Warren Zevon had spent a decade scuffling around the Los Angeles music business prior to the release of his self-titled 1976 album. The Chicago-born Zevon—the product of an unlikely marriage between a Jewish gambler/gangster father and strict Mormon mother—had been a childhood piano prodigy, written songs for The Turtles, played in a boy-girl folk duo called lyme & cybelle, and made ends meet penning jingles for Gallo wine and Chevrolet. Zevon’s first shot at a solo career came in the late-’60s, under the guidance of Sunset Strip Svengali Kim Fowley. His psych-flecked debut album, Wanted Dead or Alive, was released in 1970 by Liberty Records and promptly flopped. Zevon went on to become the bandleader for The Everly Brothers, struggled to find another record deal, then entered a kind of professional exile in Spain. He was performing nightly in a Sitges bar in 1975 when his old pal, singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, sent a postcard urging Zevon to come back to America, promising to get him a contract with David Geffen’s Asylum label. The resulting 11-track Warren Zevon album—enriched by years of personal struggle and infused with bits of deeply felt autobiography—would prove an uncommonly powerful song cycle. Zevon’s finely etched portraits of the Hollywood demimonde—the hustlers, junkies, rogues, and bit players—came alive in jaw-dropping detail in songs like the desperate addict elegy “Carmelita,” the brutal barroom kiss-off “The French Inhaler,” and the apocalyptic self-examination of “Desperados Under the Eaves.” While a keen student of rock ’n’ roll excess—captured vividly in “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” and “Poor Poor Pitiful Me”—Zevon also proved a fine writer of emotional ballads, with the album’s “Hasten Down the Wind” among his most affecting. Produced by Browne and colored by Waddy Wachtel’s lead guitar work, the album sessions would attract the top names in the LA music scene, with the Eagles’ Don Henley and Glenn Frey, Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, the Beach Boys’ Carl Wilson, Bonnie Raitt, and J.D. Souther among those who contributed. Released in May of 1976, Warren Zevon was not a commercial hit but caused a critical stir, with reviewers hailing the arrival of a major songwriting talent. Further confirmation came when Linda Ronstadt—then at the height of her fame—made “Hasten Down the Wind” the title track to her million-selling album a few months later, and covered several more Zevon songs over the next couple years, setting the stage for his own 1978 breakthrough, Excitable Boy.