'The soul of L.A.' 20 years after his death the stars are aligning for

Shooter Jennings knew “Carmelita. ” He knew “Lawyers, Guns and Money. ” And of course he knew “Werewolves of London, ” Warren Zevon’s 1978 rock hit about a “hairy-handed gent” on the prowl for “a big dish of beef chow mein. ”“It’s kind of the low-hanging fruit” of Zevon’s catalog, Jennings says of “Werewolves, ” which after scraping the top 20 of Billboard’s Hot 100 went on to reach new audiences in the late 2000s when Kid Rock borrowed its strutting groove for his song “All Summer Long. ”But until three or four years ago, Jennings — the Los Angeles-based musician and Grammy-winning producer whose father is the late outlaw-country pioneer Waylon Jennings — had never dug deeply into Zevon’s work. That’s when a friend pushed him to check out “Desperados Under the Eaves, ” the gut punch of a closer from Zevon’s self-titled 1976 LP in which the booze-soaked narrator contemplates his sorry situation from an air-conditioned room at the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel.“So I listened to it, ” Jennings says. “Then I listened to it 3, 000 more times. ”What he heard in Zevon’s heart-rending yet bleakly hilarious lyrics — “And if California slides into the ocean/ Like the mystics and statistics say it will/ I predict this motel will be standing until I pay my bill” — was “the most blatantly honest songwriting I’d ever encountered, ” Jennings says. “He’s owning up to a failure of emotional adulthood in that song, like he’s f— his life up and he’s putting it on parade. ”“Mind-blown, ” as he puts it, by the discovery, Jennings, 43, spent the next couple of years absorbing everything Zevon recorded over an idiosyncratic career that made him a cult-fave avatar of L. A. ’s dark side and a musician’s musician beloved by ’70s superstars like the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac and Linda Ronstadt. Now Jennings is set to show off his studies Friday night in a concert tribute to Zevon at the Roxy in West Hollywood with a band he’s calling the Werewolves of Los Angeles.“Hunter S. Thompson used to say that he’d retype Hemingway novels as a way of getting inside the art, ” Jennings says, referring to the influential gonzo journalist who was a close friend and collaborator of Zevon’s. “That’s what it was like to learn these songs. ”Twenty years after Zevon’s death from cancer at age 56, the Roxy gig is just one manifestation of a surge of interest in his wise and witty songs about love, sex, addiction, murder, history and geopolitics. Andrew Slater, the veteran record producer and music manager who produced several of Zevon’s late-’80s LPs, is at work on a film project about Zevon with the cooperation of the late singer’s family. Last month, the War on Drugs covered Zevon’s “Play It All Night Long” at a show in Philadelphia with help from Craig Finn of the Hold Steady.


All data is taken from the source: http://latimes.com
Article Link: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2023-01-31/warren-zevon-rock-hall-of-fame-shooter-jennings


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