Other fans included Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, Ry Cooder, Emmylou Harris, Don Henley, Tom Petty, Dwight Yoakam, Billy Bob Thornton and T Bone Burnett, who played with Zevon on his last album. Zevon was an artist's artist, relatively little known to the public but revered by the best of his contemporaries: Bob Dylan was a great admirer. But it's hardly the whole man and it's a version that doesn't come anywhere near to explaining why his fans and friends loved him and still love him so deeply.
This is the Zevon that became the cult legend: the hard-drinking, satire-spitting writer of biting rock'n'roll songs such as Werewolves of London, the song for which he is best known. And when he was drinking, he was almost unbearable: erratic, violent, emotionally absent, impossible. As a teenager, I was angry that he wasn't there for me as a kid, angry at him for mistreating my mom," says his and Crystal's daughter, Ariel. As a father, he was largely absent until his son and daughter were adults: "He had no language for dealing with children. "He had tonnes of charisma, but when he didn't want people coming up to him, he had charisma in reverse," his ex-wife Crystal Zevon remembers.
He was at times intimidating, self-destructive, aloof. But he could also be, as his friends, family and lovers will quickly tell you, a pain in the ass. W arren Zevon, who died a decade ago this September at the far-too-premature age of 56, was a singer, a songwriter and one of the great under-appreciated talents in modern America.
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