#2084 Warren Zevon - Warron Zevon

What's my deal with LA?

I lived just south of that shithole for thirty years and in retrospect I fucking hated it. Hated driving through it, hated driving to it, the megamall castle, the fakeass casino, the billboards for shoes, gallons of effort poured into an cracked, ungrateful piece of earth devoid of humanity.

And every time I fly in to visit those who stayed behind I marvel, I shrivel and shrink and die at the

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it is a place that goes on forever to nowhere.


and yet, something about it draws me in, from Mulholland Drive to Chinatown to LA Confidential, I can't resist something about it. The way that it lies as a desert, that its emptiness is big enough for us all, it draws me in.

from culver city's hidden treasures, to echo park's flashes, to silverlake's oasis, out to the outer outer reaches: into palm springs' escape, to orange county's bubblefuck microrefuges, to the grapevine's bleed into the central tiles, to santa barbara's flicker of escape into endless winding eternity.

and anything that catches one ray of that reflected light sometimes draws me in, as long as it's cast from a true place.

and Zevon catches that. he is not of Los Angeles, he sits at its outskirts, he wears out his hangover in its beerlight, he hunches at the cusp of the desert that's not there anymore, creeping along some edge into the tamed frontier. But he is not outside. Zevon has been in and through, he's the Eagles if they'd actually lived a fucking day, Phosphorescent's spirit guide, Nick Lowe without the energy to stay so fucking arch, just casting out a last breath frustration and awakening grateful.

All-time great moment in rock:

Zevon talks about "a girl at the rainbow bar; she asked me if I'd beat her / she took me back to the hyatt house - - - I don't want to talk about it"

"hyut! nevermind" he barks.

and you believe that he doesn't want to talk about it, but that he's haunted enough that he couldn't quite keep it out of his songs forever. and it does not sound like a move to move records. it does not at all. it is sincere as shit and its fucking bracing.

you get the idea that Zevon has come out of the den of insincerity with his soul intact. his tale's emphatically worth hearing, he says with his last breath of sincerity 4.5/5