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Review of I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
by Steve Roeser
Discoveries Magazine, Jan. 1997
reprinted with permission of the author

          I dunno about you, but I'm pretty sure my life would've been just a little bit more humdrum if Warren Zevon had never embarked upon a recording career. I'm not sure I've ever completely gotten over the side effects caused by repeated listenings to Zevon's Excitable Boy album back in 1978. (Anybody, like me, who had to play that record over and over again was probably somewhat damaged to begin with, but it just sounded so damn good.) But be that as it may, Warren Zevon-- an incurable remantic if there ever was one-- never threw in the towel, so why should I?
          So, here we are 20 years after his offical solo debut in 1976, and Rhino has put together the definitive Zevon package. He had actually recorded an album in 1970 for Imperial (One Way Records is reissuing it) that billed him as simply "Zevon," but the double CD Rhino release begins with his self-titled Asylum debut, produced by Jackson Browne, as was his break-through LP, Excitable Boy, which featured his signature tune, "Werewolves Of London." Zevon's protestations to the contrary, Linda Ronstadt's version of "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me" can't hold a candle to his own demented performance of the tune, and Hank Williams, Jr. may have felt he was born to cover Warren's classic "Lawyers, Guns And Money," but he'd be better off re-writing that "Monday Night Football" theme song one more time. Many have tried, but nobody yet has done a Warren Zevon song better than the man himself.
          With six tracks each from the two Browne-produced albums, three from the possibly overly-arch (for its day, 1980) Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School, and a pair of tracks from his live album recorded at the Roxy in L.A., disc one ends with four selections from what is perhaps his most overlooked LP, The Envoy. Consider what remarkably well-crafted songs "The Hula Hula Boys" and "Let Nothing Come Between You" both are. Yeah, but who cared? By then it was 1982 and Prince was becoming all the rage. But was Warren Zevon too precious to cut a Prince tune? No way. You'll find "Raspberry Beret" among the many highlights on disc two that takes us through the grim '80s and up to the present in the life of this most adventurous songwriter and musician.
          Disc two opens with four tracks from his excellent 1987 Virgin outing, Sentimental Hygiene, a superior effort that was just as great for its time as E-Boy was for the era of "Saturday Night Fever." The fact that the members of R.E.M. worked with him on that and the Hindu Love Gods record done at the same time, means about as much as Neil Young playing with Pearl Jam. Zevon has proved himself capable of making a great record no matter who is playing with him. (That's Young, by the way, with the very Neil-like guitar solo on the title track from Sentimental Hygiene and Chick Corea playing piano on "The Long Arm Of The Law," one of the inclusions from the Transverse City record.)
          All in all, with 44 songs evenly divided between the two CDs, the second disc is almost as great as the first, with numerous high points among this 2 1/2 hours of music. Just mentioning "Splendid Isolation" and "The Indifference Of Heaven" is not enough to do justice to Zevon's more recent output. Small quibbles? Finding his version of "She Quit Me" (even if it was a demo), the Zevon tune that was sung by a female artist for the "Midnight Cowboy" soundtrack album in '69, would have been very cool. And maybe "Jeannie Needs A Shooter" (a co-writing credit to Bruce Springsteen, but not one of Warren's best songs) could've been left off in favor of the live versions of both "Werewolves" and "Pitiful Me" (the ones on Stand In The Fire). It's not overkill to have the studio and live versions of the same songs in the same collection, when they are as important to the artist's career as those were. And the inspired lunacy of those live performances really defined who Zevon was back then.
          But Zevon himself was intimately involved in the preparation of this release, which far exceeds the only other "Best Of" that's ever been offered of his work, A Quiet Normal Life. That basically only covered the years 1976-82. This new anthology eclipses that single disc compilation by a long shot, with Zevon providing song-by-song commentary in the booklet, which also features great photos as well as song lyrics. A fine overview of the work of a very deserving artist, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead is testament that Warren Zevon was burning the midnight oil and giving his best, even in the worst of times.