Category: Mere Words

In the end, we are who we are. The best we can hope for after we’re gone is that someone will think enough of us to to render a kind and fair account of our memory.

The thing is, in death as in life, you tend to do unto others the way they did unto you, and, well, long story short, singer-songwriter Warren Zevon, who died from mesothelioma in 2003 at the age of 56, wasn’t always a very nice person.

Zevon, like his songs, was often acerbically funny and witty and generous; in music and in life he possessed the ability to locate poetry in the commonplace. But he also epitomized Toulouse-Lautrec’s dictum that “One should never confuse the artist with the art.” Zevon the man  had difficulty seeing beyond his own often petty desires and, as a result, left scores of hurt friends and family in his wake. Which, when it comes to the more than 130 songs he wrote and recorded in his 34-year recording career, is neither here nor there.

In a genre that begets imitation and champions crass commercialism, Zevon was an original. Reviewing Zevon’s eponymous album back in 1976, Paul Nelson called forth a disparate roster of stellar artists to herald Zevon’s arrival: “he is a talent who can be mentioned in the same sentence with Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne, Randy Newman, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and a mere handful of others — no apologies necessary.”

All of which brings us, over 30 years later, to the new book I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon. Written by Zevon’s ex-wife Crystal Zevon, the book provides a compelling oral history of a man who was as troubled as he was talented. Detailing the years before, during, and after Zevon’s battle with alcoholism, the result is an artfully rendered casebook study of an addictive personality and, because Zevon portrays herself as honestly as she does her ex-husband, a codependent relationship.

Less than halfway through the book, photographer and art director Jimmy Wachtel, commenting on Zevon’s newfound sobriety, gets right to the heart of the matter: “To be honest, he was the same asshole, drunk or sober, so there wasn’t that much difference except he didn’t repeat himself as much.”

For those of us who didn’t know Warren Zevon personally, it remains the work that matters, for which he’ll be remembered. For those who did know him, who have to sift through the memories and hang onto the ones that made Zevon special and kept him in their lives and their hearts, it’s a bit more difficult.

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon is due out from HarperCollins on May 1st. In the meantime, Crystal Zevon is posting updates about personal appearances and other related events — as well as material about Warren Zevon that doesn’t appear in the book — over at her website.

What a waste of talent and technology.

Sin City comes onscreen as initially striking and innovative, but soon turns redundant and anti-human and, worst of all, boring. How many impalings, decapitations, severed limbs, and newfound, blood-spurting orifices are we supposed to suffer before we notice that, amidst all the incredulous plot lines, bared breasts, and sometimes admittedly amazing cinematic flourishes, stunning mediocrity has taken over? Unfortunately, like the movie’s many victims, despite being shot again and again and again, the movie just keeps on going.

Directors Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller, and “special guest director” Quentin Tarantino, proven talents one and all, have effectively transferred Miller’s Sin City comic book to the screen — but why? In having done so, the filmmakers have accomplished the cinematic equivalent of “recreating” the Eiffel Tower and planting it in Las Vegas.

“Wow” soon gives way to “So?”

If you watched the opening minutes of last night’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, after Jann Wenner’s eulogy of Ahmet Ertegun and before the interminable acceptance speeches began, you saw a lovely In Memoriam presentation dedicated to those significant figures in the music industry who passed away in 2006.

Twelfth among the litany of names both famous (Buck Owens, Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett, James Brown) and not so famous (blues musician Sam Myers, Denis Payton of the Dave Clark Five, publicist Ronnie Lippin), appeared none other than Paul Nelson, the subject of the book I’ve worked on since last July.

As a music journalist, much of Paul’s writing was of the moment and consequently lost to back issues of assorted magazines and newspapers. Last night, however, this great writer received at least some of his due.

