dwight yoakam a long way home album cover

Zevon was overdue, and rather than read about any other artist, I decided to take a deep dive on just the one-read what books I could find and buy Zevon’s entire catalog. This year, I determined that a reckoning with Mr.

It’s a damn hard way to make a living, having to die to get ‘em to know you’re alive.”įor many years my summer reading list has included rock ‘n’ roll memoirs, think Greg Allman, Eric Clapton, Graham Nash, Keith Richards, Slash, Ozzy Osbourne, and Joe Perry. Zevon had previously quipped, “I better die quick so they’ll give me a Grammy nomination. Surprisingly, these were the only Grammy nominations and awards of his career. Still, I didn’t buy the CD until 2018.įive months after Zevon’s death, The Wind won two Grammys (Best Contemporary Folk Album and Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal) and it was nominated for three more (Song of the Year, Best Male Vocal Performance, and Best Rock Song). This final and acutely bittersweet album was Zevon’s ultimate comeback after a turbulent thirty-five year career. The closest I ever came to buying a Zevon record was in 2003 when on death’s doorstep, he made The Wind (and a companion VH1 documentary) with a little help from his friends and admirers-Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Don Henley, Emmylou Harris, Ry Cooder, John Waite, Dwight Yoakam, and others.

Still, I was never seriously tempted to buy an album, nor do I recall having the opportunity or desire to see him perform live. What little (very little) I did know of Zevon’s music, I liked. The self-proclaimed “Mutineer” had always been an enigma to me. The Wolfman fittingly closed out his radio show with Zevon’s best-selling single “Werewolves of London.” Little did I know that four decades later, at the age of 53, I would spend an entire summer listening to, reading about, and proclaiming the glory and foibles of the late great Warren Zevon. I was introduced by the legendary FM disc jockey Robert “Wolfman Jack” Weston. I first “met” Warren in 1978 when living in Munich, Germany. This essay offers the unschooled a point of entry into the distinctive and disorderly music of Los Angeles’s “Mr. It is true that Zevon only had two songs that charted, one at #21 and the other at #57, but even a partial excavation of Zevonlandia reveals a fantastically rich, fun, fascinating, and not infrequently disconcerting musical life. To the uninitiated, Zevon was either a one or two-hit wonder or no wonder at all. The singer-song writer Warren Zevon, rock ‘n’ roll’s “Excitable Boy,” died of cancer fifteen years ago this September at the age of 57. I hope that his whole body of work will be re-celebrated, by a whole new generation. I AM RE-POSTING THIS ARTICLE ON THE 16TH ANNIVERSARY OF ZEVON'S PASSING.

Dwight yoakam a long way home album cover