The title, as any Zevon-ite will tell you, derives from Warren’s last public appearance on his friend David Letterman’s Late Show, shortly after he was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer in the late summer of 2002.
“From your perspective now, do you know something about life and death that maybe I don’t know?” Dave asked.
“Not unless I know how much you’re supposed to enjoy every sandwich,” Zevon replied.
Like all commemoration services, this one has attracted a motley lot. The songwriter’s oldest friends – Don Henley, Ry Cooder, David Lindley and Jackson Browne – occasionally seem hamstrung by too much respect for the material, although Bob Dylan does essay a decent ‘Mutineer’, and you can hear Bruce Springsteen’s mouth water as he gets his chops around the East Texas testament of ‘My Ride’s Here’. Better again, Steve Earle rolls up his sleeves and gets stuck into the bittersweet beauty ‘Reconsider Me’ like a man who knows all about the intervention process, while Billy Bob Thornton’s basso profundo locates indigenous southern ghosts in ‘The Wind’.
But it’s the sons rather than the fathers that really impress. Jakob Dylan’s band The Wallflowers blare through a rip-roaring ‘Lawyers, Guns And Money’ with the perfect balance of dis and respect for the source. The Pixies’ assault on ‘Ain’t That Pretty At All’ translates LA radio rock into garage bluster while holding to the drunken, misanthropic temper tantrum of the lyric. Pete Yorn is more cautious, but still makes a decent fist of Zevon’s most under-trumpeted piece of writing, the head-on-the-table study in solipsism that is ‘Splendid Isolation’, while Jordan Zevon delivers a tender version of his old man’s paean to an ill-fated ‘Studebaker’ (“It made a sound that cracked my heart in half/And with only half a half pint of vodka left . . .”). And driving home the point that WZ did some of his best writing in the last five years of his life, Jilly Sobule contributes a gorgeously fragile reading of the plea-bargain-with-God that is ‘Don’t Let Us Get Sick’:
“Don’t let us get old/Don’t let us get stoopid, alright?/Just make us be brave/And make us play nice/And let us be together tonight.”
Amen.