son and his daughter, Ariel. "He's been such a stand-up guy. That's what I'm going to remember."

Music fans will remember a songwriter of vision, a performer of passion and a man who, in both song and behavior, seems to have been rehearsing for death his whole life. From "Werewolves of London" and "Excitable Boy" to "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" and "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead," from "Life'll Kill Ya" to "My Ride's Here," Zevon has been looking at death with a cocked eyebrow and sardonic smile for more than 25 years.

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