Back in the early days of his career, when he was writing songs as tough-minded and blustery as "Excitable Boy," "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" and "Lawyers, Guns and Money" and living out some of his characters' misadventures in a recurring stare of alcoholic dementia, Warren Zevon had little heart for the trials of record making. It was his practice to fall into the recording studio, usually with friends and coproducers Jackson Browne and guitarist Waddy Wachtel, pound out his razor-witted vignettes and then fall back out -- in effect, surrendering his work to his friends.

"I just wanted to run away." Zevon tells me one night over dinner at the Hollywood canyon home he shares with his girlfriend, actress Kim Lankford. "I was telling telling myself I was doing it like Dylan -- you know: walk in, knock it off and walk out -- when actually it was my laziness and lack of ability that prevented me from doing the work of concentration."

That approach did make for a fairly imperative-sounding, reckless-spirited brand of rock & roll, but it also left Zevon wondering whether his best songs were evidence of a real and self-determined artistry or merely the product of an alcohol-immersed sensibility. Not even the album about his cure, the sadly underrated Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School (1980), or his live LP, Stand in the Fire (1981), could fully settle Zevon's self-doubt. Both were fit and fierce ways of celebrating his new sober life, but neither offered many clues about what was to take the place of old inspirations.

As it turns out, inspiration isn't what retrieved Zevon's artistry; instead, it was simple indomitability. His new album, The Envoy -- his most stylistically ambitious and varied effort to date, and, at more than a year in the making, easily his most painstaking LP -- stands us a testament to the business of long, arduous work. It is also the record that, in Zevon's estimation, determines the measure of his own worth as a songwriter -- the one that tells him whether he can really pull off art, as well as life, straight.

"I used to feel it was cheating to work at writing a song -- that songs should just flow fluidly or spring from a bolt-shot of inspiration," he says. It's just past midnight, and Kim has gone off to bed. Zevon looks as tired as his voice sounds, but he insists these are his best hours for talking.

"But now," he continues, "when I'm working consciously on a song, I know what real work is. In a way that makes the process more frustrating, but it also makes it more exciting. I get these vague but real intense feelings about things I could write that are just a little beyond my grasp, so I have to work harder to reach them. That's real exhilarating. I don't think I ever felt that way in the old days."

Zevon pauses as if in midthought, a furrowed look cut into his face. "It just occurred to me," he says after a couple of moments, "that the dogged way I've worked at making this record sort of reinforces what the record's about. What I mean is, if there's a pervading idea that routes from The Envoy, it's the idea of problem solving, of sorting out your choices and applying a bit more control to how you make them."

He hesitates again, then shifts forward a bit in his seat. "I realize it's an old subject, but it's constantly pertinent to me my quitting drinking. It's been four years now, and they told me that when I stopped, I'd look back at whatever point it had started, which, for me, was at fourteen. Even then, in the midst of all that drinking, I knew it was my choice to make, and that I'd have to exercise a lot of self-control if I ever wanted to make it.

"Control like that -- self-control -- is what it's all about for me. That's what I like about the character of The Envoy in the title song: he's just this kind of workmanlike, self-disciplined version of a James Bond-style agent. I like him because he has a will, because he's a problem-solving kind of guy, and because I need his kind of control." Zevon takes a swallow of cola, then smiles faintly. "I think of The Envoy as Excitable Boy Grows Up."

Maybe a better way of describing The Envoy is as a rock & roll equivalent to The Human Factor -- Graham Greene's novel about love as the greatest risk, and highest cost, of a life lived for intrigue. From the twin-burst opening salvo of the title track (a bemused vision of espionage and global dissolution) and "The Overdraft" (a raveup about statutory rape, cowritten with novelist Thomas McGuane), to the haunting, black-humored musings of "Jesus Mentioned" and the mellifluent, infectious bounce of "Let Nothing Come Between You," The Envoy is an unsentimental but affecting work about the durability of the human heart -- how heart and will survive in the face of insurmountable circumstances.

But The Envoy is also, in places, deeply disquieting. There's not much likelihood of forgetting a song like "Charlie's Medicine," with its fateful recountal of bad choices and bad ends. "Charlie dealt in pharmaceuticals," Zevon sings at the beginning of the song in a matter-of-fact voice. "Charlie used to sell me pills/Yesterday his sister called to tell me/He'd been killed." Following a blazing, whiplash guitar solo from Waddy Wachtel, Zevon mounts a taut, leaping synthesizer phrase and breaks into the song's vaguely conscious-striken chorus: "Charlie had to take his medicine/Charlie got his prescription filled/I came to say goodbye/I'm sorry Charlie died/I came to finish paying my bill . . . ."

I tell Zevon that the song reminded me of all the times that, after acquaintances or friends of mine had died, I'd managed to draw some comfort from knowing that death had come shakingly close and yet passed me by -- as if those deaths had somehow been lessons for my benefit.

