Bruce Springsteen called him ‘one of the great, great American songwriters’, Jackson Browne hailed him as ‘the first and foremost proponent of song noir’, and Stephen King once said that if he could write like him, he ‘would be a happy guy’. The list of artists that lined up to appear on his records include Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Dave Gilmour and Emmylou Harris. So how is it that most people, if they have heard of Warren Zevon at all, know him only as ‘that Werewolves’ guy’? This book goes beyond that solitary hit single to examine all aspects of Zevon’s multifaceted, five-decade career, from his beginnings in the slightly psychedelic folk duo Lyme and Cybelle, through to his commercial breakthrough in the late Seventies with Excitable Boy, his critically acclaimed late Eighties comeback Sentimental Hygiene, his decline into cult obscurity, and his triumphant if heart-breaking final testament, The Wind, released just prior to his death in 2003. Along the way the reader will discover one of rock’s consummate balladeers, as well as a cast of characters including doomed drug dealers, psychopathic adolescents, outlaws of the Old West, BDSM fetishists, ghostly gunslingers, an unfeasibly large assembly of apes, and, yes, lycanthropes unleashed on the streets of London.
AUTHOR: Peter Gallagher is the author of Marc Bolan, Tyrannosaurus Rex, and T. Rex: Every Album, Every Song, a previous volume in SonicBond’s ‘On Track’ series. He is a regular contributor to Shindig! magazine and his fiction has appeared in Writing Magazine and The London Reader. His next book will be Kiss in the 1970s, also for SonicBond, and he is working on a novel set in the Weimar Republic, which he hopes will see publication some time before the cows come home. He lives in Glasgow, Scotland.