Twenty years after Zevon’s death from cancer at age 56, the Roxy gig is just one manifestation of a surge of interest in his wise and witty songs about love, sex, addiction, murder, history and geopolitics. “That’s what it was like to learn these songs.” Thompson used to say that he’d retype Hemingway novels as a way of getting inside the art,” Jennings says, referring to the influential gonzo journalist who was a close friend and collaborator of Zevon’s. Now Jennings is set to show off his studies Friday night in a concert tribute to Zevon at the Roxy in West Hollywood with a band he’s calling the Werewolves of Los Angeles. “Mind-blown,” as he puts it, by the discovery, Jennings, 43, spent the next couple of years absorbing everything Zevon recorded over an idiosyncratic career that made him a cult-fave avatar of L.A.’s dark side and a musician’s musician beloved by ’70s superstars like the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac and Linda Ronstadt. “He’s owning up to a failure of emotional adulthood in that song, like he’s f- his life up and he’s putting it on parade.” What he heard in Zevon’s heart-rending yet bleakly hilarious lyrics - “And if California slides into the ocean/ Like the mystics and statistics say it will/ I predict this motel will be standing until I pay my bill” - was “the most blatantly honest songwriting I’d ever encountered,” Jennings says. “Then I listened to it 3,000 more times.” Today, January 24th, marks what would have been Zevon’s 75th birthday, and in celebration of his career I bring you one of his many insightful, yet oddly danceable rock classics below – join me in dancing a little jig (or at least bob your head) to the wonderful ‘Lawyers, Guns and Money’.“So I listened to it,” Jennings says. When he died of cancer in September 2003 aged just 53, many of his close friends, including the likes of Jackson Browne and Bruce Springsteen, would pay tribute to the talented musician’s life. It is clear that Zevon was a troubled soul as he battled his mental illness and alcoholism, and for that, his family and many friends were forgiving of his occasional ill-temper. His ex-wife Crystal Zevon remembered: “He had tonnes of charisma, but when he didn’t want people coming up to him, he had charisma in reverse.” He had two children with Crystal who have said they still have a great deal of love for their father despite his absence through much of their childhood, and as his daughter, Ariel put it “when he was drinking he was erratic, violent, emotionally absent, impossible”. Throughout his life, Zevon battled addiction and a bad temper which was likely a symptom of depression resulting from his alcoholism. Over the years that followed, he would struggle to maintain the commercial success of the late 1970s aside from a few highlight returns to form in albums such as The Envoy released in 1982 and Mr. The early release that boosted him to global stardom and would remain his lifetime magnum opus, was his 1978 album Excitable Boy, which housed some of his greatest hits including the famed ‘Werewolves of London’, which was recorded with the help of his friends from Fleetwood Mac, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie. Zevon was a peculiar man with undeniable talent that seemed to bring with it some problems as he made his way through a rollercoaster career of variable commercial success. This would become a constant throughout the rest of Dylan’s career and served to add a touch more conviction when he did, on rare occasions, express his admiration. As he became more successful in his own right, he became less liberal when naming artists he admired, seemingly unwilling to feed the egos of his peers until they reached a certain high standard in his eyes. Dylan even managed to become acquainted with Guthrie in the final years of his life, he would play to him in his bed where he was tragically dying from Huntington’s disease.Īs the years wore on though, Dylan became the biggest name in folk music and the spearhead of an unsettled population with the political themes expressed throughout much of his work. Later, he would become enamoured with folk music and Woody Guthrie in particular. From the tender days of his youth, Bobby would play the piano stood up and sing in his school band in an attempt to emulate his hero Little Richard. In his early days, Bob Dylan would make it very clear which musicians he idolised. Even the best songwriter of all time learned his trade somewhere.
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