Zevon pulls slowly on a cigarette, then settles back into his chair. "To be perfectly frank," he says, "'Charlie's Medicine' is like a confession, in the sense of confessing in order to be exonerated. But it takes away from whatever value the song may have to be too explicit about it, because then it's really not a song anymore.

"I remember that after John Belushi died, I went back to the article that Paul Nelson had written about my alcoholism [RS 339] and reread the part about how I'd had a big crisis one night after coming across a picture of myself with Jackson Browne and John Belushi. At the time the picture was taken, I looked like some obscene drunk, and they both looked dry-skinned and serious. And I cried, because I thought, 'Look at these creative guys -- why, Lord, why did I end up this way?'

"Then after John died, I related how close I'd probably come myself; and you're right: that is comforting. It makes you know you're still alive, after all. But it's also sort of a heavy thing to catch yourself thinking.

"That matter of death also has a lot to do with why I write about violence so much, and for that matter, why I like detective and espionage stories," he continues. "A story or account of violence, like 'Excitable Boy,' for example, is a way of getting close to the subject of death without feeling helpless against it."

That reminds me of a review in which Greil Marcus said that Zevon writes about "werewolves and mad killers" because that's what he thinks be could turn into. Maybe another stay of putting it is that he writes about killers and werewolves so he won't turn into one.

"If there's some kind of exorcism I'm acting out by writing about violent characters, is really isn't something I'm conscious of," Zevon says. "But I think what Marcus was accurate about was in saying chat a lot of my work is about fear. I think about fear a lot and how I can deal with it, and I think writing songs is one way of working fear out."

Zevon gets up and moves over to the living room bookcase. After a few moments, he comes back bearing a copy of Robert Stone's A Flag for Sunrise. "Let me read you something from this that struck me," he says, thumbing through the book's early pages. "There's this character, he's kind of the stereotypical drunken priest administering to a South American military dictatorship, and he's writing some kind of ecumenical book that he's been working on for twenty years. Here's what Stone says about him: 'He had rewritten the work six times and had reached the point where he could no longer endure it without alcohol. Yet without the work, he had found, life itself was not endurable.'"

Zevon shuts the book and leans back into the sofa, looking rueful. "I can certainly relate to that," he says. "This work is unbearable to me a lot of the time. I don't know if the only courage I need isn't just in that: the bearing of the work itself. I have to believe that the creative process is a perfectly natural function -- that I can bear it without being fucked up.

"I should tell you," Zevon adds after a bit, "that there's one song from The Envoy that I haven't yet played for you. For one thing, I felt it wasn't quite finished, but I also felt it was an incredibly sappy song, just full of difficult, purple sentiments. But if you like, I'll play it for you now."

We move to the far end of the lining room, a sort of haphazard home-recording studio, congested with amps, keyboards, turntables and tape decks. Zevon inserts a cassette into his Nakamichi, then turns the volume low, so the music won't disturb Kim's sleep. Together we lean in toward the miniature speakers propped up against the wall, and a simple, stately piano progression ushers in the song:

"You can't find him/The way is dim/You feel like giving up/You ache for her/Rest assured It's never too late for love . . . ." Later in the song, in an unusually light, graceful voice, over a rhapsodic piano line, Zevon sings maybe the bravest lyric of his career, if for no other season than because it's the first one he's even aimed solely at himself: "'You could try to let the past slip away/Live for today/Don't stop believing in tomorrow."

After the song's finished, Zevon looks at me a little reticently, as if reluctant so ask what I think. I tell him I didn't find the song sappy at all: instead it seemed strong but compassionate, and maybe a little more self-knowing than some of his earlier love songs.

He smiles a shy smile. "I'd always hoped that when I came to write a song like this, it could carry a little bit of muscle, since I'd never attempted it when it wasn't my experience. Then lately, I came to realize how resistant I'd always been to the kind of courage is takes to love someone, how before, I'd always sought being loved more than giving it. Now I think I've earned a little of the strength that comes from knowing that by loving someone, you can't lose. I am in love -- I've been happy for years and grateful for it, and it's time I said that."

Coming from a man who helped make fearful notions and hardboiled sentiments a part of rock & roll's thematic terrain, that last statement may come off sounding blithe, even a bit incongruous. But in the context of Zevon's work -- not to mention life -- it might also be read as a statement of consummate courage: come clean, dump the werewolves and killers and face the ever-present dread that created them in the first place. It's a vision of love as a way of defying the panic fear of life, but also as a way of making the madness a little more bearable.

"I imagine that this kind of love song," says Zevon, "probably has none of the qualities that some people find intriguing about my writing -- none of that 'Lawyers, Guns and Money' or 'Excitable Boy' kind of imagery. As the same time, when I was writing that stuff, I always felt like I had so act them out -- that it wasn't fair of me unless I tested them on my liver. Now, it's more like I should test the new songs on my heart, which is probably riskier than the drinking.

"But as far as I can see, it's the only risk in town."

(RS 378, September 16, 1982)