Back in 1976, Paul Nelson tried to sign Tom Pacheco to Mercury Records. For reasons that were commercial — as in “not commercial enough“ — he failed. But Paul knew people who knew people and, as a result, Pacheco landed a record deal at RCA. About the first of those albums, 1976’s Swallowed Up in the Great American Heartland, Paul, who by then had left his A&R post at Mercury and returned to criticism, wrote: “Tom Pacheco spent most of his early years listening to wild Texas music in the snowbound towns of Massachussetts, and his songs combine the best from both worlds.”

Last evening, the forty or so people who filled the Uptown Coffeehouse at the Riverdale Society for Ethical Culture discovered that, over thirty years later, Paul’s words still ring true. Pacheco, whose songs have been recorded by the Band, Richie Havens, the great Rick Danko, and Jefferson Starship, performed the first set by himself and the second set with the Bloodlines Band: his amazingly talented guitarist brother Paul Pacheco (who played with Jimi Hendrix and Howlin’ Wolf) and his brother-in-law bassist Vern Miller (whose band Barry and the Remains opened for the Beatles on their final tour).

Pacheco’s quavering voice well serves his songs, which range from the wildly fanciful (“Big Jim’s Honey,” inspired by Sam Love’s novel Electric Honey, wherein the proximity of a beekeeper’s hive to a marijuana patch yields interesting results) to the heartbreakingly real (“Walter,” a worthy successor to John Prine’s “Sam Stone” in the returned-vet-as-damaged-goods genre). Political songs of Guantanamo Bay (“My Name Is Hamir”) and everything that’s wrong with America (“When You’re Back on Your Ranch in Texas”) were balanced by not-so-simple love songs and “The Journal of Graeme Livingstone,” an epic tale of an eighty-nine-year-old Florida hotel-owner who claims he killed Jack the Ripper.

According to Pacheco, Paul Nelson’s early interest and encouragement are the reasons he’s still in music today. A Woodstock residsent, Pacheco now has nineteen albums to his name and tours extensively in Europe. Paul, I think, would be proud.

A feather of a movie. The matter-of-fact, laid-back, middle-class microcosmic manner in which writer/director Noah Baumbach lays out the drama is so undramatic, and the humor is so anti-jokey and deftly delivered, that a half-decent wind threatens to blow it all away.

Yet it all hangs together, and I can’t come across this movie on cable without once again watching it to the end.

Yours truly and the book I’m writing receive a kind mention in the February/March 2007 issue of Gallery & Studio, a magazine devoted to “The World of the Working Artist.”

Managing editor Ed McCormack’s essay, “Andy’s Aura, Patti’s Power, My Sister’s Boxes, My Father’s Press Clippings, Paul Nelson’s Withering, and Other Aspects of Art and Fame, Obscurity and Loss, Death and Resurrection,” an extremely personal meditation (which, at six pages, is almost as long as its title) on life and death, where we come from, where we’re going, and what we encounter along the way, at its heart seeks to find the answer to this conundrum:

Why Patti Smith matters so much to those who take rock & roll more seriously than McCormack does.

And while he wishes he could call upon the late rock critics Lester Bangs (whom, in an otherwise painstakingly researched piece, he misidentifies as “the dean of American rock critics,” a title belonging to Robert Christgau) or Paul Nelson to provide the answer, Nelson probably couldn’t have helped him, as Patti Smith’s attraction was lost on him, too.

About her first album, Horses, pretty much a universally acknowledged classic, Nelson in 1976 wrote that “I never want to hear it again…” In the years that followed, he avoided writing about Smith at all and, the few times he did, struggled to resist the cheap shot.

All of which is neither here nor there, as McCormack, himself also an ex-writer for Rolling Stone (as was Patti), does a fine job addressing, in a heartfelt and often humorous manner, the considerable cult that belongs to Smith.

As far as the bit about me, McCormack deftly demonstrates the importance of remaining open to influence in one’s art. Had I not e-mailed him late last year while researching my book, I wouldn’t be writing this piece today; and McCormack might never have referenced Paul Nelson — and certainly not me — and the article he happened to be writing would have ended up being that much shorter.

