It was five years ago today that Warren Zevon passed, and if your heart don’t break a little when you see that hour-long night with David Letterman then you ain’t got no heart at all. The really sad story happened backstage, after the show had wrapped. Packing away his guitar, Zevon was talking with Dave getting ready to say what both knew would their final goodbyes. Snapping the latch on his guitar case, Zevon gave Letterman his guitar with instructions to take care of it. The gesture, the understanding of the finality, the inability to say anything remotely uplifting, it all caused Letterman to cry.
Zevon suffered from and eventually died from a type of cancer caused mesothelioma. You might have seen this strain popularized from those legal commercials, encouraging the viewer to call if “you or a loved one has suffered” from this cancer, mostly caused by exposure to asbestos. It’s a particularly deadly strain, one that causes a tremendous amount of pain and suffering before eventually taking the life of its host. I’m not sure how Zevon would have been in environments that contained asbestos, but I do know the original thought of “traditional” lung cancer caused by an apparent love of cigarettes had nothing to do with his death.
Still miss him…
Here is a video from the old Letterman show featuring a song from one of my favorite Warren Zevon albums Sentimental Hygiene.
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