The comfortable feeling Zevon evoked with his audience was not the same kind as his contemporaries in the Quaalude-easy-going 1970s L.A. scene, like Jackson Browne and the Eagles. Instead of singing about taking it easy or peaceful, easy feelings, Zevon indulged his own sardonic wit and built an audience — albiet smaller than his L.A. friends' — that appreciated his mix of satire with empathy. Plus, Zevon rocked.

The only time I saw Zevon live was in 1991 in Indianapolis, as he toured behind his Mr. Bad Example album, opened for and backed by the long-forgotten Odds, a Canadian refugee band he discovered in L.A. Many musicians struggle to come to terms with how their audiences see them and fight against that image, or merely chug out the hits with no pretenses toward challenging their fans. Somehow, Zevon was able to straddle the middle — playing a show of mostly 1976-82 material (that appeared on his best-of, A Quiet Normal Life) without him, or the audience, going through the motions. He also made the Odds, like all the other musicians he’s worked with, sound better and rock harder than they did on their own.

Perhaps by that time Zevon had become more comfortable with himself. The son of a professional gambler had acquired his own vice, drinking, in a big way during his late '70s and early '80s heydays, and returned to good graces with the excellent 1987 album Sentimental Hygiene, backed by Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry, among others. Sentimental Hygiene, with its laugh-out-loud look at rehab ("Detox Mansion"), its five-minute rumination on manhood wrapped inside the biography of a boxer ("Boom Boom Mancini") and stab at funk ("Leave My Monkey Alone"), was a surprise from a guy who had pretty much been given up for dead after The Envoy stiffed in 1982.

Zevon tried to stretch himself with Tranverse City in 1988, inspired by William Gibson's cyberfiction, but the album was mostly dull. At that point, Zevon seemed to realize — like Popeye — he was what he was, and hasn't pushed himself so hard stylistically since. But that move spoke of aging gracefully, not a desperate stab to regain stardom, because Zevon was never that big a star.

Still, Zevon probably wouldn't attract the collaborators he has if was merely a nice guy, or simply a good songwriter. The guy has lived a novelist's life multiple times over — who wouldn't want the chance to listen to him tell stories? Hours could be devoted just to Zevon's upbringing. He was the only child of an itinerant professional gambler, and when he left home at 16 after his parent's divorce, he did so with a Corvette his father won in a poker game. Or how about asking Zevon about playing piano for three years in the early 1970s in an Irish bar in Spain — a bar owned by an ex-mercenary? (Billy Joel played in a piano bar and wrote the treacly, self-referential/reverential "Piano Man;" Zevon hooked with his piano bar's owner to write "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.") The members of R.E.M., in particular, around the release of Sentimental Hygiene, told the radio show Rockline that one of the best parts of recording with Zevon was hearing his stories of life, rehab and the music business — stories, of course, that R.E.M. couldn't share on the air.

So "Everybody Wanted to Hang Out With Him" would work for Zevon's epitaph. That is, unless he wants to be particularly droll and use a phrase from his own lyrics: "Lawyers, guns and money / won't get me out of this."

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.