Warren Zevon Tribute Participants Tell What Made the Late Rocker Great

It’s Warren Zevon season. That may sound like a funny thing to say, in 2025, or in any year since the legendary rock singer-songwriter died in 2003, given a perennial underdog status that never augured for anything that would be likely to be called a posthumous groundswell, per se. And yet, downtown Los Angeles is about to see two major celebrations of Zevon in less than a month, against all odds. The second will come when he is inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on Nov. 8.

But preceding that this Friday night is the true concentrated dose of Zevon power — a full-on tribute concert involving dozens of singers and dozens more backing musicians taking place at the United Theatre on Broadway. It’s being produced as the annual benefit of the Wild Honey Foundation, which earns plaudits every year for salutes to Buffalo Springfield, the Band, the Beach Boys, the Beatles and so many other classic rock acts that start with a B that it’s a wonder they ever looked to the opposite end of the alphabet. Wild Honey tributes tend to push the three-hour mark, so “Play It All Night Long” may be the operative song of the night — that, or “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead.”

The two key frontpeople of the night may be Jackson Browne and Jorge Calderón, both of whom worked with Zevon from his first album in 1976 and remained close with him until the end — not to mention his son, Jordan Zevon, the night’s most important co-sign. Other participating artists include Dwight Yoakam (who’ll surely be reprising his well-known cover of “Carmelita”), Fountains of Wayne, Shooter Jennings, Marshall Crenshaw, Chris Stills, Steve Wynn and many more. (Veteran L.A. rock writer and Variety contributor Chris Morris will host the evening.)

Jordan Zevon is sitting at a rehearsal studio in North Hollywood after running through his chosen songs for Friday’s show. Asked if this tribute is the kind of event he’s been waiting for to honor his dad for the last 20 years or more, he shakes his head.

“Quite the opposite,” Zevon demurs. In the past, when much smaller-scale salutes took place, “I kind of avoided them and didn’t get too involved,” he says.. “I always wished everybody well. But I knew I’d get really picky about it. Even thinking about it gives me chills,” and not the good kind. “What made this exciting for me was that I knew Wild Honey and I’d been to their shows in the past, so I knew this would be one that would just sound really great. And I knew a lot of the people that would be involved, so it made it much more appetizing for, for me to do.” (It helped that one of the musical directors, Jordan Summers (who plays with artists from the Wildflowers to Cat Powers), was his classmate, bandmate and BFF going back to their days as the only two Jordans then attending University High in West L.A.)

Calderón was Zevon’s most regular collaborator, co-writing songs with him ranging from “Veracruz” and “Nighttime in the Switching Yard” on the earliest albums to finally producing and co-writing the singer-songwriter’s swan song, “The Wind,” released a month before his death.

“Jackson Browne and myself put together three or four tributes at Largo, before the pandemic,” Calderón recounts, “and they were great because it was a smaller scale. But I hadn’t done one in a long time when Jordan Zevon called me to do it, and I said, ‘You know, I, I don’t want to do this. Leave it to the youngsters to do the songs.’ Immediately I got a phone call from Jackson” — and faster than you can say “Mama Could Be Persuaded,” “he talked me into doing it.”

Not everyone stepping up to the mic has a long association. Shooter Jennings would seem to be one of the most qualified acts on the bill: On several occasions in recent years, he has done full-length Zevon tribute shows in different cities, and even released a limited-edition vinyl LP of his Zevon covers. So to hear him admit that he was not super into Zevon until the past decade is somewhat shocking… if a good sign of just how far beyond his death the artist is still picking up wholesale converts who become devoted for life.

Admits Jennings, “I’m a latecomer to the party, compared to some of these dudes who have been swimming in it for 30, 40 years. I knew his music a little — I even used to sing ‘Carmelita’ with buddies at Molly Malone’s back in the early 2000s, and I loved Drive-by Truckers’ cover of ‘Play It All Night Long,’ and I knew him from seeing him on Letterman. But I hadn’t really done a deep dive until a friend of mine made me sit down and listen to the words of ‘Desperados Under the Eaves.’ And then it kind of made me collapse inward with my lack of knowledge of him. But I definitely, take it very seriously now.” Once he got over the shame, starting around 2018 “l started to go crazy over him and then I spent like the next few years pretty much only listening to him and Linda Ronstadt. It became this period of time where I was just loving the Los Angeles of the ’70s and the bands that were recording here at the time.”

