Nothing's Bad Luck
Nothing's Bad Luck

Author: C. M. Kushins

Publisher: Da Capo Press

Published: 2019-05-07

Total Pages: 495

ISBN-13: 0306921472

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Biography of legendary singer-songwriter Warren Zevon, spanning his nomadic youth and early recording career to his substance abuse, final album, and posthumous Grammy Awards As is the case with so many musicians, the life of Warren Zevon was blessed with talent and opportunity yet also beset by tragedy and setbacks. Raised mostly by his mother with an occasional cameo from his gangster father, Warren had an affinity and talent for music at an early age. Taking to the piano and guitar almost instantly, he began imitating and soon creating songs at every opportunity. After an impromptu performance in the right place at the right time, a record deal landed on the lap of a teenager who was eager to set out on his own and make a name for himself. But of course, where fame is concerned, things are never quite so simple. Drawing on original interviews with those closest to Zevon, including Crystal Zevon, Jackson Browne, Mitch Albom, Danny Goldberg, Barney Hoskyns, and Merle Ginsberg, Nothing's Bad Luck tells the story of one of rock's greatest talents. Journalist C.M. Kushins not only examines Zevon's troubled personal life and sophisticated, ever-changing musical style, but emphasizes the moments in which the two are inseparable, and ultimately paints Zevon as a hot-headed, literary, compelling, musical genius worthy of the same tier as that of Bob Dylan and Neil Young. In Nothing's Bad Luck, Kushins at last gives Warren Zevon the serious, in-depth biographical treatment he deserves, making the life of this complex subject accessible to fans old and new for the very first time.

Warren Zevon
Warren Zevon

Author: George Plasketes

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-06-02

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1442234571

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Warren Zevon was one of the most original songwriters to emerge from the prolific 1970s Los Angeles music scene. Beyond his most familiar song—the rollicking 1978 hit “Werewolves of London”—Zevon’s smart, often satirical songbook is rich with cinematic, literary, and comic qualities; dark narratives; complex characters; popular culture references; and tender, romantic ballads of parting and longing. Warren Zevon: Desperado of Los Angeles is the first book-length, critical exploration of one of popular music’s most talented and tormented antiheroes. George Plasketes provides a comprehensive chronicle of Zevon’s 40-year, 20-record career and his enduring cultural significance. Beginning with Zevon’s classical training and encounters as a youth with composers Robert Craft and Igor Stravinsky, Plasketes surveys Zevon’s initiation into the 1960s through the Everly Brothers, the Turtles, and the film Midnight Cowboy. Plasketes then follows Zevon from his debut album with Asylum Records in 1976, produced by mentor Jackson Browne, through his successes and struggles from a Top Ten album to record label limbo during the 1980s, through a variety of music projects in the 1990s, including soundtracks and scores, culminating with a striking trio of albums in the early 2000s. Despite his reckless lifestyle and personal demons, Zevon made friends and alliances with talk show host David Letterman and such literary figures as Hunter S. Thompson and Carl Hiaasen. It was only after his death in 2003 that Zevon received Grammy recognition for his work. Throughout this book, Plasketes explores the musical, cinematic, and literary influences that shaped Zevon’s distinctive style and songwriting themes and continue to make Zevon’s work a telling portrait of Los Angeles and American culture.

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

Author: Crystal Zevon

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2009-10-13

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 0061744999

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When Warren Zevon died in 2003, he left behind a rich catalog of dark, witty rock 'n' roll classics, including "Lawyers, Guns and Money," "Excitable Boy," and the immortal "Werewolves of London." He also left behind a fanatical cult following and veritable rock opera of drugs, women, celebrity, genius, and epic bad behavior. As Warren once said, "I got to be Jim Morrison a lot longer than he did." Narrated by his former wife and longtime co-conspirator, Crystal Zevon, this intimate and unusual oral history draws on interviews with Bruce Springsteen, Stephen King, Bonnie Raitt, and numerous others who fell under Warren's mischievous spell. Told in the words and images of the friends, lovers, and legends who knew him best, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead captures Warren Zevon in all his turbulent glory.

Bumping Into Geniuses
Bumping Into Geniuses

Author: Danny Goldberg

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 9781592403707

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A giant of the music industry grants an all-access pass to the world of rock and roll, with mesmerizing stories of thirty-five years spent working with legends from Led Zeppelin, to Stevie Nicks, to Nirvana. Danny Goldberg has been a hugely influential figure in the world of rock and roll. He did PR for Led Zeppelin; he managed the career of Nirvana; he ran Atlantic Records, Mercury Records, and Warner Bros. Records; he launched Stevie Nicks’s solo career. In Bumping into Geniuses, Goldberg shares his stories about performers who represent a broad and powerful portion of the psychic real estate of the rock and roll kingdom: Patti Smith, Warren Zevon, Bruce Springsteen, KISS, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, Hole, Stevie Nicks, Bonnie Raitt, Steve Earle, Led Zeppelin, and more. But there’s more to this story than just Goldberg’s varied career. It’s also a look at the industry itself: a business that was neither the romantic vehicle for self-expression that its most naive fans imagined, nor the purely crass money machine depicted by its most cynical critics. It was complex and chaotic—a mixture of art and commerce, idealism and selfishness—and sometimes, rock’s most gifted and influential musicians were able to transcend it all. For anyone interested in the rock and roll industry, or simply the mores and temperaments of the musicians themselves, Bumping into Geniusesis an incredible insider’s tale that only Goldberg could tell.

