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The family eventually wound up in California, where they lived in towns all up and down the southern coast. Warren had a music teacher who contrived to introduce the young student to Stravinsky (an album autographed by the master is Warren's "most prized possession"). But the influence of the great composer during Warren's subsequent visits to see him in his home above Sunset Boulevard was supplemented by a rough-and-tumble education at high school. Warren quit when he was 15, around the time his parents split up. He tried living with his father for a while, a difficult situation since Bill "kept moving to a new apartment every few weeks." Warren then headed for New York, taking an unsuccessful shot at "being Bob Dylan. " After a time, Warren drifted back to Los Angeles, scuffled around the fringes of the pop world. He wrote advertising jingles, played piano for the Everly Brothers (the "little Suzie" who gets mangled by the excitable boy is a wry nod at them), got' a song onto the sound track of Midnight Cowboy and made one album called Wanted Dead or Alive that attracted scant attention. Eventually he met up with Crystal, and took off to Spain, where he sang for his supper in a Costa Brava saloon run by a soldier of fortune named David Lindell (coauthor of Roland). Lindell held Zevon's wages in escrow, in case of either dire need or sudden good fortune. Jackson Browne, who had got friendly with Zevon back in Hollywood, wrote him in care of the Dubliner Bar inviting him to return stateside and cut a record. Warren blew the escrow account to get halfway home; a gig in London with the Everly Brothers provided the final funding.
If the rest is history, much of it is yet to come. Zevon, who has just embarked on a modest concert tour, will be keeping an eye on the sales figures for Excitable Boy to see if the commercial returns are as strong as the critical ones have been so far. One thing that is certain right now is that Warren Zevon can run with fast company. Randy Newman, Jackson Browne. Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon ... he is as good as the best, can match their pace. Maybe, if he goes on growing, he can even set the pace. Just one question lingers: Can he sustain it? He is such an excitable boy.
—Jay Cocks