He was in the house before the house burned down
Looking over this week's Days Between Stations column (from April 1998, up next), I was pulled back into Warren Zevon's story. I realized how much I missed him—how better off, or maybe just more, or truer to itself, the world might be if he were still around, instead of dying of cancer in 2003 at the cruel age of 56. My friend Howard Hampton wrote on the occasion of the presidential election of 2016 that the only song to hear—that seemed to play itself—was Zevon's "I Was in the House When the House Burned Down," and that song is playing louder than ever as this cursed year unfolds.
I began thinking about other pieces on Zevon that had come up over the years—one a sort of not-interview from the Village Voice in 1978, and one from the long-gone New West from 1977, about a new strain in Southern California rock 'n' roll—mostly about the Eagles, but with Zevon as the intelligence perhaps hovering over their new music.
Where are we now? Zevon is still dead. Glenn Frey of the Eagles died in 2016 at 67. Don Henley is about to lead the Eagles out on their latest Long Goodbye tour, opening March 1 at the Hollywood Bowl—with that concept (borrowed from Raymond Chandler's 1953 rewrite of The Great Gatsby, his best book—he knew how much he had to live up to, and he made it) they can keep waving goodbye forever, even after they have to subtitle the shows as the Hologram Tour. A trial is about to open in New York over the supposed theft of Henley's draft lyrics for Hotel California songs, the charge being that the poet and Fug Ed Sanders, having been hired to write the authorized book on the Eagles, had taken them from Henley's house for research, kept them after the book, though reaching 900 pages in four volumes, went to ground, and then sold them to people who tried to peddle them through auction houses, and . . . Do you care? What can you say? That there's something just too perfect about Sanders going from The Family, by far the best book on the Manson family and one of the scariest books I've ever read about anything, to the Eagles—I mean, he barely had to cross the street. Luckily, he too is still around, at 84, with a new Fugs album last year, highlighted by “Where Have All the Commies Gone?” based on Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” which maybe was really about what Sanders’s song now is.
I liked Zevon so much that I went to a show by him in Iowa City on the night the Cardinals were playing game 7 of the World Series in 1982. They won their first championship of my life and I missed it. I was a much bigger Cardinals fan then, but he made it worthwhile.
I didn't know about the friend-of-a-friend connection. Dave Marsh told me about staying at his place once and watching Zevon stand at the kitchen sink in the morning and chug a quart of vodka before suggesting they go get tacos.You probably heard that story too, I guess.
My sister Robin is pictured on the cover of Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School.