Despite his disappointment on the road, he managed to turn his career troubles into sardonic comedy playing an exaggeratedly aggrieved version of himself on The Larry Sanders Show, Dream On, and Suddenly Susan. #Warren zevon last album seriesHe grumbled constantly about his lot, finding himself at 50 in worse shape professionally than he’d been at 25.Īnd yet, he was arguably more visible than ever, thanks to a series of television appearances. The venues were growing smaller and smaller, the crowds older and older, Zevon more and more bitter. Zevon was unceremoniously dropped by his label, Giant Records, and for the first time in his career, he had to tour constantly just to stay afloat. Those two releases reveal an idiosyncratic artist who loved a wicked turn of phrase and wrote about military juntas and broken hearts with the same gravity, but during the second half of the Clinton Administration, no one seemed to care. And who else was writing about decapitated mercenaries and tireless diplomats in songs set in what Joan Didion once called “the far frontiers of the Monroe Doctrine”? In 1995 he released what he considered to be his best album, Mutineer, and followed it up the next year with a career retrospective called I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, both of which argued persuasively for his status as a singularly literary songwriter who hid a tender heart behind a sardonic front. Like many of his singer-songwriter peers, he’d been enduring low sales and diminishing interest as his old fans aged and his new fans remained largely nonexistent. Warren Zevon spent the late 1990s in a very strange purgatory.
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