It’s finally time for us bloggers to write our Warren Zevon tributes. The “excitable boy” has been swallowed up by the force that propelled his artistic career. I’m talking about death, Zevon’s leit motif. His first album was called “Wanted Dead or Alive”. His song titles include “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” and “Life’ll Kill Ya”. There were lots of fatalities in his lyrics, lots of guns firing and bullets zipping about. One his final album, he recorded a cover of Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” (which includes the line “mama put my guns in the ground, I can’t shoot them anymore”).

I’ll miss Zevon. He was a true original. Perhaps he wasn’t making the hit parade anymore, but he never went out of style. He never became a parody of himself like Ozzie Osborne. (But give Ozzie credit for being an intentional self-parody, not an unintentional one like Elvis). Perhaps it’s appropriate that Zevon went out while still a force in the music world. Yea, it just wouldn’t have been right for him to have faded away like Bing Crosby or whoever.

Zevon died at home while taking a nap. He closed his eyes, fell asleep and never woke up. It makes you think about the refrain from Ozzie’s “Close Your Eyes”, i.e. “if I closed my eyes forever, would it all remain the same …”

Warren Zevon was the kind of guy who should have put a “don’t try this at home” sticker on his albums. Like a lot of rock stars, he burned out too soon. Most of them succumb to heroin, but Zevon was done in by something more traditional, i.e. cigarettes (via lung cancer). Warren Zevon’s image as a tough-guy had an appropriate ending, but Warren Zevon as a human being didn’t.

Was there a vulnerable side to Warren Zevon? Sure there was. Every album or two had a song that hinted at it. E.g. “Nobodys In Love This Year”, “They Moved The Moon”, “Accidentally Like A Martyr”, and “Desperados Under the Eaves”. The lines in Desperados about listening to the air conditioner hum in a Hollywood Hawaiian hotel are perhaps the best evocation of loneliness to be found in all of rock and roll. Zevon has finally checked out of that lonely hotel room. “Look away down Gower Avenue …” Good bye, Mr. Z. I ain’t in Los Angeles, but I know what you mean.