Basket Case
Basket Case

Author: Carl Hiaasen

Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

Published: 2002-01-08

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 037541441X

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A rollicking and hilarious novel from the bestselling author of Squeeze Me and “Florida’s most entertainingly indignant social critic” (New York Times Book Review). Jack Tagger’s years in exile at the obituaries desk of a South Florida daily haven’t dulled his investigative reporter’s nose for a good story. When Jimmy Stoma, the infamous front man of Jimmy and the Slut Puppies, dies in a fishy scuba accident, Jack sees his ticket back to page one—if only he can figure out what really happened. Standing in his way are, just for starters, his ambitious young editor, who hasn’t yet fired anyone but plans to “break her cherry” on Jack; the rock star’s pop-singer widow, who’s using the occasion of her husband’s death to relaunch her own career; and the soulless, profit-hungry owner of the newspaper, whom Jack once publicly humiliated at a stockholders’ meeting. Following clues from the late rock singer’s own music, Jack tries to unravel the lies surrounding Jimmy Stoma’s strange fate.

Warren Zevon
Warren Zevon

Author: Peter Gallagher

Publisher: Sonicbond Publishing Ltd

Published: 2022-11-30

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1789522315

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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 Zevon, he ‘would be a happy guy’. The list of artists that lined up to appear on his records include 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 his cast of characters, which include doomed drug dealers, psychopathic adolescents, outlaws of the Old West, BDSM fetishists, ghostly gunslingers and, yes, lycanthropes unleashed on the streets of London. Peter Gallagher is the author of Marc Bolan, Tyrannosaurus Rex, and T. Rex on track for Sonicbond. He is a regular contributor to Shindig! magazine and his fiction has appeared in Writing Magazine and The London Reader. His is also working on 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 sometime before the cows come home. He lives in Glasgow, Scotland.

Take a Sad Song
Take a Sad Song

Author: James Campion

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-06-01

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1493062387

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In Take a Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of "Hey Jude," James Campion dives deeply into the song's origins, recording, visual presentation, impact, and eventual influence, while also discovering what makes "Hey Jude" a classic musical expression of personal comfort and societal unity conceived by a master songwriter, Paul McCartney. Within its melodic brilliance and lyrical touchstones of empathy and nostalgia resides McCartney's personal and professional relationship with his childhood friend and songwriting partner, John Lennon, and their simultaneous pursuit of the women who would complete them. There are also clues to the growing turmoil within the Beatles and their splintering generation scarred by war, assassination, and virulent protest. Campion's journey into the song includes the insights of academic experts and professors in the field of musicology, sociology, philosophy, psychology, and history. Campion also reveals commentary from noted Beatles authors, biographers, music historians, and journalists and, finally, a peek into the craft of songwriting from a host of talented composers across several generations. Take a Sad Song is a tribute to how a song can define, inspire, and affect us in ways we do not always fully comprehend, as well as a celebration of a truly amazing track in the Beatles canon that reveals one band's genius and underscores its lasting voice in our cultural and musical landscape.

Shell Shocked
Shell Shocked

Author: Howard Kaylan

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2013-03-01

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1480342947

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(Book). If Howard Kaylan had sung only one song, the Turtles' 1967 No. 1 smash hit "Happy Together," his place in rock-and-roll history would still be secure. But that recording, named in 1999 by BMI as one of the top 50 songs of the 20th century, with over five million radio plays, is only the tip of a rather eye-opening iceberg. For nearly five decades, Howard Kaylan has been a player in the rock-and-roll revolution. In addition to his years with the Turtles, Kaylan was a core member of Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention and the dynamic duo Flo and Eddie, and part of glam rock history with Marc Bolan and T. Rex. He's also given street cred and harmonies to everyone from John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen and Alice Cooper to the Ramones and Duran Duran, to name just a few. Howard Kaylan's life has been a dangerous ride that he is only too happy to report on, naming names and shedding shocking tales of sex, drugs, and creative excess. Shell Shocked will stand alone as not only one of the best-told music-biz memoirs, but one with a truly candid and unmatchable story of rock-and-roll insanity and success from a man who glories in it all.