After his diagnosis, Warren recorded a cover of Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” a brave song for someone who’s dying. Kevin loved Zevon’s wit and vulnerability. He was never that well known, struggling instead to establish his own career, but best known for songs covered by artists like Linda Ronstadt. On trips to Chicago and Bloomington, Indiana, we played our favorite music, with Warren always in heavy rotation. When Kevin received his Stage IV diagnosis, two years after cancer first came into our lives, we searched for a miracle. She left LA for Vermont and a new life, returning only when Warren called her after his Stage IV cancer diagnosis twenty years later. Though she didn’t write lyrics for “Hasten Down the Wind,” she did contribute to several other songs, including “Werewolves.” When they divorced, Crystal walked away from all of it, even any claim to royalties. She shared that their relationship was intense and loving, but also difficult, stressed as it was by Warren’s alcohol abuse and insecurities. “We left people hurt in our wake,” she said. She is a badass, as she was when the two first met, each involved in other relationships that could not withstand their powerful attraction, so strong it was noticeable at their very first meeting. When I called Crystal Zevon to talk about Warren, she had just returned from protesting immigration policy at the Texas-Mexico border.
How do I start life again, when so much of who I am is lost, I wondered? In the five years after Kevin’s death, I lost both parents, a best friend, our minister, and I watched our kids go off to college. I would find them, talk with them, write a book about them, learn from them about recreating a life when the person you are most identified with is no longer. A quick internet search gave me a list of more than twenty, all with amazing stories. That would be my grief group, I decided: the wives of rock stars who died young. On the anniversary of John Lennon’s death, I heard a radio story about Yoko Ono and all she had accomplished in the years since. When my therapist encouraged me to start my own group, I pondered who that might be. I honored their losses, but their lives were different from mine. Grief groups were filled with sweet women in their seventies and eighties. Shortly after Kevin died, I knew I needed to find other young widows. The copies of “Excitable Boy” and “Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School” numbered four. After multiple break-ups and make-ups, we permanently combined our record collections. I was the first girl Kevin dated who knew Zevon beyond his hit, “Werewolves of London.” He was surprised that I actually owned Warren’s records. He was a musician and songwriter we both loved. On the occasion of this anniversary, I select “Hasten Down the Wind,” by Warren Zevon. Instead, it was my failed attempt at being a music writer in the 1980s that spurred me to take on this newest project.
#Hasten down the wind image how to
I explain that he wasn’t, though he regretted not knowing how to play an instrument. When I tell people about the book I’m writing, they often ask if Kevin was a musician. We curated playlists on our phones toward the end, those were filled with songs that others had suggested to get him through the roughest parts of chemotherapy and radiation, or another surgery. Our lives were often centered around music-playing on the stereo system wired throughout our renovated farmhouse our first date was to a concert. Each year, I acknowledge the date by posting memories and updates along with a link to a favorite song. It is the tenth anniversary of my husband Kevin’s death.
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