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Message |
    
Chris Dickson
Citizen
Username: Ironman
Post Number: 741
Registered: 8-2001
| | Posted on Monday, August 25, 2003 - 10:02 am: |     |
Did anyone else watch the VH1 special on Warren Zevon and the making of his last album?
Thoughts? |
Hank Zona
Citizen
Username: Hankzona
Post Number: 710
Registered: 3-2002
| | Posted on Monday, August 25, 2003 - 10:55 am: | |
Didnt see it Chris...but have heard a few songs from the recording, including "Knocking on Heaven's Door". Is he in remission, I thought I heard? |
gozerbrown
Citizen
Username: Gozerbrown
Post Number: 184
Registered: 3-2002
| | Posted on Monday, August 25, 2003 - 11:55 am: | |
I missed it too and will probably catch a re-run of it eventually. I heard last week on Howard Stern (the bastion of news...) that he is now pretty much confined to his home. |
twig
Citizen
Username: Twig
Post Number: 83
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Monday, August 25, 2003 - 12:18 pm: | |
Saw it. It was amazing to watch Warren dealing with his impending death in such a calm and dignified manner. Made me wonder how I would handle it if (God forbid) I was in his situation. Of course, it was edited and I have to assume that they chose not to show the "bad days" where he probably isn't quite as together. I've always been lukewarm about his music and thought it to be a bit quirky. However, I have to say that, after watching last night, the new CD sounds pretty darn good. |
Nohero
Citizen
Username: Nohero
Post Number: 2016
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Tuesday, August 26, 2003 - 11:14 am: | |
The show is on again tonight (Tuesday) at 8:00 p.m., according to VH1.
You can listen to songs from the new album at the VH1 web site. |
sbenois
Citizen
Username: Sbenois
Post Number: 10185
Registered: 10-2001
| | Posted on Friday, August 29, 2003 - 11:52 pm: | |
I saw it and found him to be among the bravest, most inspiring people on the planet.
---> Brought to you by Sbenois Engineering LLC <---- |
Nohero
Citizen
Username: Nohero
Post Number: 2026
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Saturday, August 30, 2003 - 4:54 pm: | |
This morning's "Weekend Edition" on NPR had an extended segment, with an interview with his son, and several song excerpts. The music sounds great.
S is right, he is inspiring. Hearing him sing "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" makes you want to cry and cheer at the same time. |
Nohero
Citizen
Username: Nohero
Post Number: 2066
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Monday, September 8, 2003 - 8:49 am: | |
Woke up this morning to the news that Warren Zevon passed away yesterday. I've been listening to the new album all weekend, and somehow had hoped that he had more time. |
scribbler
Citizen
Username: Scribbler
Post Number: 19
Registered: 11-2001
| | Posted on Monday, September 8, 2003 - 7:43 pm: | |
Same here, Nohero. I played the Life'll Kill Ya CD this morning and was unable to smile at the irony. I'll Keep Him in my Heart.
Requiescat in pace
That's all she wrote  |
Chris Dickson
Citizen
Username: Ironman
Post Number: 770
Registered: 8-2001
| | Posted on Tuesday, September 9, 2003 - 11:17 pm: | |
MITCH ALBOM: Singer Zevon's life anything but gray
September 9, 2003
BY MITCH ALBOM
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
Warren Zevon once opened his suitcase for me in a backstage dressing room. In it were gray shirts, gray pants, gray socks -- even gray running shoes.
"Warren," I said. "What's the deal?"
"Hey," he answered, with a deep laughing voice, "gray is who I am."
Actually, gray was just the cloak he threw over himself. Warren himself was anything but. Blood red, perhaps, as in "Werewolves of London," angry jade, as in "Lawyers, Guns and Money," cynical yellow, as in "Excitable Boy." But never gray, never pale, never dull.
"I'll sleep when I'm dead," Warren Zevon once sang. Then he went to sleep Sunday night, at age 56, and he died. Warren might have enjoyed the weirdness of that, but none of us did, at least none of us who had been bracing for the news since last summer, when he went to a doctor in the morning, thinking he had a cough, and emerged in the afternoon with a death sentence: You have cancer everywhere, they told him. Go home and say good-bye.
OBITUARY
Warren Zevon: Rock star toured life with dark wit
I was in L.A. then, and Warren and I went to lunch a few blocks from his apartment. We walked in the midday sunshine. I tried to make jokes, because Warren tried to make jokes. Then at the table, Warren looked at me and said, "So . . . am I supposed to die with my boots on?"
He didn't. He got depressed. He got angry. And then Warren -- who, despite selling millions of albums, said he felt like "an organ grinder's monkey" when he had to perform -- got what he needed to stay alive. He got creative. He wrote lyrics. He wrote music. Friends came to record songs with him; so did big names like Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty. By the end, they were almost propping Warren up to sing. But he finished the album.
It came out two weeks ago.
This is the first line of the first song:
Some days I feel like
my shadow's casting me
And now a shadow is all we have left.
Quick friends
Warren and I became friends in the mid-'90s, when he came to play with a novelty band of writers that I belong to. Warren loved writers. His apartment was high walls of books. His references were Kafka or Vonnegut or Carl Hiaasen.
He was always asking me to write him a sports song -- "Make it hockey," he'd say, "nobody sings about hockey" -- and so one night we sat in the basement with a guitar and a piano and a case of Mountain Dew (Warren's favorite) and in three hours, we put music to lyrics I had written about a misunderstood hockey goon. Warren loved it. And I loved that Warren loved it.
A few months later, I was on vacation on a faraway island, and the phone rang in the hotel. It was Warren. He said he was in the recording studio with Paul Shaffer and some guys from David Letterman's band, and Letterman was there, too, and would it be all right if they changed one of the words in our song?
"You're WHERE?" I said.
"In the studio."
"You're recording the song?"
"Well, yeah," he replied, with that deep smirking laugh. "What did you think we wrote it for?"
A lovely soul
Warren sang about misfits and werewolves and Thompson gunners and death, and you might have thought from that he was distant or heartless, a permanent cynic. Nothing could be more of a lie. Warren was, I know this word sounds funny but, well, lovely, he really was, gentle and smart and, under it all, hopeful. Even a little romantic. He tried marriage, although it didn't take, he tried parenthood, and, by his own standards, was a good father at the end. He stayed alive long enough to become a grandfather. My wife and I tried to fix him up once. We double-dated. There were no sparks, but I remember Warren dressing in a suit and holding the woman's chair and I kept saying to myself, "This is a rock star?"
I don't know if he spoke to God near the end. But a few years ago, he wrote a song that ended this way:
Don't let us get sick
Don't let us get old
Don't let us get stupid, all right?
Just make us be brave
And make us play nice
and let us be together tonight.
That is as plaintive a prayer as I've ever heard. And I'd take one more minute with Warren, any way I could. I am looking now at an e-mail from him marked Dec. 25, 2002, responding to one I sent him about Springsteen and Petty. He wrote back: "They couldn't hold a candle -- or a hockey stick -- to you. Best for the happiest of holidays. . . . Your little buddy." Now Warren is dead and I don't know if I'm crying for him or for me. All I know is that it hurts more than he would want it to, and this is really the first and only time that gray is the appropriate color.
Contact MITCH ALBOM at 313-223-4581 or albom@freepress.com. Catch "The Mitch Albom Show" 3-6 p.m. weekdays on WJR-AM (760).
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