The criteria one uses for determining whether or not a film is good, or by which one would recommend said film to someone else, is far from scientific (Siskel and Ebert’s thumbs up or thumbs down being on the low end of the scale and Paul Schrader’s canon somewhere out there in the ether); but today Deb and I happened upon a yardstick that seems as reliable as any. It being a fairly nice, hinting-at-spring kind of day, we decided to walk to the theater and back. Three miles to, three miles back. Six miles total. And, having done so, and having just taken the obligatory prophylactic Ibuprofen to assuage my already achy, exercise-deprived legs, I can honestly say that yes, I recommend Zodiac.

Though in my mind director David Fincher’s Se7en is a modern classic, two of his subsequent films, The Game and Panic Room (sorry to say, Fight Club has thus far eluded me), left something to be desired script-wise. No such trouble with James Vanderbilt’s screenplay (based on Robert Graysmith’s book) for Zodiac, a police procedural which, at 158 minutes, never bores. While it could be convincingly argued that this is just an $80 million version of a particularly compelling Law and Order episode, Fincher’s direction and the ensemble acting take it up several notches. Jake Gyllenhaal is fine as the cartoonist-turned-journalist Graysmith, Mark Ruffalo suitably dumpy as Inspector David Toschi, and Robert Downey Jr. splendid as Paul Avery, the doomed-by-his-own demons journalist. Among the several laudatory supporting performances, Elias Koteas, Dermot Mulroney, the always excellent Philip Baker Hall, and, coming out of nowhere, Candy Clark, all stand out. Chloë Sevigny, unfortunately, is wasted in the thankless role of Graysmith’s wife.

While I wouldn’t walk a mile for a Camel, I would walk six miles for Zodiac.

Indeed an offer was tendered on my book. I spoke with the publisher for about forty minutes last week and liked what I heard. I hope he did, too. But, being the moderately optimistic yet pragmatic fatalist that I am, I’ll resist talking about it further until the contract is in front of me and pen has been put to paper. Once that happens, I’ll return with the details.

Until then, let’s just say that it’s an extremely satisfying experience, watching everything come together. On one hand, I’ve only worked on this project for seven months; on the other, I’ve carried it with me for over thirty years. And, thanks to the research required to write this book, I’ve made some terrific new acquaintances and some bona fide friends to boot (plus, with the invaluable help of Maggie, our GPS, I’ve learned my way around NYC).

Who said writing had to be a solitary business?

Just a note of thanks to NBC for once again pulling Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip from Monday night’s schedule, thereby freeing me to watch Family Guy reruns on TBS. Aaron Sorkin’s original concept — a behind-the-scenes look at what purportedly goes on in the production of a weekly live comedy show à la Saturday Night Live — quickly revealed that, as interesting as it might have sounded, and despite how good the first episode was, perhaps there really isn’t that much of interest going on backstage to support 26 one-hour episodes (or whatever constitutes a season these days). Alas, it appears that the grind of putting together a TV comedy show week after week, with the clock on the wall counting down from 168 hours to zero again and again, is exactly that: a grind.

So the show went on hiatus for a little bit of retooling and, when it returned, had been reduced to an occasionally funny but overall pretty boring romantic comedy with all of the TV production stuff taking a decidedly backseat. On the positive side, it made those early episodes look much better in retrospect; the bad thing was that the show had become a colossal bore. By downplaying the let’s-put-on-a-TV-show aspect, Studio 60 lost what made it potentially fascinating in the first place. Rather than concentrating on the love lives of characters who are not as funny or cute or, especially, interesting as Sorkin thinks they are, he should have found a way to refocus his original premise. Who knows what form the the series will take when it reincarnates — if it does at all. Hopefully, three will indeed be a charm.

Last time Sorkin tried this (what goes on behind the curtain of a TV show) — the amusing and witty Sports Night — it worked; this time, it doesn’t. For now, if I want funny and smart, I’ll stick with Brian and Stewie.