I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon, by Crystal Zevon. Ecco, 452 pages, $26.95.
There has never been a more cinematic songwriter than Warren Zevon. His first musical break was getting a tune onto the soundtrack of Midnight Cowboy, and his best-known song, "Werewolves of London," is a send-up of Lon Cheney-era horror movies. In concert he would toss out references to Hitchcock and Peckinpah and, due partly to his deep emergence in Los Angeles popular culture in the 1970s, the bulk of Zevon's songs were consistently and effortlessly filmic, using a string of images to tell a story.
It's fitting, then, that the first book-length treatment of his tumultuous life is in the form of an oral history, already a mere step away from the biopic or an especially pitiful episode of VH1's Behind the Music. Crystal Zevon, the singer's wife for seven years and exhaustively tolerant companion-for-life, has compiled a kaleidoscopic set of recollections from Zevon's family, lovers, fellow musicians, friends and admirers. You can almost hear the sound of the clapboard between comments.
The movie at times is impossible to watch without flinching. The youth and early starving-musician scenes zip by easily enough, even if they never entirely explain the volcanic rage that fueled Zevon's life and music, and eventually destroyed just about everyone around him. And destruction is what the Behind the Music audience really craves: the soaring arc of success -- which for Zevon came in the form of his near-perfect 1978 album Excitable Boy -- and then the inevitable slide into self-inflicted ruin.
Warren delivers the goods, and how. Anyone even passably familiar with Zevon songs like "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me," "Lawyers, Guns and Money" or "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" will have guessed that the songwriter found his wisdom via the road of excess. Devotees of the rock-and-roll tell-all (think Hammer of the Gods, or No One Here Gets Out Alive) may have a high tolerance for the genre's deadpan renditions of bad-boy antics: the trashed hotel room, the pliant and disposable groupies. Zevon seemed to crave the decadence almost as if that -- rather than money, fame or achievement -- was the goal. In a beautifully self-aware quip, he told Carl Hiassen: "I got to be Jim Morrison a lot longer than he did."
It's one thing, though, to read about a musician who beats his wife -- black-and-blue, in the face, while she's driving, because of course he's far too drunk to take the wheel -- and quite another to hear such tales in the victim's own words. Spare a moment to contemplate the masochism of the rockstar's wife. It is a desperate, dead-end role. Without him, she has no fame, no identity; with him, her life is hell.
And that, unfortunately, limits this book's power: much of the time the reader is unsure who to root for. Just as cynical horror movie audiences yell at the screen: "Don't open that door!" or "Don't make out in the car at night!" by the middle of this book readers are likely to find themselves yelling at Crystal to just walk out on this asshole (which she does for a while). In the face of his repeated abuse, about the only redemptive thing one can say about Warren is that at least he was capable of writing a witty song about it. His 1987 album Sentimental Hygiene was the first he did largely sober, and included several songs worth relistening to, in light of this book's sinister revelations: "Detox Mansion," a feisty jab at celebrity rehab; "Trouble Waiting to Happen," a self-mocking account of blackouts and hangovers, and "Reconsider Me," arguably the finest I'm-sorry song ever written, featuring the repeated line: "And I'll never make you sad again/'Cause I swear that I've changed since then."
Even so, the redemption-through-sobriety storyline to which Crystal vehemently clings is unpersuasive. Warren makes his amends and stops drinking (well, up until the late-stage cancer diagnosis), but there's no avoiding the fact that his career was ultimately disappointing. Zevon was a pop genius, no question, but the music he wrote during his wild age is infinitely better than the music he wrote sober; the final decade of his too-short life produced no more than a handful of songs that will be remembered by anyone outside the feverish Zevon cult. No amount of cinematic gloss will redeem the fact that the man squandered his extraordinary talent.