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As any musician is careful to keep his instrument in tune, Warren Zevon takes some pain to live sufficiently close to danger and desperation so as not to lose his cutting edge. At 31, he is a dedicated juicer who can put away a bottle of Stolichnaya a night and a gun-wielding roisterer. He is also an attentive father and melancholiac composer who works in fits and starts in the short hours before dawn, turning out his strange songs and working occasionally on "my long-boasted-about but seldom-heard symphony"—all on the Steinway concert grand that stands in the living room of his modest Los Angeles house. Zevon seems to be living out a myth of ruinous romantic excess that is both self-perpetuating and self-destructive. "F. Scott Fitzevon," some friends call him. Jokes his mentor, Jackson Browne, best of all the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriters, who has taken a strong hand in the production of both Zevon albums: "There's part of Warren that nobody can take credit for except Warren—and that's the part that scares the hell out of all of us."
"Sometimes he's the most normal person I know," confides Zevon's wife Crystal, 28. "And sometimes he's totally crazy. He's always nice with me and the baby, but every now and then he'll just decide to do something—like fall down a flight of stairs. I usually laugh. He's pretty humorous." Even Crystal confesses to being a touch "terrified" now that Warren has invested in a .44 Magnum. Recently, Zevon was so enjoying brandishing the weapon as he ran around his house wearing a duck mask that friends had to corner and disarm him. "In the '60s," Zevon explains, "I couldn't have conceived of owning a gun. Now in the '70s, I feel that nobody's going to mess with me. You go from mindlessly believing in peace to arming yourself to learn how to have it."
There is as much put-on as defiance in such a posture, much striving after the long shadow of one's own legend. Zevon is shrewd enough not only to realize this but also to acknowledge it, both in his songs (one hell-raising rocker is called I'll Sleep When I'm Dead) and in casual conversation. "The fundamental idea that everything's going to be all right appeals to me less than the simple notion of bonehead justice," Zevon told TIME'S correspondent James Willwerth.
"The concept of Clint Eastwood as the justice-bent dope is more important than Richard Dreyfuss as the awestruck moron being carted off to Mars where everything will be just fine."
To Zevon, the patented Eastwood brand of low-boil violence and poker-faced absurdity may seem as natural as a song. His father, a Russian immigrant, was a onetime boxer who made his living as a professional card player. When William Zevon wanted to marry Warren's mother, the impending union caused a family crisis that became, 18 years later, the subject of their only son's most autobiographical song. Mama Couldn 't Be Persuaded:
She was determined that she wanted Bill . . .
Her parents warned her Tried to reason with her Never kept their disappointment hid They all went to pieces when the bad luck hit Stuck in the middle I was the kid