by Wayne Wood

There are people who accompany us through life who provide companionship and examples of excellence. If we’re lucky, some of those people are in our family or circle of friends—and I have been very lucky in that regard.
But what I’m thinking about today are those who are a profound influence from afar—writers, performers, maybe even sports figures who maybe we never even meet, but who through their examples influence us.
When I was a teenager—that time when one is most susceptible to influences of all kinds—Bob Dylan taught me not to be afraid of either the power of my emotions or the complexity of my mind. Frank Zappa was funny and iconoclastic and a strong advocate of not paying too much attention to the dominant ideas of either peer groups or alleged leaders. From Atlanta Braves pitcher Phil Niekro, he of the unconventional knuckleball and Hall of Fame career, I drew the lesson that having talents that are somewhat different from everybody else is not barrier to success if those talents are used to maximum benefit.
Never met any of them. Doesn’t matter—they were big influences.
This is all brought to mind by the recent news that singer-songwriter Warren Zevon is dying. He has announced through his publicist that he has inoperable cancer in both lungs.
This is sad news to his family, of course. He is 55 and has two children in their 20s that he says he plans to spend time with.
It’s sad news of a lesser magnitude, but still sad news, to those of us who like and admire his work. The greatest popular success he ever had was with the song “Werewolves of London” in 1978, but he has spent the last 25 years or so making interesting music for a relatively small but devoted group of fans.
Some of his best songs to my ear: “Mohammed’s Radio,” “Poor Poor Pitiful Me,” “Lawyers, Guns, and Money,” “Looking for the Next Best Thing,” “Tenderness on the Block,” “Sentimental Hygiene,” “Play it All Night Long,” “I Was in the House When the House Burned Down,” “Mutineer,” “Don’t Let Us Get Sick,” and “The Indifference of Heaven.”
The thread that runs through these songs, and through his other work, is that life is too important to take too seriously. He writes really funny songs about really serious subjects, and he writes songs of lost love that are so full of pain that you know he’s not just writing it down because he needs a song, he’s writing it down because he has no choice.
When he found out he was dying, the statement he asked be released contained none of the cliches we associate with celebrities delivering similar bad news—the off-key assertion that whoever it is is confident of “beating” the disease.
Here’s what Warren Zevon said: “I’m okay with it, but it’ll be a drag if I don’t make it till the next James Bond movie comes out.” (For the record, that movie is titled Die Another Day.)
Listening to his last two albums, one almost gets the idea he knew this was coming. They are titled Life’ll Kill Ya and My Ride’s Here.
Music writer Greil Marcus wrote a short item in his column for the web magazine Salon in which he summed up Zevon’s career and concluded: “From afar, he has been a good friend.”
A good way to put it. I’ve never met him, never seen him in concert, almost never heard him on the radio since the late ’70s. But I’ve bought his albums off and on over the years, and in the way that you can sense when you are on the same wavelength as somebody else, I do know him.
It seems like there is almost no way to tell a famous person how much he or she means to you. Would Warren Zevon, perhaps with weeks to live, really care to hear that I’ve enjoyed his songs? I don’t know.
Does it ever become boring for anybody famous—a performer, writer, athlete, or whatever—for strangers to say what you’ve done means something to them? If I were to meet, say, Paul McCartney, what could I say to him that he hadn’t heard virtually daily since 1963?: “I enjoy your work, it has made my life better having experienced your talent. Thank you.”
And yet, what else could I say? All that is true, and the fact that it’s also true for tens of millions of other people doesn’t make it any less true for me. If I ever get to meet Paul McCartney, or Warren Zevon, or one of a thousand other famous people in all kinds of fields whose work I admire, I’m certainly not going to talk about the weather or the stock market.
Well, word is that Zevon is using some of his remaining time—funny phrase, because by definition all any of us have left is our “remaining time”—to record some new songs. He has a studio setup at his house, where, he says, he can keep recording even when “the hearse is idling at the curb.”
I love this guy.
But until we get to hear these last songs, it’s worth remembering that the final song on his (so far) last album, My Ride’s Here, concludes with these words: “I’d like to stay/But I’m bound for glory/I’m on my way/My ride’s here…”
Well, the ride is on its way for all of us, sometime or another. And in this season of thanksgiving, let us remember those, near and far, who nurture us and provide us with the lights we live by.

Accidentally like a martyr