He is elated this beautiful afternoon, he explains, because he has only now begun finishing a song he started writing 20 years ago. Back then he didn't know how to complete the song, "because I'm a really slow learner," he says with the sort of grin that indicates he's not being all that self-deprecating. All those years of keeping journals have come in handy: Lyric in hand -- one scribbled down decades ago, then forgotten until rescued -- he has now set about the task of finishing the melody. The song will likely appear on his next album -- whenever that may be, and for whoever might choose to release it.
Just as Rhino Records is releasing a two-CD anthology of Zevon's work titled I'll Sleep When I'm Dead -- which includes tracks from his 1970s successes on Asylum through his recent work on Virgin and Giant, not to mention some never-before-released soundtrack music -- Zevon does not have a deal with a record label to release his new material. In a world filled with musicians desperate to get a deal or get out of one, one of rock and roll's most literate storytellers struggles now with the task of trying to find yet another record executive who will at least pretend to care about his work.
"My deal with Giant Records ended about a year ago," Zevon says of the label that released four albums, including 1990's Hindu Love Gods (an album of blues covers recorded with R.E.M. minus Michael Stipe) and last year's Mutineer. "Those relationships tend to end about ten minutes after I hand over the second album."
Such has been the nature of Zevon's 20-plus-year career: That he is best remembered for one "odd" (his word) Top Ten hit, "Werewolves of London," is a travesty that negates a body of work containing some of the finest, sharpest stories ever set to melody, songs spanning all the way from "Frank and Jesse James," "Desperados Under the Eaves" and "Carmelita" off his eponymous 1976 Asylum Records debut to "Jesus Was a Crossmaker" off Mutineer. Outside the cult, he's remembered -- if at all -- as a novelty songwriter, a one-hit wonder who disappeared about the time the champagne went flat; to the cult, he's Hunter S. Thompson tapping out his tales on a piano.
Eighteen years ago, he was a superstar with few peers among the L.A. singer/songwriter set: Jackson Browne produced him, Linda Ronstadt covered his songs, the Eagles and Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham sang backup on his records, People sent reporters to chronicle his vodka-soaked exploits in the Hollywood Hills. He was a legend in the making, a hero of circumstance. Now he's a box-set subject encased in a cardboard tombstone, and he's not that happy about it.
Zevon remains "ambivalent" about the retrospective and all things "of a historical nature." He calls it an unwillingness to "reflect upon the '70s"; the folks at Rhino say it's his being "difficult." Zevon, at least, had final say over the song selection, if only to guarantee that Rhino didn't release "Excitable Boy in opposite sequences on two different CDs," he says, a thin smile crossing his face.
"I urged them to the value of putting out tracks from albums that were out of print, as opposed to one that was still selling every week for someone else," Zevon says. "I saw no harm in [the retrospective], but for reasons that have less to do with an eagerness to celebrate my illustrious career and more to do with being in just kind of a vague period between albums when it's nice to have something around."
Zevon does not look over his shoulder and think about what could and should have been. He recalls that in the days before his 86-year-old father died, his old man told him, "Don't look back." Nonetheless, that's exactly what he does during this lunch, easily if begrudgingly. After all, Zevon doesn't dismiss his past; he's still happy to perform "Werewolves of London" after all these years. "This might just be my vanity, but it doesn't seem like it's anchored to some camp phase in songwriting history," he says. It's just that he doesn't want the past to overshadow the now.
