I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon

by Crystal Zevon

HarperCollins, HK$130

Rock'n'roll is learning to express itself as old age encroaches. Perhaps the arrival of its sixth decade encouraged the rickety beast to challenge itself in new forms. It may be a means of atoning for old sins, or bragging of them. The rest of us slide from clarity to senility. Rock'n'roll, the supremely indulged id of the baby boomers, believes it can defy its dotage by untangling its addled youth into a lucid narrative that need not end.

It lay on the couch early this decade and allowed us to psychoanalyse as history was regurgitated in a run of startling documentaries. The reticent, the dumb, the drugged freaks all let us inside their heads. We saw the Dandy Warhols' calculated cool, the Ramones' screwy conservatism. We wondered if our album collections held any truth when a band as spineless as Metallica could fool us with a tough image.

A good book seemed beyond rock stars. The best we could hope for were tales of cartoonish excess such as Motley Crue's The Dirt or that seasoned journalists could move in close enough to bands to produce the likes of Greg Kot's Wilco: Learning How to Die or Neil McCormick's Killing Bono. In this sense, Bob Dylan's Chronicles could break as much ground as his music. His first memoir deserves to be celebrated just for making more sense than his lyrics. Five years on, it endures for melding the rock'n'roll freak show with some sense of the ideas behind the music.

Not many rock stars are comfortable with ideas. Even fewer of those who find them are lucky enough to turn a trade. Which is why I'll Sleep When I'm Dead and Thirteen Tonne Theory are compelling. The books are by or about rock stars who are somehow less than famous and far from rich. Both made music full of all the required pop hooks, as well as legitimate musical ability, imagination and poetry. But after mismanaging or missing out on opportunities they watched peers win the lottery of recognition.

Zevon (right), in particular, is a widely known name whose Werewolves of London is the kind of staple we think keeps a songwriter's bathtub full of champagne for the rest of his days. Yet shortly before he died of lung cancer in 2003, Zevon was broke and looking back on almost 40 years in the music business when he told Hunter S. Thompson 'my career is about as promising as a civil war leg wound'.

His ex-wife, Crystal Zevon, has compiled the book as a chronology of direct quotations from those who knew the singer-songwriter. The observations of Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bob Thornton, Stephen King and Jackson Browne, among scores of others, often contradict each other, revealing the contributors' blind spots as they try to speak positively about the self-absorbed, often violent Zevon. Left on the cusp of mega-fame for most of the 1970s, Zevon knew the stars, attended the great parties and had hugely influential fans in the music, film and publishing worlds. He enjoyed amazing excess in drugs and sex. Sleeping with a woman, he told one lover, was as necessary as taking a crap each day.

Overcoming his drug and alcohol habits left him a wreck and revealed an addiction to sex and an obsessive compulsive disorder.

Before he died, aged 56, Zevon was reconciled with a number of his mistreated lovers and children. He also found a consistency in his musical output for the first time but knew that death in middle age would hurt his chances in the pop pantheon. 'I'm too old to die young and too young to die now,' he said.

Zevon left instructions for his son to dispose of his pornography collection after he died. Instead of a shelf of Debbie Does... skin flicks, Jordan Zevon found a collection of videos of his father having sex.

Crystal Zevon's eye-bulging biography may outlive her ex-husband's music and become 22nd-century source material for social historians looking back on the US empire.

Mark Seymour's band, Hunters and Collectors, had a Zevonesque standing in Australia during the 1980s and 1990s. They were a literate outfit who pursued commercial success with integrity. Hunters and Collectors were left behind when INXS, Crowded House - whose bass player is Seymour's brother Nick - Midnight Oil, Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue found international niches. Seymour (left)writes of trying everything from art rock to over-polished production. His large band operated as a communist cell, splitting all cash and songwriting credits until resentment tore them apart. The egalitarianism that helped the band survive for 18 years also made them inflexible and naive at crucial moments.

If I'll Sleep When I'm Dead shows the risks of excess and of losing focus and control of ego, Thirteen Tonne Theory is a warning about the dangers of becoming too earnest and the grind of touring. Seymour seems to have neglected to keep a diary during his days with the band and his memories often lack the detail needed to pull off a writing style borrowed from crime fiction. Fans of the 'Hunnas' may miss the muscled, passionate tone of Seymour's lyrics, but his book shows that talented rock songwriters shouldn't ask for much more than the chance to make music their way for 20 years. It is more than artists in many other disciplines enjoy. The lesson is that superstardom is too much of a long shot to waste time making your work as commercial as possible. You are better off creating what you consider interesting and hoping the audience finds it.