Many famous musicians have said they liked Zevon's work, including Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young. His most famous songs include "Werewolves of London", "Lawyers, Guns and Money", "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" and "Johnny Strikes Up The Band." All of these are from his third and most famous album: "Excitable Boy" (1978). Zevon has written many songs that were recorded by other artists. These include "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" (a top 40 hit by Linda Ronstadt), "Accidentally Like a Martyr," "Mohammed's Radio," "Carmelita", and "Hasten Down the Wind".
Zevon sometimes recorded or sang cover songs. He liked to sing Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" and Leonard Cohen's "First We Take Manhattan". He was often a guest on "Late Night with David Letterman" and the "Late Show with David Letterman". Letterman later sang with Zevon on "Hit Somebody! (The Hockey Song)" with Paul Shaffer and members of the CBS Orchestra.
He had a lot of problems in his life, including divorce, alcoholism, and suicide attempts. He also had a paranoia of doctors and this killed him: he did not know he had cancer until doctors could not help him.
Zevon was born in Chicago, Illinois. His parents were to William Zevon, a Secular Jew and Beverly Cope Simmons, a Mormon from Salt Lake City, Utah. They soon moved to Fresno, California. By the age of 13, Zevon sometimes visited Igor Stravinsky where he studied modern classical music. Zevon's parents divorced when he was 16 years old. After the divorce, he dropped out of high school and moved from Los Angeles to New York to become a folk singer.
In 1978, Zevon released his most popular and critically acclaimed album "Excitable Boy". Radio stations often played the songs off the album, especially "Werewolves of London." "Werewolves of London" and "Excitable Boy" were both examples of black humor (jokes about bad things). The album also had the songs "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" and "Lawyers, Guns and Money," which were both deadpan humor songs about geopolitics.
"Rolling Stone" named the album one of the most important albums in the 1970s. They said that he, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, and Bruce Springsteen were four of the best new artists to emerge in the 1970s.
After "Excitable Boy" Warren Zevon published "Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School" in 1980. This album had the only other song recorded by Zevon that reached the Billboard Top 100: "A Certain Girl." "A Certain Girl" is a rhythm and blues song written by Allen Toussaint.
This album was dedicated to Ken Millar, who calls himself "Ross Macdonald." Millar is a writer who writes mystery novels, and Zevon really liked Millar's stories. He met Millar in an intervention put together by the journalist Paul Nelson. For awhile this intervention helped Zevon not drink too much alcohol.
Warren Zevon did not like to go to the doctor, and never went to one when he was an adult. Before playing at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival in 2002, he started feeling dizzy and started to have a chronic cough. When Zevon told his dentist his problems, his dentist recommended seeing a doctor. When he finally visited one, the doctor diagnosed him with mesothelmia.
Warren Zevon did not want to get treated for his cancer if it might keep him from making music. So instead he started to make his final album, titled "The Wind". He had a lot of friends who helped him make the album. These friends included Bruce Springsteen, Don Henley, Jackson Browne, Timothy B. Schmit, Joe Walsh, David Lindley, Billy Bob Thornton, Emmylou Harris, Tom Petty, Dwight Yoakam, and others.
Papa John's Pizza
Papa John's is the third largest pizza company based in the United States. Its headquarters are in Louisville, Kentucky, U.S. It was founded by John Schnatter in 1984.
Shrew opossum
The order Paucituberculata contains the six surviving species of shrew opossum. "Caenolestes" is the main genus, and the group as a whole may be called 'caenolestids'.
They are small, shrew-like marsupials of the Andes mountains of South America.
20 million years ago, there were at least seven genera in South America. Today, just three genera remain. They live in inaccessible forest and grassland regions of the high Andes.
Insectivores were absent from South America until the Great American Interchange three million years ago, and are present now only in the northwestern part of the continent. Shrew opossums have lost ground to the these and other placental invaders that fill the same ecological niches. Nevertheless, the ranges of shrew opossums and insectivores overlap broadly.
Shrew opossums are about the size of a small rat (9–14 cm long), with thin limbs, a long, pointed snout and a slender, hairy tail. They are largely carnivorous, being active hunters of insects, earthworms and small vertebrates. They have small eyes and poor sight, and hunt in the early evening and at night, using their hearing and long, sensitive whiskers to locate prey. They seem to spend much of their lives in underground burrows and on surface runways.
Largely because of their rugged, inaccessible habitat, they are very poorly known. Recent studies suggest that they may be more common than had been thought.
Australidelphia
The Australidelphia is a superorder of Australasian marsupial mammals.
It consists in five extant (living) orders, which contain most of the world's marsupials.
ÖFB Ladies Cup
The ÖFB Ladies Cup is the Cup competition in Austrian women soccer. It was first played in the 1972/73 season under the guidance of the Vienna Football association as Ladies Cup. Since the 1992/93 season the Ladies cup is under the guidance of the ÖFB (Austrian Football Association) and is called ÖFB-Ladies-Cup. From 2004 till 2009 the competition was called ÖFB-Stiegl-Ladies-Cup, after the main sponsor of the cup, a brewery from Salzburg.
The Cup is played with 32 teams in five rounds. The ten members of the ÖFB-Frauenliga and 22 teams from the nine federal states take part. In the first round the teams were drawn after local aspects.
Lepidodendron
Lepidodendron is an extinct genus of primitive (tree-like) plant. They were the first large land plants, and a major part of the coal forest tropical flora.
They were huge, over , and the trunks were often over in diameter.
Sometimes called 'giant club mosses', they are actually closer to the quillworts "Isoetes" than to clubmosses.
They thrived during the Pennsylvanian sub-period of the Carboniferous 315–300 million years years ago.
The conditions were tropical swamps and rain forests of a huge river system much larger that the Amazon basin.
The river plain which was the heart of the wetland stretched across Pangaea 5000 km from eastern Canada to the Ukraine, and was 700 km wide. This would make the Pennsylvanian basin larger than any wetlands on Earth today.
The rainforest system collapsed about halfway through the Pennsylvanian, and was replaced by a cooler, drier climate.
The wetland forests ended when the land level was raised by the pressure of the Gondwana continent against Laurussia, causing the zone of contact to be raised. The end of the Coal Measures marks the end of the Carboniferous period. China was too far away to be affected, and there the wetland forests continued for another 50 million years, into the early Permian.
"Lepidodendron" had tall, thick trunks that rarely branched and were topped with a crown of bifurcating branches bearing clusters of leaves. These leaves were long and narrow, similar to large blades of grass, and were spirally-arranged.
The closely packed diamond-shaped leaf scars left on the trunk and stems as the plant grew provide some of the most interesting and common fossils in Carboniferous shales and accompanying coal deposits. These fossils look much like tire tracks or alligator skin.