Warren Zevon - Accidentally Like a Martyr

There are so many more songs in Warren Zevon's canon than "Werewolves of London," yet he is damned to be remembered as the writer of a novelty song. "Desperados Under the Eaves" is a superior work, as is "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" and "Excitable Boy" and "The Envoy."

But Werewolves is his legacy, for good, bad or indifferent.

When I pick up a guitar and decide to play a song by Zevon, I almost always gravitate to "Accidentally Like a Martyr." It's a great and fine piece of music, and a joy to perform.

From his website, a story from 2013:

Warren 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. But he could also be, as his friends, family and lovers will quickly tell you, a pain in the ass. He was at times intimidating, self-destructive, aloof. "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. As a father, he was largely absent until his son and daughter were adults: "He had no language for dealing with children. 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. And when he was drinking, he was almost unbearable: erratic, violent, emotionally absent, impossible.

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. 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.

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. 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. In Crystal Zevon's 2007 biography of her late ex-husband, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: the Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon, Springsteen writes, "[Warren] would write something that had real meaning, and it was funny, too. I always envied that part of his ability and talent." David Crosby also writes in the same book: "He was and remains one of my favourite songwriters. He saw things with a jaundiced eye that still got the humanity of things."

When trying to describe a musician's style, the usual tactic is to compare him to other musicians. But when it comes to Zevon, because his music is so highly literate and based on storytelling, the more apt comparisons are with writers. "One thing I regret," says his friend, Stephen King, "is that we never got a chance to collaborate on a song or story." In recompense, King has dedicated his forthcoming novel, Dr Sleep, to Zevon.

Hunter S Thompson was another literary friend and there were definite overlaps of sensibility between the two men: their unforgiving satire, their hard-living, their occasionally incomprehensible dark humour. Ariel Zevon recalls once going with her dad to a gig in Colorado and Thompson was waiting for them outside in his RV: "He invited Dad in, then ceremoniously draped some huge fancy cables around his neck and handed him a Taser. Who knows why? My dad dutifully wore the cables around his neck on stage, and lit up the Taser."

Warren was a difficult person. I've read his biography that revealed him for all his triumphs and faults. He had problems, and anyone who was in his life had to accept those problems as part of the package. He could be a cruel person, a mean drunk with a violent streak. But he also could be a remarkable artist. Like most of us, he was a complicated person.

But his music lives on.