![]() I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel I was listening to the air conditioner hum.”). He justifiably raves about the lyrics in “Desperadoes Under the Eaves” (“Don’t the sun look angry through the trees? Don’t the trees look like crucified thieves? Don’t you feel like desperados under the eaves? Heaven help the one who leaves…. Zevon never lost his facility with words, but mere cleverness is not the same as great art.Ĭampion undermines his own argument with the examples he selects. Individual songs stood out subsequently, but they were eclipsed by a lot of showboating, and the recycled musical motifs and underwhelming singing. In the end, though Warren Zevon made one brilliant album, his 1976 breakthrough “Warren Zevon”, almost duplicated it on his 1978 follow-up, “Excitable Boy”, but never came close to such a triumph again. The author calls on many of them and their peers in the book to bolster his case. In 2004, the posthumous tribute album ‘Enjoy Every Sandwich’-The Songs of Warren Zevon featured contributions from Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Steve Earle, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt and Ry Cooder, often performing songs from later in the songwriter’s career. Campion doesn’t evade those struggles, but he argues that Zevon was able to use those challenges as the raw materials for some of his best work on his final records.Ĭampion has some famous musicians willing to testify on his behalf. In his gushing, heart-on-his-sleeve prose, heavy on first-person pronouns, Campion is trying to transform the standard critical take on Zevon: that the tremendous promise of his early work was left unfulfilled by his struggles with drugs, alcohol and self-aggrandizement. This summer James Campion published his critical biography, Accidentally Like a Martyr: The Tortured Art of Warren Zevon , a 290-page argument that the singer/songwriter deserves better from rock history than he’s gotten so far. So let’s look at a proper evaluation of Warren Zevon’s place in music history? Last week marked the 15th anniversary of his death at all too young an age of 56 on September. On the other hand, Zevon is less deserving than some acts still waiting to get in like: Radiohead, Whitney Houston, Gram Parsons, Graham Parker, the Replacements, the Zombies. On the one hand, Zevon is more deserving than a lot of selections already in the Hall: Kiss, Yes, Rush, Chicago, Journey, Bon Jovi and so on. Well, there are two ways of looking at this. Surely does Warren Zevon not belong in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?
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