Warren Zevon
Desperado of Los Angeles
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- $43.99
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- $43.99
Publisher Description
Warren Zevon was one of the most original songwriters to emerge from the prolific 1970s Los Angeles music scene. Beyond his most familiar song—the rollicking 1978 hit “Werewolves of London”—Zevon’s smart, often satirical songbook is rich with cinematic, literary, and comic qualities; dark narratives; complex characters; popular culture references; and tender, romantic ballads of parting and longing.
Warren Zevon: Desperado of Los Angeles is the first book-length, critical exploration of one of popular music’s most talented and tormented antiheroes. George Plasketes provides a comprehensive chronicle of Zevon’s 40-year, 20-record career and his enduring cultural significance. Beginning with Zevon’s classical training and encounters as a youth with composers Robert Craft and Igor Stravinsky, Plasketes surveys Zevon’s initiation into the 1960s through the Everly Brothers, the Turtles, and the film Midnight Cowboy. Plasketes then follows Zevon from his debut album with Asylum Records in 1976, produced by mentor Jackson Browne, through his successes and struggles from a Top Ten album to record label limbo during the 1980s, through a variety of music projects in the 1990s, including soundtracks and scores, culminating with a striking trio of albums in the early 2000s. Despite his reckless lifestyle and personal demons, Zevon made friends and alliances with talk show host David Letterman and such literary figures as Hunter S. Thompson and Carl Hiaasen. It was only after his death in 2003 that Zevon received Grammy recognition for his work.
Throughout this book, Plasketes explores the musical, cinematic, and literary influences that shaped Zevon’s distinctive style and songwriting themes and continue to make Zevon’s work a telling portrait of Los Angeles and American culture.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Warren Zevon (1947 2003) was one of the most innovative songwriters in recent popular music history, and Plasketes (Russell Banks: In Search of Freedom) captures the full range of Zevon's skills in the first full-length biography of the artist. Plasketes provides a comprehensive analysis of Zevon's entire body of work from his self-titled debut in 1976 to The Wind, recorded and released during his last year alive that serves as an almost definitive look at his "legacy of tortured brilliance," which still attracts new admirers today. Especially fascinating is Plasketes's look at how Zevon's debut "endures as one of the most delightfully dark visions of Southern California culture, demystifying the Hollywood scene, its desperation and decadence." Also good are his in-depth looks at some works that critics overlooked at the time of their release, such as "Transverse City" ("Zevon's most ambitious record") and "Life'll Kill Ya" ("a gem, a modest masterpiece"). Plasketes admits his reliance on "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon" the exhaustive posthumous oral history compiled in 2007 by Zevon's ex-wife, Crystal but he adds plenty of original work to fully illuminate the art behind the wild stories from Zevon's alcohol and drug binges.
