It's like getting a glimpse of how the world really works. It seems impossible but somehow inevitable in a secret handshake way. You can pack a lot of poetry in that image, it's like that photograph of Boys' Stater Bill Clinton shaking hands with President John F. That house is up a little hill from the Sunset Strip, maybe half a mile from the Viper Room. Thompson-esque of all the Linda Ronstadt constellation of Southern California singer-songwriters hanging out with the great "inventor of music," the Russian who'd scandalized Paris with The Rite of Spring in 1913, getting together in a modest house in the Hollywood Hills a couple of years before anyone had heard of The Beatles. That was a cool image, the kid who'd grow up to be the most outre and Hunter S. It was a long time ago, probably in the 1970s. I heard a story about a 13-year-old Warren Zevon drinking Scotch with Igor Stravinsky. And in the spare, heartbreaking ” El Amor de mi Vida,” Zevon leaves the listener with an unforgettable image: a man looking out at a world that, somewhere, holds the woman who used to love him: “I look outside, I know you’re there/ And you’ve found a brand new life somewhere/ I only wish it had been us/ But I’m happy for your happiness.” It’s a lovely sending-off, with forgiveness and an open heart-the way we’d all want to be sent off, to a new lover, a new place, or whatever fresh mysteries lie beyond the life we know."In the songwriting field, there isn't a section for fiction and a section for nonfiction. ” Keep Me in Your Heart,” finished at his home studio in April after he was no longer able to travel, bids a cleareyed goodbye to an old love, and the language couldn’t be much homelier: “Sometimes when you’re doing simple things around the house/ Maybe you’ll think of me and smile/ You know I’m tied to you like the buttons on your blouse/ Keep me in your heart for awhile.” It’s the modesty of that qualifying “maybe,” and the shrugging “for awhile,” that make the sentiment hard to shake off. In two ballads co-written with Jorge Calderón, though, he found the voice for a songwriter’s farewell. Unfortunately, his prognosis is the same.” It doesn’t seem likely that Zevon will be appearing in public again. A PR person for Artemis says, “Some days are better than others for him. He lived to finish the record and to see his grandchildren born.
“July 2003: Warren is still alive,” the official bio says, and that’s that. It’d feel like a gimmick if the guest stars weren’t so well-used-Cooder’s plangent guitar on “Dirty Life & Times,” Henley and Schmit’s sympathetic vocal backing on “She’s Too Good for Me,” Walsh reprising the gutbucket pleasures of “Rocky Mountain Way” in “Rub Me Raw.”Įven Zevon’s record label seems to grasp that this is a moment to keep it simple. Schmit, Jackson Browne, T-Bone Burnett, Tom Petty, Joe Walsh, Emmylou Harris-a Murderer’s Row of singer-songwriter talent.
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Other old friends and co-conspirators are in the mix: longtime collaborator Jorge Calderón, plus Ry Cooder, Don Henley, Timothy B. Even funny and very Zevonesque tropes like “I’m sprawled across the davenport of despair” are mounted in a setting of creeping decay (” Disorder in the House,” with a raging guitar lead by Bruce Springsteen). It’s a mantle the record wears gracefully, though, in ways both small (the keening crunch of David Lindley’s lap steel guitar, a sound so recognizable to anyone who was there in the ‘70s that it’s sure to induce a small shock of sense memory) and big: The familiar outlaw-on-the-run motif of ” Dirty Life & Times“ holds an unmistakable sense of the clock running down.
It’s not surprising that this part of Zevon’s sensibility is front and center on The Wind (Artemis Records), or that the project carries with it a valedictory air.
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