Living in L.A. and thinking about its literary traditions was part of the appeal of adopting Zevon as a favorite, Jennings says. “I mean, his perspective is pretty cold and dark, in moments, and you gotta kinda live and learn , I think, to get that, and to have that sense of humor in a weird way,. There was a point in time in which I felt I was the guy in ‘Desperados Under the Eaves,’ you know? Tthere’s a part of me that believes that he’s like if Bukowski was a musician or something, exploring that kind of hard, ugly truth a lot of the time. I like the guy who was in the gutter and, strung out and, made his way back from it and hates everybody for every reason in the world. That’s the stuff that interests me in life. I’m not interested in the pretty picture as much,” he says, extolling the guy who — beyond his hit “Werewolves of London” — has songs like “Ain’t That Pretty at All” and “Life’ll Kill Ya.”

But Jennings points out that his couth side was very much a match for his wildman side, even before he became renowned as one of the first rockers to go public with his detox experiences in the ’80s. “He wrote this brutal stuff, but then he was armed with the piano, and the stuff had a classical bent to it — these neoclassical arrangements mixed with this kind of folk and almost Beatles-meets-country kind of sensibility musically excited me.”

Paul Rock is the chief driving force behind Wild Honey, having set the org up going back to the ’90s as a chance to gather some of L.A.’s best musicians in tribute to the world’s greatest artists, as a fundraiser for causes related to autism, a condition that has touched his family. (See this Variety story for an account of how his son, Jacob, found a way to co-compose music, despite being non-verbal, and had his own Wild Honey show.) This year, there are two beneficiaries of the proceeds: the Ed Asner Family Center, which is for autism families, and the Asbestos Disease Awareness Foundation, the Zevon family’s charity of choice.

Rock says putting together the Zevon show was “two years in the process, but maybe another year before that that we thought about it. The Jackson Browne connection is strong and we knew he was Interested in doing it, so that plays a role when you know you can get somebody that’s that passionate and have someone like that to build the show off. Because the only tricky part of this is that it’s just about the first time where we can’t bring the original artist because he’s not alive. We’ve always tried to have a key member of the band.” (Past Wild Honey shows have seen Richie Furay show up for the Buffalo Springfield show, John Sebastian for the Lovin’ Spoonful, Garth Hudson for the Band, Al Jardine and Brian Wilson for the Beach Boys and Dave Davies for the Kinks.)

“So to supplement that for this show, we tried to get people that were crucial to his career, in his band live or in the studio. Of course Jackson produced his first two early records, which gives us a lot of authenticity in this one, along with Jorge. Then we got all the session guys like Bob Glaub and Rick Marotta. I think that’s what’s selling the show to the hardcore Zevon fan.” (As of this writing, only a handful of seats were left in the balcony of the United, formerly the Theatre at Ace Hotel, and at least dozens of those tickets are being claimed by fans flying in from around the country.)

“I think there’s a real cult of personality there, even with people who are way too young to have heard him originally. It strikes a chord, the guy who just couldn’t stop himself; the myth of the wild man artist, I think. is pretty strong with him, and with young people, more than you’d think.”

But the irony with Zevon, as Rock also points out, is that there are fans who have little interest in the artist as anti-hero and just revere him for the songwriting that has resulted in dozens if not hundreds of covers — starting with the woman who first introduced his name to much of America, Ronstadt.

“Over the year his songs have continued to be covered songs by people that are somewhat contemporary. So when you’re thinking about who’s gonna play, you go through everybody who’s covered the songs, you know, and you find their videos on YouTube and know you could ask them, so there’s still a presence there that’s stronger than most of his time. Plus, I think his appearances on Letterman over the years kept it alive” — including the one in 2003 where he revealed he had terminal cancer, where he uttered his famous “Enjoy every sandwich” maxim. “He was on quite a bit, so there’s a whole generation of people who saw him do that.”

“The thing about Warren being known as a songwriter, all the way back to Linda, that really makes it a real easy one for us. When you have someone whose appeal is built mostly around their style or their stage thing or something that’s very unique to them, as opposed to the songs that have been covered by many people, it’s harder to do a show if people are just sitting there thinking about the qualities of the original artist and what makes them so striking. Warren is obviously a unique personality, but the songs are very universal.”

Except, of course, for when they’re incredibly peculiar. On this particular rehearsal day, Inara George, of the Bird and the Bee, and Eleni Mandell, who sometimes joins George in their side project the Living Sisters, are rehearsing a duet of a song that is about as distinctive as it gets: “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” which starts off as a heavily detailed foreign mercenary story and ends somewhere in the land of Ichabod Crane.

