Excitable Boys

In I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon, an oral biography edited by his ex-wife Crystal, the facts and legends intersect with those of many other lives, including Chet Atkins at the Exit/In. Deliciously exhaustive as the book is, you wish Zevon’s process weren’t scanted, and that there were more pages devoted to the formation of his songwriting’s verbal genius and how it has sustained itself as a growing, if still largely underground, influence. “He raped and killed her / Then he took her home,” he wrote in a single line of “Excitable Boy,” satirizing the horror genre, conventional dating mores and male sexuality, including his own. The last is particularly important, as during his later 18-year period of semi-sobriety, Zevon transferred his death-defying consumption of alcohol to sex. Addictions provided him with a means of avoiding love, and yet love’s lack, beginning in his insufficiently parented childhood, and his rage against it, produced some of our era’s best songs. Many aren’t even recognized as Zevon’s, like “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” and “Hasten Down the Wind,” which Linda Ronstadt made famous.

Zevon’s lifelong sense of darkness, plus his incomparable musicianship, transformed a diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer into The Wind, arguably his masterpiece. Ry Cooder, Bruce Springsteen, Emmylou Harris, Jackson Browne and Billy Bob Thornton are among Zevon’s co-players and/or -writers here, we’re told in I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead’s foreword, composed by one of the literary friends Zevon cherished, Carl Hiaasen.

Largely an autodidact, Zevon–whose first music lessons were from Stravinsky—possessed a spookily high IQ and loved quoting Schopenhauer. He wanted to be known as a writer, not just a songwriter, thus he was more than elated when Tom McGuane, Hunter Thompson and recently appointed New Yorker poetry critic Paul Muldoon became longtime fans, friends and even co-writers. (Tennessee Congressman Steve Cohen was also an admirer and a pal.). At the very end of his life, when Zevon tumbled off the wagon, he nonetheless remarked with typically sharp-minded drollery that his death from terminal cancer might make him—finally—“really famous.” Zevon’s unforgettable appearance on a David Letterman show devoted entirely to him accomplished that, and I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead continues to spread the word. The book induces us to see past the alcohol, OCD, sexual insanity and just plain looniness—for a long while he would only wear gray, seizing upon Calvin Klein T-shirts as particularly lucky and buying dozens—in Zevon’s life. We’re irresistibly lured back to the funny, mordant, powerful, brilliant, informed, scary and ultimately wise music.

Wonderful TonightPattie Boyd, Random House, $25.95, 336 pp.

Pattie Boyd [Harrison Clapton]’s own memoir, Wonderful Tonight, appeared a few months before Clapton, and don’t assume that her book is dismissible as an aging groupie’s remembrances. Boyd, while married to George Harrison, became Eric Clapton’s obsession; then after divorce, she became his wife, then his ex-wife. Boyd inspired the classic “Layla” when she initially sent the besotted Clapton away with the reminder that George was his best friend. Clapton’s petulant and self-destructive rejoinder was that she’d left him no choice but to become a heroin adddict. Boyd stuck it out at home until her husband’s own intoxicant use and compulsive womanizing made her seek out Clapton again—“I tried to give you consolation / When your old man let you down.” Boyd was let down for most of her life: an awful childhood jolted her from her beloved early home in Kenya to cold dreary England, where she had too many uncaring paternal figures and too little motherly attention, in addition to doing time as a quasi-orphan. If Clapton was deliberately led to believe that his mother was his sister, he at least had the advantage of a stable upbringing by his doting grandparents.

The Boyd-Clapton union broke up, perhaps inevitably, perhaps because of Clapton’s infidelity—which included fathering Conor, the child who later died tragically in a fall—and his lingering sense of guilt over betraying his best friend, and perhaps because he stopped using heroin only to take up drinking voluminous amounts of brandy, vodka and beer. Yet while Clapton’s music served as the outlet for some of his demons, Boyd could only create a role as his muse, always wanting to look—and be—“wonderful tonight.” The role usually snuffs out a woman’s individuality, not to mention any creative urge she might have. Boyd, defying the odds and the tradition, has produced a distinguished body of work as a photographer, and two exhibitions gave her the courage to write this candid, ultimately sweet-hearted memoir.