Warren Zevon

April 11, 2016
Warren Zevon (1947–2003) was one of the most innovative songwriters in recent popular music history, and Plasketes captures the full range of Zevon’s skills in the first full-length biography of the artist. Plasketes provides a comprehensive analysis of Zevon’s entire body of work—from his self-titled debut in 1976 to The Wind, recorded and released during his last year alive—that serves as an almost definitive look at his “legacy of tortured brilliance,” which still attracts new admirers today. Especially fascinating is Plasketes’s look at how Zevon’s debut “endures as one of the most delightfully dark visions of Southern California culture, demystifying the Hollywood scene, its desperation and decadence.” Also good are his in-depth looks at some works that critics overlooked at the time of their release, such as “Transverse City” (“Zevon’s most ambitious record”) and “Life’ll Kill Ya” (“a gem, a modest masterpiece”). Plasketes admits his reliance on “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon”—the exhaustive posthumous oral history compiled in 2007 by Zevon’s ex-wife, Crystal—but he adds plenty of original work to fully illuminate the art behind the wild stories from Zevon’s alcohol and drug binges.