![]() He sabotaged his career with heavy drinking at the turn of the 1980s, he was living the noirish extremes he captured with such cutting language and hard-boiled candor in “Excitable Boy” and “Lawyers, Guns and Money. Zevon’s only major commercial success came in 1978 when “Werewolves of London,” a hilarious blues march about bloody debauchery, went Top Thirty. Warren William Zevon was born in Chicago on January 24th, 1947 - the only son of a professional gambler (his Russian-Jewish father) and a Mormon (his Scottish-Welsh mother) - and raised in California, where he cut some singles in 1966 as half of a folk-rock duo, Lyme and Cybelle, and had two early songs covered by the Turtles. I remember him telling me, ‘Just tell me the good news.’ “ “But there was also the other side of it for him: ‘This is all happening because I’m dying.’ ” Near the end, Calderón adds, Zevon did not read many of the rave reviews he got for The Wind “because they all talked about him dying. Making The Wind “was like a drug the creativity, the people that were coming to play, the beauty of the music,” says his good friend and longtime collaborator Jorge Calderón, who co-produced the album and co-wrote seven of its eleven songs with Zevon. But here’s some laughs.’ I don’t see what harm it could do.” Yet there were moments in his last year when even Zevon ran out of jokes and stoicism. “You get in front of people and say, ‘Here’s this deal we all dread. “Heaven knows, I’ve been pounding this subject into the ground for decades,” Zevon said with a baritone chuckle when I interviewed him last fall, just after he had started recording The Wind. That October, between sessions, Zevon flew to New York to give a poignant farewell live performance on Late Show With David Letterman. ![]() Shortly after his diagnosis, Zevon issued a public statement about his illness, then immediately set to work writing and recording The Wind, a final album of frank goodbyes, wry reflections and outright party songs, with an all-star cast of comrades including Browne, Don Henley, Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen. The Wind Warren Zevon Released AugThe Wind Tracklist 1 Dirty Life and Times Lyrics 2 Disorder in the House Lyrics 3 Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door Lyrics 4 Numb as a Statue Lyrics 5. Instead, he got an eternity: an entire year. ![]() Zevon’s doctors gave him three months to live. In August 2002, he was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a rare, lethal cancer that was devouring his lungs and liver. For more than three decades, Zevon - who died of lung cancer on September 7th at the age of fifty-six, at his home in Los Angeles - addressed the high costs of hard living in songs such as “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” “Excitable Boy” and “My Ride’s Here,” with incisive comic detail and, as Browne puts it, “a fierce defiance, charging into that single fact of life: that it comes to a close.” In return, Zevon had the last word on his own mortality. Zevon's version of the song features Phil Everly singing harmony vocals, and also David Lindley playing slide guitar.For the last act of his remarkable career, Warren Zevon achieved the impossible: “He got to attend his own funeral,” says his friend Jackson Browne with a fond laugh. It was with Browne's assistance that Zevon got a major record contract. Their relationship played a significant role in his career thereafter. The track was produced by Jackson Browne, who met Zevon in the mid-seventies. The lyrics of the song describe the latter days of a relationship between a man and a woman, with the woman accepting that "nothing's working out the way they planned" before the man accepts that "she needs to be free". The song was later covered by Linda Ronstadt, who would use the song as the title track for her seventh solo LP. "Hasten Down the Wind" is a song written and recorded by Warren Zevon and featured on his eponymous major-label debut album. 1976 single by Warren Zevon "Hasten Down the Wind"
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