by Joe Matthews

Created on: December 26, 2008   Last Updated: December 29, 2008

Warren certainly deserves to be ensconced in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but what would he do there? Would it make him happy?

I met Warren once, in a medium-sized bar in Wildwood, NJ. He played acoustic, running through the songs from his recent album and pandering the classics. We were all drunk, but Mr. Zevon may not have been yet. The place was packed. That such a dark writer can summon the crowds he did speaks to the power of his rockin' and the connection to the all-too-human stuff. Not all of us can identify with the character in 'Lawyers, Guns and Money,' but those of us who do know who we are, and Warren is sainted among us. He didn't have much to say, and I didn't bother him. I think he's more interested in being the rogue than the celebrity.

I know dozens of Zevon songs by heart, and unlike most professional/commercial art they're pregnant with layers of understanding, mostly deeper, darker, more troubling layers, where the pink and soft skin gets peeled back to show the bloody, darker, more painful stuff in the flesh, finally arriving at the bone in the center of it, where the nerves are dull, resigned and hopeless. Rigid, they would be used to beat villagers, or you'd see them charred and smoldering in the remains of a house fire.

His love songs were exceptional in their lack of joy and double scoop of remorse, agst, failure, and their success is beautifully sad:

"I'm getting tired of you. You're getting tired of me. It's the final act of our little tragedy. Don't feign indignation. It's a fait accompli..."

This weary, exhausted reporting of the emotional wringer of modern relationships, coming after the sex revolution, drug parties and motorcycle club culture and at the onset of the new repression, paranoia and hyperconnectivity of today hits literati and the adult Wildwood Bar crowds differently, but squarely. Zevon demonstrates to me that I'm not alone, that the beauty of loss and sacrifice and failure frame the romanticism of modern life in America. I love the way he uses words we all know but certainly never sing.

Then in Transverse City, he moves from disillusion with romantic love to betrayal by industry, government, being human. Luminaries like David Gilmour, Jerry, Chick Corea were there, along with his normal stable of session professionals. This album puts him apart from himself, which fits perfectly with his catalog of restless, fitful creation.

Warren was consistent in other ways. The people around him watched him disappear inside himself. He was a pain, even as he was in pain. His peers among the singer-songwriter set saw the height of his art, and took part in the troubled relationships upon which it was built. But he did it to himself. He chose the life of the hermit, chasing away would-be love, defyingcamaraderie, staunchly opposing fulfillment.

It would be unfair to exclude Warren Zevon from the Hall of Fame, and equally unfair to invite him in.

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