At the conclusion of “Join Me in L.A.: The Songs of Warren Zevon” — a 32-song, four-and-a-half-hour concert held at the United Theater in downtown Los Angeles on Friday — Jackson Browne shook his head and marveled at his old friend’s uncompromising vision.
“Listening to all these songs, it occurred to me that Warren never pandered at all,” Browne said in an interview. “He never dumbed down for anybody or tried to write a hit. He just wrote and went on writing the best songs he could until the moment he was gone. That was his singular achievement.”
The event, guided by a troika of Zevon intimates — his son, Jordan; his longtime collaborator Jorge Calderón; and his artistic champion Browne — served as a celebration of Zevon’s music and a prelude to being honored by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame next month.
Zevon’s career was marked by considerable critical acclaim, little commercial success and bouts of self-sabotaging behavior. Yet the most shocking twist came with his final act: a sudden cancer diagnosis, followed by a long goodbye and farewell album before his death at 56, in 2003.
Death in its many varied forms — physical, moral, romantic — was long the central preoccupation of Zevon’s work. The irony, of course, is it’s unlikely that any of the honors he has posthumously received (including Grammy Awards for his swan song LP, “The Wind”) would have come to pass had he lived. “And he kind of planned it that way,” Jordan Zevon said in an interview, referring to his father’s dramatic exit. “Dad knew this would be the outcome.”
Renowned for his macabre comic sense, Zevon also had a penchant for tender sentimentality. A classically trained musician with a rock ’n’ roll heart and a littérateur whose tastes ran the gamut from Graham Greene to Mickey Spillane, Zevon made music that was an unlikely mix of brains and brawn, high art and low culture. Once, back in the 1970s, Browne introduced him in concert as “the Ernest Hemingway of the 12-string guitar.” Afterward, Zevon corrected him: “No, Jackson — the Charles Bronson of the 12-string guitar.’”
The evening’s house band, the Wild Honey Orchestra, was a collective of local musicians, led by the keyboardist Jordan Summers and the drummer Nick Vincent, abetted by several notable Zevon session alums including Rick Marotta, Bob Glaub and Leland Sklar.
The concert’s set list covered the breadth of Zevon’s career, dating back to his stint in the ’60s pop duo Lyme & Cybelle. Steve Stanley and Kristi Callahan teamed for the airy psychedelia of “Follow Me” from 1966, while the Smithereens’ Dennis Diken, joined by the Young Fresh Fellows’ Scott McCaughey and the onetime Beach Boys member David Marks, ripped through “Outside Chance,” a buoyant Beatlesque romp.
Zevon’s pop period was fleeting, and his musical destiny lay elsewhere. After releasing a lone hard-rock album in 1969, he spent the early ’70s developing a distinctive songwriting voice, resulting in the grand leaps that would define his beloved work from later in the decade.
Those songs — including berserker anthems like “Excitable Boy” and “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” — were given a convincing reading by the country music scion Shooter Jennings, who managed to capture Zevon’s idiosyncratic cadences and phrasing. Standouts from Zevon’s ’80s era, which followed a long wilderness period and rehab, were performed by the veteran singer-songwriters John Wesley Harding and Marshall Crenshaw, who both brought a lived-in truth to somber reflections like “Reconsider Me” and “Splendid Isolation.”
Despite his literary reputation and classical credentials (the young Zevon was mentored by Igor Stravinsky), his music was often simple and earthy. When asked his occupation, Zevon would typically reply “folk singer,” and he used the oldest traditions of the form; his catalog is filled with shanties and martial rhythms, rebel songs and funeral laments.
The pianist and singer Leslie Mendelson located the deep solemnity in the mariner’s tale “Mutineer,” and Steve Wynn of the Dream Syndicate captured the naked violence and desperation in “Play It All Night Long.” The country star Dwight Yoakam — striding the stage in a full-length duster and Stetson — put his stamp on the junkie picaresque “Carmelita,” throwing a bluegrass hitch in his voice as he pleaded: “I’m all strung out on her-o-in on the outskirts of town.”
While Zevon’s songs often ponder the darkest aspects of the human condition, the concert also highlighted an often-overlooked spiritual strain in his output. Zevon, who was born to a Jewish father and a Mormon mother, had a religious sense that was — as his hero Greene once put it — “a troubled, paradoxical faith.” Yet a sense of grace permeated many of the performances at the United.
“There is a gospel quality in Warren’s work,” Browne said. “He may not have had the voice to give them that treatment. But some people naturally bring that out when they sing them, just by having the air pass through their lungs.”
The journeyman R&B singer Billy Valentine was one such example, offering a beatific“Accidentally Like a Martyr” that found both the soulful ache and gospel uplift in the tune, bringing the 1,600-plus in attendance to their feet. Susan Cowsill also struck a chord with “Mohammed’s Radio.” The singer had recorded the song as a solo piece in 1976, before Zevon released his own version and before Linda Ronstadt scored a small hit with it. Carving new filigrees into the song with her soaring soprano, she confirmed Zevon’s mastery as a melodist.
Calderón, a sweetly voiced singer, played spare, elegiac renditions of the songs he wrote with Zevon at the end of his life, highlighted by a poignant “Keep Me in Your Heart.” Jordan Zevon seemed to relish tearing into some of his father’s gonzo character studies, including “Monkey Wash Donkey Rinse” and “Lawyers, Guns and Money.” But on “Studebaker” — one of Zevon’s great lost works — he softened, finding an existential beauty in the song’s rueful denouement: “I’m up against it all like a leaf against the wind / And that Studebaker keeps on breakin’ down again.”
While the concert ended with the full lineup gathering for a rousing take of Zevon’s only hit, “Werewolves of London,” the true climax came a bit earlier as Browne led a string-fueled version of “Desperados Under the Eaves.”
Arguably Zevon’s masterwork, the narrative begins at the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel, the embodiment of the West’s “dream dump.” The song’s protagonist — a thinly veiled version of Zevon — battles alcoholic tremors and waits for California’s inevitable, cataclysmic quake to consume him before a haunting coda, an air-conditioner hum recast as a hymnal, urging him to “Look away, down Gower Avenue.”
Browne’s performance summoned a sudden wellspring of emotion in the crowd, with many visibly wiping away tears. “On the most fundamental level, people listened to Warren,” Browne said after the show. “They listened and they heard him because they were looking for something they needed. By that measure, he delivered on a tremendous scale.”
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