Warren Zevon — MacArthur Park and LA Haunts

Warren Zevon was a creature of Los Angeles — born in Chicago, raised in various California cities, and ultimately a Westside LA fixture whose sardonic, literary songs were the dark underside of the Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter world. His second album Warren Zevon (1976), produced by Jackson Browne and featuring much of the LA studio elite, contained 'Werewolves of London,' 'Lawyers, Guns and Money,' 'Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,' and 'Desperados Under the Eaves' — a song that captures a very specific Los Angeles despair, its narrator drinking beer in the Hyatt House on Sunset and watching the sprinklers run.

Zevon's relationship with alcohol and drugs was severe and his career was interrupted by periods of incapacity, but his best work — Excitable Boy (1978), the underrated The Envoy (1982), and the late-career recording Mutineer (1995) — showed a writer of genuine originality. His final album The Wind (2003), recorded while he was dying of pleural mesothelioma and released weeks before his death, was an act of extraordinary dignity, featuring contributions from almost everyone who had mattered in his musical life.

Zevon spent much of his LA life on the Westside — Santa Monica, the Hyatt House on Sunset, the studios of the Sunset Strip. MacArthur Park, Wilshire Boulevard, and the broader mid-Wilshire area appear in his lyrics as landscapes of beautiful decay. He died at his home in Los Angeles on September 7, 2003. His friend David Letterman, who gave him his last major television appearance when he was diagnosed, called him 'my favourite guest.'