Doug Moe: Zevon bio is ode to a master By Doug Moe MY FIRST Warren Zevon concert was in Whitewater, of all places.

It wasn't long after the release of Zevon's late 1970s album, "Excitable Boy," which would endure as his most commercially successful and yield his lone hit single, "Werewolves of London."

I loved the album, having bought it after reading a Rolling Stone profile of Zevon by Paul Nelson that said listening to Zevon was like reading Norman Mailer or watching a Sam Peckinpah film -- all high-impact, no prisoners, life-on-the-edge material that might wound you or cure you but would not leave you unaffected.

At the Whitewater show, the comedian opening for Zevon bombed. In truth, he wasn't very funny, but the rowdy Zevon crowd hounded him mercilessly. I remember feeling uncomfortable enough to leave my seat midway through the comedian's routine.

When Zevon and his band took the stage, they launched into a high-energy song -- I think it might have been "Johnny Strikes Up the Band," from "Excitable Boy" -- and then after only 10 or 15 seconds, the band shut down. The lights went out. Zevon was silent.

A long half-minute passed in darkness. Then Zevon said: "I'm glad you can take a joke."

He never mentioned the comedian, and the rest of the show was excellent. Despite many loud requests from the audience, however, Zevon never played "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner," a song that in some ways was more his signature than "Werewolves." At that point a Zevon concert without "Roland" -- who finds his enemy "in Mombassa, in a barroom drinking gin," and blows him away -- was unthinkable.

Can you take a joke?

Now Zevon, who was a big Madison favorite prior to his death in 2003 -- he once played the Barrymore twice in nine months -- is having a bit of a revival. Tuesday was publication day for "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon," an oral history put together by his one-time wife and lifelong friend, Crystal Zevon.

To coincide with the biography, two early Zevon albums -- the live "Stand in the Fire" and the studio "The Envoy" -- are getting their first CD release, along with a remastered "Excitable Boy," all from Rhino Records.

The new book is receiving a lot of attention, including a front-page Arts section review by Janet Maslin in the New York Times. Maslin is a longtime Zevon watcher, having reviewed the pre-"Excitable Boy" album, "Warren Zevon," for Newsweek in 1976.Jackson Browne, a friend and benefactor of Zevon, calls the biography "a harrowing ride through the backstreets of the L.A. music business with the King of Song Noir .... laying bare Zevon's unusual life and outrageous times that produced some of the funniest, darkest -- and most tender -- songs ever written."

For fans, one the best things in the book will be how it tells the stories behind those songs. The guy who inspired "Roland" was "an American soldier of fortune named Lindy, "who owned an Irish pub in Spain called the Dubliner.

The artistry of the songs sometimes got lost as Zevon's hard-living image grew. He drank and fired guns and mugged for magazine covers. His personal life became untidy. But through it all, this most literary of songwriters -- in an early journal entry Zevon lauded Graham Greene's short stories, and later he befriended the literary novelist Thomas McGuane -- kept writing.

The music industry producer and manager Jon Landau sums it up in the new book: "For most genuinely great artists, it's a lifetime endeavor. With Bruce (Springsteen) it's a lifetime endeavor. Bruce is still in there trying to write the best song he ever wrote. Maybe he will, maybe he won't, but that's what he's interested in doing. He's as interested in it today as he was the day I met him. Warren was like that, too, but with him what was unusual was his level of perseverance mixed with the level of adversity he created for himself. It is a fascinating combination."

Zevon's sensibility often seemed to come right out of film noir, with his down-and-out characters still managing to summon a dark laugh. From "Desperadoes Under the Eaves," this gem: "And if California slides into the ocean/Like the mystics and statistics say it will/I predict this motel will be standing/Until I pay my bill."

And from "Lawyers, Guns and Money," this: "Well, I went home with the waitress/The way I always do/How was I to know/She was with the Russians, too."

Zevon's last act came with a diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer in 2002. His public response was dry humor, saying he hoped to make it to the release of the next James Bond movie. In private, he went to work, writing songs and recording a final CD, "The Wind," which won a couple of Grammys.

When Zevon died at 56, in September 2003, my colleagues on the editorial page desk of The Capital Times wrote a short tribute. Praising his ability to spot hypocrites, the editorial noted: "Something tells us he could have written a helluva song about Haliburton, Dick Cheney, and the Iraq mess. Or Zevon could have sung one last rendition of Lawyers, Guns and Money,' because it sure looks as if something is going to hit the fan."

In fact, Zevon's last public song, performed on his friend David Letterman's show, was "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner." I trust they enjoyed it in Whitewater.

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