#WARREN ZEVON YOUNG SERIAL#

well, it isn’t “prehistory,” exactly, but it’s the setup: the staging of a life in which he was to act like a real rock ’n’ roll asshole. But it wasn’t Tule he went on to marry-not even after they had a child together, a son named Jordan-but rather Crystal, whom he met a few years later when he was touring with the Everly Brothers, acting as musical director for their band. One day he pulled his car over to the side of the road to pick up a hitcher, a girl he knew from San Francisco named Marilyn “Tule” Livingston, and before long they were shacked up. He reaped some serious royalties long before he himself ever had a hit when the Turtles, his friends, put a song of his called “Like the Seasons” on the B side of their 45 of “Happy Together,” which of course sold millions. He drove a white Corvette, wore a long leather coat and a gunslinger’s hat he played classical piano, which he’d learned, in part, at the feet of Stravinsky. Zevon’s father was a gambler, a card shark nicknamed “Stumpy.” Zevon told some people that Stumpy-née Willie, who owned a carpet store on Wilshire Boulevard-was a mobster, so right away you see the impulse to self-mythology. Like any good prosecutor, and any good public defender, I’ll let the facts speak for themselves. So is there any good reason one should opt now to tell it? So it’s fair to wonder, here in the more enlightened twenty-first century, why write about him? His writing is good-great, even-but his story is miserable from one end to the other.

#WARREN ZEVON YOUNG SERIAL#

He was a serial philanderer, negligent toward his children when they were young he was unkind and occasionally ungenerous with his cowriters. The singer’s ex-wife, Crystal Zevon, confirms as much in her raucous and surprisingly forgiving oral history I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead. Before we get to any of the meaty stuff about Zevon’s life and times, it seems important to note that he was a drunk, a violent and abusive alcoholic. Only: there’s no way to talk about this without addressing the elephant in the room first. He already had a band, called lyme and cybelle (lowercase intentional), a folk duo who recorded a clutch of singles in 1966. An itinerant kid-there’d been schools in Fresno, San Pedro, and San Francisco, before he finally decided to finish at Fairfax High-he came to play music. He came to LA for the same reason all the others did-Browne and Lindley and Henley and Frey, all those Eagles and high-flying troubadours who were quicker than he was to make it big-though he didn’t know any of them then. It’s a welcome way to look at an artist we maybe haven’t thought enough about, and we’re pleased to share part of the chapter exclusively on InsideHook. and personal essay that is tender and gutting at the same time. The result is a hybrid biography of the artist in L.A. In the sixth chapter, “The Cadaver and the Search,” Specktor looks at Warren Zevon, the musician best-known for his song “Werewolves of London,” and his special brand of outsiderness.

He does this by relating back to the art and artists who have helped color his own understanding of the place he’s from, be it F. It’s Specktor reckoning with his hometown as well as his own past. His new book of essays, Always Crashing in the Same Car, is hardly a love letter to his town. Matthew Specktor is from Los Angeles, and his 2014 novel, American Dream Machine, belongs in the city’s literary canon along with The Day of the Locust, Play It as It Lays and Less Than Zero, another rare entry written by a native to the city. writing timeless books about the city, but they didn’t grow up there - they migrated. Nathanael West, John Fante and Joan Didion all ended up in L.A. Sure, writers have always been drawn there in hopes of landing some cozy gig creating stories for movies or TV, but the bulk of books about the town are almost always written by outsiders.

Los Angeles has always been overlooked as a breeding ground for writers.

Warren zevon young