Accidentally Right A Martyr
This entry was posted on 6/19/2007 8:18 PM and is filed under Music,Heroes and Heroines.
6/20/07: RightWingTrashMan: Warren Zevon
[language advisory…but it’s just one word]
Summer probably isn’t supposed to be this lazy. We’re just back from a vacation, and already linking to
our own recent book review of
I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon. As noted in the piece, it’s not likely that any political party would want to claim Zevon as their own. Still, Zevon had enough right-wing moments to make you feel perfectly comfortable with keeping him in your CD collection. The following is from the article:
…Zevon’s politics make for some great contrarian moments. He gets the first bad reviews of his career after yelling at the audience while opening for The Grateful Dead. The guy certainly enjoys his Second Amendment rights. He does a benefit concert as a favor to Hunter S. Thompson, but it's to help free an idiot gal whose questionable prison conviction troubled some right-wingers.
At one point, he attempts to take custody of his daughter and tells [his ex-wife] Crystal—who's touring France on a peace march—that “I’m to the right of your father and Ronald Reagan and if you think I’m going to let my daughter be raised by some fucking Communist hippie, you’re sadly mistaken.”There’s a lot more, including our own touching tale of meeting the gentleman. Read the whole…wait, doesn’t somebody else have to say that about you?
Make him your own: The two-disc
I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead is a useful compilation, but Zevon’s finest—and most conservative—moment remains 1982’s underrated
The Envoy, as recently reissued on the Rhino label. The new liner notes avoid mentioning that the title track is a tribute to
Philip Habib.
