Alterman on Zevon and Cash

A fine tribute article in The Nation.

Warren Zevon fought cancer, and he won. Well, the cancer won too, but not before Warren taught the rest of us a lesson in death with dignity. After he got the bad news, Zevon thanked his friends, hugged his family and created--working in fits and starts as his health would allow--his finest record since his self-titled major-label debut back in 1976. This self-educated son of a Mormon mother and Russian-Jewish gangster father was perhaps the most casually literate lyricist in rock this side of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. How many writers, of any kind, can find inspiration simultaneously in the work of Rilke, Stravinsky, Philip Habib and Boom Boom Mancini?

Zevon's passing, Ry Cooder observed, was "unbelievably sad and unbelievably brave." Brave because Zevon kind of got to attend his own funeral--Huck Finn style. Letterman devoted a whole program to him; Springsteen chartered a jet to appear on the album; Dylan played three of his songs in one show. Sad, because Zevon was too sick to make it to the end of the Dylan show. And because the guy who wrote "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead"--a party animal's paean to imagined immortality--went to bed too early, for once, decades after he had beaten back his various demons and addictions.