Warren zevon wanted dead or alive11/4/2023 The chorus-“Mama couldn’t be persuaded when they pleaded with her, ‘Daughter, don’t marry that gambling man’”-delights in its own assonance and alliteration. “Mama Couldn’t Be Persuaded” isn’t morose, or even particularly serious it’s positively jaunty. That album’s second song is an explicit account of Zevon’s parents’ chaotic marriage. A decade or so later, while preparing to record Warren Zevon, he was drinking a quart of vodka a day. He also kept the house stocked with booze, which became teenage Warren’s clandestine supply. Zevon’s mother eventually found a new partner, who openly resented and sometimes beat her son. In yet another heavy-handed symbolic twist in the myth of Zevon’s self-immolating genius, it was at one of these initial encounters with the highest echelon of musical achievement that he first drank alcohol, the substance he would come to believe fueled his creativity, even as it ravaged him. Thirteen-year-old Warren took a few lessons in music composition and appreciation at Stravinsky’s home. He took to the piano quickly after that Christmas, and later the guitar, building a reputation as a prodigy that eventually, improbably, reached the awareness of Igor Stravinsky, perhaps the greatest classical composer of the 20th century, a Russian-French expat then living in L.A. Music and violence, creation and destruction, remained entwined for much of Zevon’s life. She flees the house, and Stumpy soon leaves again, too, telling his son he won’t be back this time. Stumpy Zevon-a name straight from the paperback crime novels his son would grow to love-takes the carving knife that Beverly has set out for the Christmas turkey and hurls it toward her head. Her husband’s name is William, but his intimates call him Stumpy. She calls the piano a “headache machine,” and orders her husband to remove it from the house. Mom isn’t having it, perhaps because dad refuses to maintain more than a sporadic presence in their lives. He’s bearing a gift of a Chickering upright piano, taken as winnings from an all-night poker game and presented to the boy as his very first musical instrument. But the building still stands.Ĭhristmas, 1956: A mobbed-up professional gambler arrives unannounced at the home of his wife and 9-year-old son. The hotel has changed names in the decades since he stayed there. The author and tragic hero of this fable is no longer with us. Take the Zevonian view, and you might wonder whether some larger cosmic debt at the Hollywood Hawaiian remains unpaid. “I’ve been writing this part for myself for 30 years, and I guess I need to play it out,” he quipped upon learning, in his mid-50s, of the mesothelioma that would soon kill him. Zevon sometimes seemed to view his own story as a sort of fable scripted either by fate or the doomed protagonist himself, if those two entities could even be separated. His self-titled album, at least, settled his bill with the Hollywood Hawaiian. Only those who knew him well-the friends he alienated, the wife he subjected to drunken beatings and threats of suicide, the children he all but abandoned, and whoever happened to be around when he indulged in his habit of firing guns indoors as a joke-can say with any authority whether the music he left behind is enough to repay them. Zevon had already accrued substantial debts, financial and emotional, at this relatively early juncture in his life, and he would continue racking them up for a long time after. They accepted instead a few copies of Warren Zevon, which closes with “Desperados Under the Eaves.” The hotel didn’t want to take this newly minted rock star’s money. songwriter scene he’d been kicking around for years. His compositional ambition, writerly wit, and general air of rakish malignancy all helped set him apart from his peers in the soft-rocking L.A. Critics hailed him as a major new talent. That second album, self-titled, had been only a modest commercial success upon its release in 1976, but Zevon’s name was still in the papers. A friend came and helped him escape through the window.Īccording to legend, he came back years later and attempted to make good. During one such bender, he was holed up at the Hollywood Hawaiian when he realized he didn’t have enough cash to cover the bill. He had an appetite for booze, pot, acid, sex, and fighting that led to frequent separations from the mother of his first child, born when Zevon was 22. During the six-year stretch between his failed first album and his miraculous second, he availed himself mightily of the various temptations early-1970s L.A. The lyric, like many of Zevon’s, invests a scene of real-life debauchery and turmoil with mythological significance. And if California slides into the ocean Like the mystics and statistics say it will I predict this hotel will be standing Until I pay my bill
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