“It’s a march,” says George. “It’s a jig,” counters Mandell. “It’s a marching jig,” they collectively decide. With an almost nursery rhyme-like quality, amid the bloodshed. “I actually am really excited about this one,” George said, “because my husband Jake got my kids into Warren Zevon when they were really little and they could sing every word of this song.” (Allegedly, even “Through sixty-six and seven they fought the Congo war / With their fingers on their triggers, knee-deep in gore / For days and nights they battled the Bantu to their knees / They killed to earn their living and to help out the Congolese.” And: “The CIA decided they wanted Roland dead / That son-of-a-bitch Van Owen blew off Roland’s head.”)

There was a machismo to some of Zevon’s work, clearly, but George finds a different message in “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.” “I was listening to it coming over here, and I feel like [the theme is] violence begets violence. It’s not gonna work out, killing people.”

That attention to period detail or geographical specificity very much applied to “Veracruz,” one of the seminal co-writes between Calderón and Zevon, toward the beginning of their three-decade alliance.

“Back then in ’78 when he was doing the ‘Excitable Boy’ album, he had started writing the song, and he told me it’s about when Woodrow Wilson sent troops to the port of Veracruz in 1914. He had the first part of the song, but said, ‘I need something because I’m stuck.’ And that was the first one we actually wrote and got recorded. I heard what he had and I came up withthat music and lyrics for the Hispanic part, and that’s how our collaboration started. That song is about the imperialistic government of the U.S. They’re just going somewhere to invade something, and nothing has changed. You know, it’s the same thing. The only thing is that now they send the troops to our cities to mess with us.”

He says “Veracruz” is “an anti-war song war, but it has a lot of heart in it because there’s a family in a horrible situation and they have to leave. After I wrote the Spanish part, Warren says, ‘Man, now the song has heart.’ Because the other part of the song is the description of the people, but now the people are. speaking. And so it was a wonderful song and he loved it till the end of his life.”

Calderón was critical in the final part of Zevon’s musical journey. “I really, really thought that we were meant to have been together in this lifetime, to meet and, and collaborate. Sometimes I would go there and be with him andend up playing bass or guitar, or I’d clap my hands or sing Harmony, or write a song. You’d see some albums that I just did a few things, and some other albums I’d do more. The only one that I didn’t do anything was ‘Transverse City,’ because he called me up to come work but I had chickenpox!

“When we did ‘The Wind,’ it was such a ominous thing. He was dying,” says Calderon. “We were already planning to write the songs fast and do something fast, but between that and starting to work on it, he found out about the cancer. At first I said, ‘Maybe you should just forget the record and go be with your family, get treatment.’ He said, ‘No, I wanna do the record.’ So we did it the same way we had talked about, but with this cloud of a different reality. Nobody knew. The doctors had said, ‘Oh, three months, six months’ — he lasted a year, but we didn’t know that. And the creative energy and process that he was going through and the joy of the songs that we were writing kept him alive longer. And he knew it and the people around us knew it. So that was a beautiful thing. It’s a wonderful album, very honest and sincere. It was done fast, so it’s not perfect. But rock ”n’ roll is not perfect. Rock ‘n’ roll is rock ‘n’ roll.”

The song that has come closest to becoming a standard from the final album is “Keep Me in Your Heart.” Calderón says, “That was another one that he started from the beginning, but then it became too hard for him to write — too sorrowful. He told me, ‘It’s too painful. Dude, you gotta finish this song. You are gonna have to help me, because I cannot do it.’ I don’t know how I did it, but I did, and at the end, we were both glad that the song got written, because it’s a beautiful song, touching song. What can I say? That album was a special thing, and it was the culmination and the catharsis of knowing each other.”

His son, Jordan, has had a great deal of time to consider his father’s dual (at least) legacies as a wild man before rehab, and a musical scholar before and after finding his sobriety and his footing.

“He was a brilliant songwriter, and I don’t think that that’s something that I say just because he is my dad,” Jordan says. In fact, he adds, “it might have taken me longer than some people to get old enough to realize. He really put work into it and tried to create deep, meaningful indelible songs. And he certainly never lost that when he also was being seen as a rock star and, at times, people said, a wild man on stage. A lot of people in his position might have let persona take over when the audience is sort of latching onto that image. But when you go into it with classical training and you put in this kind of deep work, you can kind of let the other stuff get to the bare edge and the talent is still there. I think he would be the first person to say that none of that stuff helped him be what he was in the ’70s. It certainly wasn’t his favorite time of his life, but he got through it.

“I think that there’s a lot of timelessness to the music. If you look at some of the brilliant songwriters, the Beatles or Elton John and Bernie Taupin, there’s that same craftsmanship to it. You know, we’ve all gone through a couple of apartments worth of IKEA furniture, and eventually we end up with the antique dresser that still looks as beautiful as the day it was made.”