#Warren zevon album covers professional

But he dissipated much of that fame through the 1980s in bouts of alcoholism and self-destructive behavior. He did have a brief period of fame in the late 1970s, following the release of Warren Zevon, the album with 'Werewolves of London,' 'Poor Poor Pitiful Me,' and, in a song called 'Desperados Under the Eaves,' lines as good as If California slides into the ocean / Like the mystics and statistics say it will / I predict this motel will be standing until I pay my bill.

#Warren zevon album covers professional

What he had were a set of admirers among professional pop artists (basically including everyone who ever tried to write lyrics), and another set of cult followers who bought his records and talked him up as an underrated genius at every occasion. But then, Zevon didn't exactly have fans, in the traditional sense. This spring, 16 years after Zevon's death, we finally have the long-promised biography, Nothing's Bad Luck: The Lives of Warren Zevon, by C.M. The sadness, the ruin, of Warren Zevon is that there aren't enough of them. She put me through some changes, Lord, / sorta like a Waring blender, in the 1976 'Poor Poor Pitiful Me.' Or They killed to earn their livings and to help out the Congolese, in the 1978 'Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.' Or I'm tied to you like the buttons on your blouse, in his 2003 song about dying, 'Keep Me in Your Heart.' They're great lines, clever rhymes, and they could only have come from one songwriter. This was someone who could write that his lover was a credit to her gender. The genius and the disaster that was Warren Zevon. You hear something like, I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand / Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain, as he sang in his 1978 'Werewolves of London.' And you know it has to be him. And a man named Warren Zevon had a surprising number of them. There aren't actually all that many lines in pop music that tell you, simply by their construction, who their writer was.