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

Zevon, Crystal (author).

Warren Zevon was greatly admired for writing some of the most intelligent and literate songs in rock. Probably best known are the darkly humorous “Werewolves of London” and “Excitable Boy.” He was a rock ’n’ roll wild man, whose unconventional life his ex-wife Crystal’s oral-history-style biography makes as iconoclastic in the telling as it was in the living. Among the tellers are members of Zevon’s family, and friends and colleagues including Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bob Thornton, Dave Barry, and Stephen King. They comment on his often dissolute lifestyle, his drinking and subsequent sobriety, his off-the-wall humor, the diagnosis of the inoperable lung cancer of which he ultimately died in September 2003, and, of course, his remarkable songs. His behavior was not always laudable—for example, he was a notorious womanizer—but he remained true to himself. This often searing, humorous, and brutally honest book captures him at his best and his worst. Another appropriate friend, crime novelist Carl Hiaasen, contributes a foreword.