Warren William Zevon was born in Chicago on January 24th, 1947 - the only son of a professional gambler (his Russian-Jewish father) and a Mormon (his Scottish-Welsh mother) - and raised in California, where he cut some singles in 1966 as half of a folk-rock duo, Lyme and Cybelle, and had two early songs covered by the Turtles.
I remember him telling me, ‘Just tell me the good news.’ “ “But there was also the other side of it for him: ‘This is all happening because I’m dying.’ ” Near the end, Calderón adds, Zevon did not read many of the rave reviews he got for The Wind “because they all talked about him dying. Making The Wind “was like a drug the creativity, the people that were coming to play, the beauty of the music,” says his good friend and longtime collaborator Jorge Calderón, who co-produced the album and co-wrote seven of its eleven songs with Zevon. But here’s some laughs.’ I don’t see what harm it could do.” Yet there were moments in his last year when even Zevon ran out of jokes and stoicism. “You get in front of people and say, ‘Here’s this deal we all dread. “Heaven knows, I’ve been pounding this subject into the ground for decades,” Zevon said with a baritone chuckle when I interviewed him last fall, just after he had started recording The Wind. “He did it publicly, and with a determination that allowed him to succeed.” “Warren did what he did at the end with the same kind of bravery that he approached the necessity and challenge of getting sober,” says Browne, referring to Zevon’s triumph over alcoholism in the early 1980s.
Then, a few days before he died, Zevon learned that The Wind had sold more than 47,000 copies in its debut week of release and would enter the Billboard chart at Number Sixteen - his first Top Twenty album since 1980’s Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School. Zevon also lived to attend the birth in June of his first grandchildren, twins to his daughter Ariel, and watch the August premiere on VHI of Keep Me in Your Heart, a gripping documentary of Zevon’s fighting spirit and failing health during the making of The Wind.