Gone Gently In death, a rocker finds his fame
McGarvey, Bill
MEDIA Bill McGarvey GONE GENTLY Songwriter Warren Zevon's public goodbye Singer-songwriter Warren Zevon, best known for his 1978 hit "Werewolves of London," died on September 7 at the age of...
...As an artist, Zevon didn't rate much higher than a cult star in the popular consciousness and never achieved anywhere near the notoriety of contemporaries like Springsteen, the Eagles, and Jackson Browne...
...It's been said before that if rock 'n' roll and the blues are the music of Saturday night, then gospel and country are the music of Sunday morning...
...Of course, saying your farewells through your art is hardly a revolutionary act...
...When The Who famously declared in 1966, "I hope I die before I get old," it was a bold statement of values for an art form barely a decade old...
...What happens when, eventually, we accept that we do get old and that we can't run away...
...Carol Shield's recent novel, Unless, was written and published while she was in the throes of a terminal illness...
...How theologically orthodox-and thoroughly un-rock 'n' roll-can you get...
...Will the music that defined us when we were young help us deepen and understand our lives as we get old...
...MEDIA Bill McGarvey GONE GENTLY Songwriter Warren Zevon's public goodbye Singer-songwriter Warren Zevon, best known for his 1978 hit "Werewolves of London," died on September 7 at the age of fifty-six after a yearlong battle with lung cancer...
...Still, in the world of rock 'n' roll, where casualties like Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Kurt Cobain are treated like blessed martyrs, Zevon's passing is a milestone of sorts...
...Zevon knew he was going to die and spent his remaining days-most of which were filmed by the cable station VH1-recording one last album as a way to say goodbye to family and friends...
...For decades Zevon has dealt with themes of death in his writing (his 2002 album My Ride Is Here featured a hearse on its cover), but faced with the reality of his own demise, the mystery of death is no longer an abstraction...
...Beatle George Harrison also recorded new material before his recent passing...
...And yet music television's enormous power to co-opt and trivialize couldn't diminish the reality of Zevon's dying...
...Now that boast feels more like a child's attempt to run away from home, deadly serious at the time but quaint and misdirected in retrospect...
...The Wind is filled with songs that alternate between the wry, gallows humor that had become Zevon's stock-in-trade, and aching, naked emotion...
...His death defies the flippancy and shal-lowness of the gimmicky, glammed-up theater that pop music usually traffics in, and exposes it for the gooey kids' stuff that it is...
...With the help of an impressive list of rock's brightest lights, including Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, and Emmylou Harris, Zevon was able to finish the album, titled The Wind, and see its release just twelve days before his death...
...But The Wind chronicles Zevon's final year with an unflinching honesty that refuses to romanticize his impending death...
...MTV and its cousin VH1, which aired the powerful special, "(Inside) Out: Warren Zevon- Keep Me in Your Heart," have carved out a lucrative corner of the market doing just that...
...His quivering, deadpan singing style is almost uncomfortably plain, conveying both a yelp of pain and a caustic smile at the same time...
...There is no bravado here, no posturing...
...But pop culture has a tendency to pull the shades down and act as though the night will never end...
...The pop world has struggled mightily to distract us from that question and to keep its listeners in a perpetual state of arrested development...
...Rather than live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse, he left us with something rare in the fantasy land of pop music: a glimpse into the slow, painful, and profoundly ordinary reality of death...
...Since its emergence a half-century ago, rock 'n' roll has derived much of its intoxicating power from its ability to help us escape...
...Some days I feel that my shadow's casting me / some days the sun don't shine / Sometimes I wonder what tomorrow's gonna bring / When I think about my dirty life and times," he sings, setting the deeply ambivalent tone that pervades the album...
...At one point in the VH1 documentary Zevon expresses disappointment that his fans misinterpreted his refusal of certain treatments as an act of bravery: "I think it's a sin to not want to live," he says...
...Shadows are falling and I'm running out of breath / Keep me in your heart for awhile / If I leave you it doesn't mean I love you any less / Keep me in your heart for awhile," Zevon croons in a withered voice on the The Wind's closing song, as if to testify that after living through the long night, he welcomes the inevitable dawn...
...His story bumps up against mysteries and fears that aren't so easily consumed and digested...
Vol. 130 • October 2003 • No. 18
