Bruce Springsteen called him ‘one of the great, great American songwriters’, Jackson Browne hailed him as ‘the first and foremost proponent of song noir’ and Stephen King once said that if he could write like Zevon, he ‘would be a happy guy’. The list of artists that lined up to appear on his records include Springsteen, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Dave Gilmour and Emmylou Harris. So how is it that most people, if they have heard of Warren Zevon at all, know him only as ‘that werewolves guy’? This book goes beyond that solitary hit single to examine all aspects of Zevon’s multifaceted, five-decade career, from his beginnings in the slightly psychedelic folk duo lyme and cybelle, through to his commercial breakthrough in the late Seventies with Excitable Boy, his critically acclaimed late Eighties comeback Sentimental Hygiene, his decline into cult obscurity, and his triumphant if heart-breaking final testament The Wind released just prior to his death in 2003. Along the way, the reader will discover one of rock’s consummate balladeers, as well as his cast of characters, which include doomed drug dealers, psychopathic adolescents, outlaws of the Old West, BDSM fetishists, ghostly gunslingers and, yes, lycanthropes unleashed on the streets of London. Peter Gallagher is the author of Marc Bolan, Tyrannosaurus Rex, and T. Rex on track for Sonicbond. He is a regular contributor to Shindig! magazine and his fiction has appeared in Writing Magazine and The London Reader. His is also working on Kiss in the 1970s, also for SonicBond, and he is working on a novel set in the Weimar Republic, which he hopes will see publication sometime before the cows come home. He lives in Glasgow, Scotland.

ウォーレン・ジヴォンという稀代のソングライターの本質を、ピーター・ギャラガーは単なる伝記の枠を超えて「ソング・ノワールの体現者」として鮮烈に描き出しています。スティーヴン・キングすら嫉妬したというその文学的感性は、虚無とユーモア、そして暴力的なまでの叙情性が混在する唯一無二のものです。本書は一発屋という偏見を打ち砕き、彼の詞世界が持つ鋭利な知性と、闇を抱えた人間たちへの深い洞察を浮き彫りにします。 半世紀に及ぶキャリアを追う中で、私たちは崩壊する魂や孤独な無法者たちが交錯する、濃密なハードボイルド小説を読んでいるかのような錯覚に陥ります。死を目前にした最後の一歩まで音楽に捧げたその壮絶な軌跡は、芸術家がいかにして自らの運命と対峙し、それを美学へと昇華させたかを雄弁に語っています。音楽ファンのみならず、言葉の力に魅了されるすべての読者の魂を揺さぶる、真実の文学的解説書と言えるでしょう。