![]() ![]() He worked around Los Angeles, writing commercial jingles and leading the Everly Brothers' backup band. Zevon's first album, "Wanted Dead or Alive," was released in 1969 and widely ignored. The Turtles made one of his songs, "Like the Seasons," the B side of the hit single "Happy Together," providing royalties that paid his rent for years. When his parents divorced, he drove a sports car his father had won in a card game to New York City to try to make it on the folk circuit.īut he had better luck in Los Angeles, where he formed the duo Lyme and Cybelle with a friend, Tule Livingstone, and began getting his songs heard. Zevon studied classical piano, idolizing composers like Stravinsky and Copland, and picked up guitar as a teenager. His father, he said in an interview, was a Russian-Jewish gangster his mother was a Mormon and often in fragile health. Zevon was born in Chicago but grew up in Arizona and Los Angeles. Zevon as writing about "the good, the bad and the ugly" and called him "a moralist in cynic's clothing." Bob Dylan performed his songs on stage and performers on "The Wind" included Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Tom Petty, Emmylou Harris, Don Henley, Ry Cooder and Dwight Yoakam. In an interview last year, he said that the diagnosis had led to "the intensest creative period of my life." He chose to work on the album, completed it and lived to see it released this year, on Aug. Zevon was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a type of tumor that can occur in the membranes around the lungs, that had advanced too far for treatment, and given a few months to live. Zevon felt chest pains while exercising and eventually went to see a physician for the first time in 20 years.Ī long-time smoker, Mr. ![]() In August 2002, a week after deciding to start a new album, Mr. Zevon made his last album, "The Wind" (Artemis), knowing that his time was running out. His piano songs suggested marches, hymns and the harmonies of Aaron Copland, while his guitar songs connected rock, Celtic and country music. Zevon's stoic baritone, the music changed with its central instrument. Zevon's ballads, like "Mutineer," "Accidentally Like a Martyr" and "Hasten Down the Wind."īehind Mr. But there was also vulnerability and longing in Mr. Zevon had a pulp-fiction imagination that yielded songs like "Werewolves of London," "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me," "Lawyers, Guns and Money" and "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead." They were terse, action-packed, gallows-humored tales that could sketch an entire screenplay in four minutes and often had death as a punchline. The cause was cancer, which was diagnosed last summer. Warren Zevon, a singer and songwriter who came up with hard-boiled stories and tender confessions of love, died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. ![]()
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