Last of the rock 'n' roll outlaws

Ah, the '70s. Boogie Nights and all those stupid clothes. So long ago. Nothing sounds even a little bit gone on I'll Sleep When I'm Dead. It's the most convincing such set I've heard, and what's convincing about it is this: A long time ago, more than twenty years ago, a certain person had a point of view, a clutch of values, a few mythic and a few more ordinary, street-level adventures he wanted to live out, in music if nowhere else. He followed that point of view where it led, and ended up right where he began, ready to begin again from the beginning.

Sitting behind his piano all that time, picking up a guitar when he could no longer afford to pay a guitarist, Zevon was never autobiographical or confessional in his music; still, what I'll Sleep When I'm Dead delivers is a body, the physical sense of a life being lived, or imagined, a life trying to live up to an imagination. A recent Harris poll asked college freshmen what pop music artists would still be around thirty years from now. Topping the list were Boyz II Men and the Dave Matthews Band. The Rolling Stones were there too. Who would you vote for? Zevon will be around, if he's alive; chances are he won't be easy to find.

He isn't now. A call to Giant, which issued his last album, Mutineer, in 1995, brought the information that "he hasn't been on the label for three years." They gave me the name of a management firm that after a little checking informed me they'd never managed Zevon and didn't know who did. Amoeba Records in Berkeley, recently featured in Rolling Stone as "The Greatest Record Store in the World" with a question mark, and which is certainly the greatest record store in town without a question mark, had only four of Zevon's thirteen albums, and that's counting two best-ofs. When I finally tracked Zevon down, I asked him if he had a new record coming out. 'I'm working on stuff at home," he said, the brightness of his voice dropping more than a few notches. "I don't know about it coming out."

Back on Larry Sanders, Garry Shandling's Larry is doing his insecure asshole's clueless-hipster routine on Zevon. "The French Inhaler," sure, whatever, but Larry wants to hear "Werewolves of London." It was a cool novelty hit, Zevon's biggest, or only, hit - about fifteen years before this episode of Larry Sanders is taking place. "I really like that one," Larry says to Zevon, knowing that if he's going to feature a where's-he-been-lately on his show he'd better give the viewers something they can recognize. "I want to hear that," Larry says, as if it's his favorite song, not just the only Zevon song he's ever heard, or heard of.

Across the years, Zevon has peddled an absurd romanticism, all guns and tough-guy poses and comic-book violence, standing up as the "Renegade," as "Mr. Bad Example," "a shooter like me," a mercenary who keeps fighting even with his head blown off. I'll Sleep When I'm Dead begins with a ludicrous tribute to Frank and Jesse James and ends with "Mutineer," more or less Zevon's promise to be the listener's personal savior-as-outlaw. What's so queer is that a lot of this actually works. Blowing all through Zevon's music is a loser's humor and a cynic's cold realism; both give the lie to his embrace of noir. But melody doesn't, and that's what makes a listener understand why, wish or will to the contrary, Zevon is in the game for the long haul, and not just because there's nothing else he can do, which there probably isn't.

It's receding dreams that seemingly bring out the best, or the most, of Zevon. 'Monkey Wash Donkey Rinse," the last song but one on I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, is a nice drunken paean to nothingness, an invitation to a party that, after a verse, you wish were really happening as much as Zevon probably does. "Mutineer" is nonsense on the page; sung, it's a simple, heartbreaking proof that if nonsense is all that keeps you going, to give up nonsense is suicide, and suicide is for cowards. "Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum," Zevon says, his voice tripping up high, as if accepting the sad fact that a song Wallace Beery's Long John Silver passed down from the 1934 Treasure Island is in some final way the only song Zevon can sing. But he can make it his own. He can make it yearn, make it regret, charge it with its own failure: Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum / Thirteen albums on a dead man's chest.

"Your face looked like something death brought with him in his suitcase," Zevon sings in 'The French Inhaler," on Larry Sanders; John Ritter has been bumped, there's a little extra time, so as filler Zevon is brought back to do one more song. There's nothing tough about the line in the way Zevon sings it. He all but throws it away, buries it in the hazy progression of the melody. You have to lean forward and listen hard to make sure that's really what he's saying. He's made his own world in two decades of songs, he's living in it, and so what he's saying doesn't sound half as corny, as hard-boiled, as preening, as written as it would coming out of anyone else's mouth. It sounds ordinary. Death's brought me my face in his suitcase, is all Zevon is saying, and I'd rather he hadn't. But since he has, I'll put it on and go about my business. See you around.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning