Edition: U.S. / Global

Warren Zevon's last waltz.

By Jon Pareles
Published: January 26, 2003

In the lobby of the Ed Sullivan Theater, two perky handlers for ''The Late Show With David Letterman'' were giving their nightly pep talk to the people headed for the front rows. They encouraged laughter, the more enthusiastic the better. They warned against whistling, which could overload the microphones. They also had one more caution. ''If you hear sad news, don't make that sympathy sound,'' one instructed. ''You know, 'Awwwwww. . . . ' ''

The audience understood why. The show's only guest would be Warren Zevon, the songwriter known for the twisted humor of songs like ''Lawyers, Guns and Money,'' ''Werewolves of London'' and ''Poor Poor Pitiful Me'' and for troubled love songs like ''Hasten Down the Wind'' and ''Accidentally Like a Martyr.'' Zevon, 56, is a dying man.


''I just thought right away that I wanted to work,'' he told me this fall over bacon and eggs in Hugo's, a restaurant near his apartment in West Hollywood. He was dressed like a junior faculty member, in jacket and jeans; his energy came and went. ''This is a good job. It's been a good job. Work is the most effective drug there can possibly be.

''I'm on the periphery of a lot of despair, of course,'' he said. ''You'd have to be stupid not to be. I have my moments when I'm not too thrilled about this whole deal. But at the same time, the songs have never come like this, so I'd have to feel more gratitude than anything else. I'm probably in the intensest creative period of my life.''

Zevon and his longtime bassist and collaborator, Jorge Calderon, have been writing whenever ideas strike them -- including, Zevon says, via cellphone conversations ''from the aisle of the health-food store. I have to move fast, because I don't know what's going to happen.''

The album in progress is sometimes somber, sometimes rowdy, and while the new songs are conscious of mortality, they're not daunted by it. In one called ''My Dirty Life and Times,'' Zevon sings, ''Some days I feel like my shadow's casting me/Some days the sun don't shine/Sometimes I wonder why I'm still running free/All up and down the line.''

Zevon says: ''I've talked to people who have, you know, paralyzing illnesses and those kinds of debilitating illnesses. And compared to that, this is a walk in the park, however it turns out. But there's certainly a limit to how explicitly I want them to tell me it's going to go.''

The Letterman appearance, in October, was likely to be Zevon's last public performance. He had a long connection to the show; when the band leader, Paul Shaffer, took time off, Letterman called on Zevon to lead the band, and Letterman makes a cameo appearance (shouting ''Hit somebody!'') on Zevon's 2002 album, ''My Ride's Here.'' Now he walked onstage as the band played ''I'll Sleep When I'm Dead,'' a Zevon song from 1976, and bluntly described his situation. ''I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years,'' he told Letterman. ''It's one of those phobias that didn't pay off.''

Letterman asked Zevon if his condition had taught him anything about life and death. ''How much you're supposed to enjoy every sandwich,'' Zevon answered.

Weeks later, Letterman was still struck by the reply. ''Here's a guy looking right down the barrel of the gun,'' he said. ''And if a guy wanted to indulge himself in great hyperbole in that circumstance, who wouldn't forgive him? But that was perfect, the simplicity of that. If this guy is not a poet, who is?''

zevon can calmly itemize some of the things he doesn't have to worry about anymore. High cholesterol. Getting fat. Going bald. ''Technology's on the decline, and that's a comfort to me,'' he says in a staticky phone conversation.

But between jokes, he has been saying goodbyes and rationing his time. He had been a constant reader and moviegoer; a conversation with him is peppered with references to Heidegger, Schopenhauer, Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, Thomas McGuane, Czeslaw Milosz, Martin Scorsese and Krzysztof Kieslowski, along with musical idols from Igor Stravinsky to Paul Simon to Jimmy Webb to Ian and Sylvia.

Now his reading time is limited. He carries a small copy of Rainer Maria Rilke's ''Duino Elegies'' with him, because, he says, ''Rilke seems to write about a universe where everybody's dead except for a brief shining moment when we're not.'' He has also been playing the DVD of ''The Maltese Falcon'' over and over, he says, ''to watch Bogie smoke.''

Zevon was a lifelong smoker himself. And during the 1970's, he led the fast life of a hitmaking Los Angeles songwriter. He drank; he took drugs. ''I ran around like a psychotic,'' he says. He did his time in rehab during the 1980's.

During the summer of 2002, he had been exercising when he started to feel chest pain and shortness of breath. He thought he had strained a muscle, but it didn't go away. Eventually, Zevon's dentist -- the only doctor he saw regularly -- insisted he go to a physician. From there, the news was bad. Zevon decided to make a public statement about his illness in September, and he has allowed a video crew from the cable channel VH1 to follow him as he makes what he expects will be his final album.