'The soul of LA': 20 years after his death, the stars are aligning for Warren Zevon
LOS ANGELES — 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/
