Warren Zevon was diagnosed with mesothelioma — an inoperable lung cancer — in August 2002. He was 55 years old. The doctors who delivered the diagnosis told him he had three to six months to live. He lived for thirteen months — thirteen months during which he made an album, gave the last major interview of his career to David Letterman, and spent the remaining time doing what he had always done, which was making music that was too dark for easy radio airplay and too good to be dismissed.
Zevon’s reputation during his lifetime occupied the specific uncomfortable space that artists who are too literary for rock radio and too rock and roll for literary respectability tend to occupy — appreciated deeply by a devoted audience and by the musicians who knew what they were hearing, commercially marginal by the standards of his most celebrated contemporaries, consistently undervalued by the mechanisms of commercial recognition that reward the immediately accessible over the specifically true.
Bruce Springsteen has said Zevon was the greatest rock and roll songwriter of his generation — a statement he made before Zevon’s diagnosis and has not revised since. He made it with the specific directness of someone making a factual statement rather than a tribute, which is the most meaningful form the assessment can take.
1. Keep Me in Your Heart (2003)
Written specifically as a farewell — a direct address to the people who would remain after he was gone, asking to be kept in their hearts. Zevon has said the song was the simplest thing he ever wrote and the hardest — that the simplicity was the point and that arriving at the right simplicity required everything he had. It was recorded during the final album sessions, in a state of physical deterioration that the people who were in the studio have described with the careful specificity of witnesses protecting something they understood as significant.
2. Disorder in the House (2003)
A duet with Bruce Springsteen — Springsteen came to the final sessions specifically to perform with Zevon, and the recording of Disorder in the House has been described by the people who were present as one of the most emotionally intense sessions either man participated in. Springsteen has said going to the studio to record with Zevon in those circumstances was the most important professional visit he made in the final years of Zevon’s life. The song’s dark humor — the chaos, the mess, the things that have gone wrong — is the most Zevon of the final album’s tracks.
3. Werewolves of London (1978)
The song that introduced most people to Zevon — a piece of gleeful horror movie camp that conceals, as all great Zevon songs do, a specific intelligence and a specific craftsmanship that the surface comedy is designed to make available to people who might otherwise miss it. He has said the song was written in fifteen minutes at a party. He has also said it is the song that his more musically sophisticated work has had to spend forty years living alongside, which is the specific cross that commercial novelty songs place on the careers of artists who are not primarily novelty artists.
4. Lawyers, Guns and Money (1978)
The most complete expression of Zevon’s specific worldview — a narrator in international trouble, calling home for rescue, the request for lawyers and guns and money being the most honest description of how the world actually works that appeared in any rock song of the 1970s. Springsteen has cited this song specifically as the one that most completely demonstrates what Zevon was doing — that the dark comedy and the genuine insight are inseparable, and that the music is the delivery mechanism for something that resists being described as simply funny or simply serious.
5. Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner (1978)
A narrative song about a mercenary’s posthumous revenge — told with the deadpan specificity of a journalist reporting a story that the mainstream press would not print, set to a melody of such casual beauty that the subject matter requires the melody to make it possible to hear. Jackson Browne has said this song is the proof of Zevon’s genius — that it does something that no other song in the American catalog does, in a way that reveals how much more difficult the doing was than the song allows you to understand while you are hearing it.
Zevon died on September 7, 2003. His last album, The Wind, was released three weeks before his death. It won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. He was not alive to receive it. Springsteen has said losing Zevon was the loss of the one writer who could do things with language in a rock context that no one else was doing. He has said this in the past tense, knowing it is past tense, and has not softened it.