Warren zevon cause of death full#

His Scots-Welsh mother, Beverly, was Mormon, an influence Zevon vividly recollects, although he has not been a practicing member of the faith for many years: “Mormons have a matter-of-fact attitude toward the supernatural. An only child, Warren William Zevon was born of exotic stock in Chicago on January 24th, 1947. “If you thought Neil Young and I were mad about being young, wait till you hear how mad we are about being old and decrepit.” But Zevon’s obsession has deep roots. “I always thought old age would be a good subject for rock & roll,” Zevon claims. He actually told me some really good advice: ‘Whatever you do, wherever you go, make yourself happy.’ Death is his outlet, a topic he digs.” (Zevon’s daughter, Ariel, is twenty-six.) At home, Jordan notes, his father “always had a gorilla skull with wire-frame glasses hanging around. “I don’t know why he’s chosen that topic, other than a love of skulls,” says Zevon’s son, Jordan, 33, one of Zevon’s two children by separate early marriages. But his work has always been characterized by a comic kind of courage.” It’s summed up in ‘Life’ll Kill Ya’: ‘From the president of the United States/To the lowliest rock & roll star/The doctor is in/And he’ll see you now.’ It’s a very funny song about the most daunting fact of our lives. “But he does it with a humor and appetite for what life is really like. “It’s not easy to write a rock & roll record about mortality, because so much of rock & roll is spent eluding it,” says Jackson Browne, a close friend since 1968, who produced Zevon’s first Asylum Records LP, 1976’s Warren Zevon, and co-produced the hit follow-up, 1978’s Excitable Boy. He is best known for his one Top Thirty single, the 1978 blood-lust spoof “Werewolves of London.” But Zevon’s greater legacy is the ripe wit and acute detail with which he has written and sung about extreme living and the big sleep: in the 1970s classics “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” “Lawyers, Guns and Money” and “Excitable Boy” songs of personal armageddon such as “Detox Mansion,” rooted in his victory over alcoholism in the early 1980s and the wry gems “Life’ll Kill Ya” and “My Ride’s Here,” the respective title songs of Zevon’s 20 albums.

Zevon has prepared for this crossroads for thirty years, on more than a dozen albums. I gave him the verses, and he loved it: ‘We’ve got something!'”Īnd the original line? “He has to take these painkillers,” Calderón explains, “so he was saying, ‘I’m as numb as a statue, so beg, borrow or steal some feelings for me.'” Then he called me while he was walking to the video store, because he can’t drive anymore. Calderón describes a recent evening when he and Zevon nailed a new song on their cell phones: “He’d given me a line out of a conversation the other day, so I wrote a few verses. He’s already got a title song for the album: “My Dirty Life and Times.” A gold-plated list of pals has lined up to help out, including Ry Cooder, Don Henley, Dwight Yoakam and Bob Dylan, who is playing Zevon covers nightly on his current tour. He enjoys being in charge of his own epitaph. Zevon has chosen not to undergo chemotherapy. For now, he is taking only anti-nausea and pain medications. It works so well as a drug.” It is a poignant comparison. When you get into songwriting, everything else falls away. Much of what Zevon is writing for this record is for, he says, “people I want to say goodbye to.

“I’ll probably wake up tomorrow, too,” he declares optimistically.įlashback: Warren Zevon Teams With Carl Wilson on 'Desperados Under the Eaves'

Warren zevon cause of death full#

Dressed in loose gray pants and a wool sport coat, with a full head of dirty-yellow hair and a strong smile, Zevon does not look sick or dying, only a little tired - and that’s because he was up late the night before, working on his music. “But the nature of destiny is that I’m alive today,” Zevon says cheerfully after that menu finally arrives. Can you help her with her coupons? Can we speed this up a little?’

Zevon professes not to care about the numbers except, he cracks drily, “in line at the market: ‘Excuse me, I have terminal cancer. Zevon’s doctors initially gave him three months to live but later backed off from a specific figure. He left with a death sentence: diagnosed with mesothelioma, a rare, inoperable cancer that had ravaged his lungs and invaded his liver. In late August, Zevon went to a cardiologist, complaining of shortness of breath. “At a time like this,” he says with an arched eyebrow and a low, rumbling laugh, “you really get the feeling of time marching on.” Warren Zevon is sitting at a table in a Hollywood hotel cafe, patiently waiting for someone to bring him a menu.