Warren Zevon: The Wind : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The song that feels most like death on what is probably Warren Zevon's last album is "Prison Grove," a moaning phantom that sounds like a cross between Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground)" and a Russian folk dirge. Between Ry Cooder's chilling slide guitar and the chanted chorus (Jackson Browne, Billy Bob Thornton, Bruce Springsteen, T-Bone Burnett, Jordan Zevon), the listener has no choice but to contemplate the end and only the end. Zevon sees it here as an execution, an inmate of life being led from the dismal known to the terrifying unknown.

Death has always fascinated Zevon, of course, as it has many musicians. Few, though, have had a chance to write about it with full knowledge of its imminent arrival. Even for Zevon, who has terminal lung cancer, intimations of mortality have usually been an undertone inspiring some character's reaction to a chaotic situation or risky career choices ("Lawyers, Guns and Money"). In somebody else's defiance of death, we in the audience get an intense affirmation of life, not to mention some of the best jokes in rock & roll history. And that's the tradition that informs most of this album. Zevon wants to look back and see what it all adds up to ("Dirty Life and Times"), wants to set things right with the friends and fans who have loved him ("Numb as a Statue"), wants to bestow a last gift of his wit and enthusiasm ("The Rest of the Night"), hopes that people remember him fondly ("Keep Me in Your Heart"). But he's also too honest an artist not to look forward into the void. Humor and talent can get you out of a lot of jams, but not this one. Hence "Prison Grove." Zevon's a lucky man in the sense that brilliant songwriters are granted a form of immortality denied everyone else. People continue to sing their songs long after they're gone. The Wind reminds the rest of us that we're going to be gone someday, too, and it leaves a heroic lesson in how to face the truth.