Browne is one of many mentors who tried to help Zevon, knowing that their wild-man compatriot was his own worst enemy. "My role as benefactor took its toll on our friendship," Browne says astutely, but it was a friendship that endured to the end of Zevon's days. Browne also points out that when he introduced Zevon to an audience as "the Ernest Hemingway of the twelve-string guitar," Zevon said he was more like Charles Bronson. "Warren didn't have literary pretensions," Browne says. "He had literary muscle."
He also had literary tastes (he was the rare rock musician who went looking for bookstores while on the road) and literary antecedents (he is aptly compared here to Dorothy Parker and, by Bruce Springsteen, to Nathanael West). And he had literary cronies, some of whom he met by showing up at their book signings. "He was more self-deprecating about his talent than we were about ours, and we genuinely stink," Dave Barry says about the Rock Bottom Remainders, the all-author band with which Zevon sometimes played.
"I don't think his fires were out, but I think he'd banked his fires," says another band member, Stephen King, who knew Zevon during the singer's middle and later years.
Most of his friends from this period had no idea of the wreckage caused by Zevon's early alcoholism. After years of hair-raising benders (many of them described in the book), he became sober for 17 years, only to be thrown off the wagon by a diagnosis of certain death. These last megabinges shamed Zevon and angered some of his new friends. "I said the one thing this guy should not do is die a cliche," says the writer Carl Hiaasen, who worried that Zevon's two children would have to read about their father's fatal drug overdose in a newspaper. But they didn't. And he had three months to get acquainted with twin grandsons.
The Zevon legacy, which will be greatly bolstered by this intimate portrait despite the warts it reveals, also carries on in other ways. In his diary, Zevon reported meeting a yuppie family who called their dog Zevon. With classic Zevon acerbity, he told them, "I don't think this is what grandfather had in mind."
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