September 9, 2003

Warren Zevon, Wry Singer and Songwriter, Dies at 56

arren Zevon, a singer and songwriter who came up with hard-boiled stories and tender confessions of love, died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 56.

The cause was lung cancer, which was diagnosed last summer.

Mr. Zevon had a pulp-fiction imagination that yielded songs like "Werewolves of London," "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me," "Lawyers, Guns and Money" and "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead." They were terse, action-packed, gallows-humored tales that could sketch an entire screenplay in four minutes and often had death as a punch line. But vulnerability and longing were also in Mr. Zevon's ballads, like "Mutineer," "Accidentally Like a Martyr" and "Hasten Down the Wind."

Behind Mr. Zevon's stoic baritone, the music changed with its central instrument. His piano songs suggested marches, hymns and the harmonies of Aaron Copland, while his guitar songs connected rock, Celtic and country music .

Mr. Zevon made his last album, "The Wind" (Artemis), knowing that his time was running out. In August 2002, a week after deciding to record a new album, Mr. Zevon felt chest pains while exercising and eventually went to see a doctor for the first time in 20 years.

A lifelong smoker, Mr. Zevon was told that he had mesothelioma, a cancer that had advanced too far for treatment, and that he had only a few months to live. He chose to work on the album, completed it and lived to see it released this year, on Aug. 26. In an interview in 2002, he said the diagnosis had led to "the intensest creative period of my life."

Mr. Zevon was prized by other songwriters. Bob Dylan performed his songs onstage, and Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Emmylou Harris, Ry Cooder, Dwight Yoakam, Tom Petty and Don Henley all appeared on "The Wind."

Mr. Springsteen has described Mr. Zevon as writing about "the good, the bad and the ugly" and called him "a moralist in cynic's clothing."

Mr. Zevon was born on Jan. 24, 1947, in Chicago, but grew up in Arizona and Los Angeles. His father, he said in an interview, was a Russian-Jewish gambler; his mother was a Mormon and often in fragile health.

Mr. Zevon studied classical piano, idolizing composers like Stravinsky and Copland, and picked up guitar as a teenager. When his parents divorced, he drove a sports car his father had won in a card game to New York City to try to make it on the folk circuit.

But he had better luck in Los Angeles, where he and a friend formed the duo Lyme and Cybelle, and began getting his work heard. The Turtles made one of his songs, "Like the Seasons," the B side of the hit single "Happy Together," providing royalties that paid his rent for years.

Mr. Zevon's first album, "Wanted Dead or Alive," was released in 1969 and widely ignored. He worked around Los Angeles, writing commercial jingles and leading the Everly Brothers' backup band. And he made his way into the coterie of songwriters, among them Mr. Browne and J. D. Souther, that was bringing new depth to the California soft-rock of the mid-1970's.

Linda Ronstadt chose "Hasten Down the Wind" as the title song of her 1976 album, and Mr. Browne produced Mr. Zevon's major-label debut, "Warren Zevon," that same year.

In 1978 Mr. Zevon's album "Excitable Boy" reached the Top 10 with its own hit single, "Werewolves of London."

Mr. Zevon, who was married and divorced twice, had two children, Jordan and Ariel. They survive him, along with two grandchildren. Jordan Zevon was the executive producer of "The Wind."

Success brought pressure and temptations, and Mr. Zevon succumbed, using drugs and alcohol, toting a gun, losing control onstage. "I ran around like a psychotic," he once said.

He made no albums from 1982 to 1987, and spent time in rehab. He considered alcoholism "a real coward's death," he said in 1981. After conquering his problems, he re-emerged to a steady, well-respected career: touring and making albums, including "Transverse City" in 1989, "Mr. Bad Example" in 1991, "Mutineer" in 1995 and "Life'll Kill Ya" in 2000.

Members of R.E.M. backed Mr. Zevon on his 1987 album, "Sentimental Hygiene"; other songs they recorded together were released under the name Hindu Love Gods in 1990. In the early 1990's, Mr. Zevon also wrote theme songs and scores for television series — "Tales From the Crypt," "Route 66," "Tekwar" — and he was a frequent guest musician on "Late Night with David Letterman."

When his cancer was diagnosed, Mr. Zevon was the first to recognize that songs like "My Ride's Here," about a hearse, had become self-fulfilling prophecies.

"I keep asking myself how I suddenly was thrust into the position of travel agent for death," he said last year. "But then, of course, the whole point of why it's so strange is that I had already assigned myself that role so many years of writing ago." He allowed a camera crew from VH1 to make a documentary during the recording sessions for his final album.

"The Wind" has death-haunted songs like "Prison Grove" and "Keep Me in Your Heart," as well as a version of Mr. Dylan's song about a dying sheriff, "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." But songs like "Disorder in the House" and "Dirty Life and Times" maintain Mr. Zevon's old sardonic humor.

While he was recording the album, Mr. Zevon said he was planning to write goodbyes to people and to make one other point: that, he said, "This was a nice deal: life."