Zevon was in junior high school, studying classical piano, when he had the chance to watch recording sessions with Igor Stravinsky and the conductor Robert Craft. But he soon decided classical music wasn't for him. ''I felt that it was music of another time,'' he says. ''I couldn't add anything, and it wasn't necessarily so relevant anymore.'' Still, he never entirely renounced it; it's easy to hear Aaron Copland in Zevon's piano parts, and for ''Genius,'' Zevon wrote a string arrangement that flaunts unlikely harmonies.

As a teenager Zevon started playing guitar and writing songs, and by the late 1960's he was already placing them. One, ''She Quit Me Man,'' was on the soundtrack of ''Midnight Cowboy.'' Another, ''Like the Seasons,'' was the B side of ''Happy Together,'' the Turtles' 1967 No. 1 single. ''That paid my rent for years,'' Zevon says. His first album, ''Wanted Dead or Alive,'' appeared in 1969 and was generally ignored. But songs like ''A Bullet for Ramona'' already revealed the gift for the pulp-fiction narratives that would run through his songs.

He didn't start with any plan, he says. ''I was writing any damn thing I could. It would be anything that I could somehow stumble, stagger through and write, whether it was a folk song or a Burt Bacharach imitation. But I always knew when something was going to be worth working on, however long it took. And then I'd work on it for a year, sometimes just waiting for the words to come, waiting for the third verse. Or the bridge -- that can take 14 years. Or else you rationalize that it doesn't need a bridge.''

During the early 1970's, Zevon wrote jingles and led the Everly Brothers' backup band; he spent a summer playing piano in a bar in Spain. Back in California, he fell in with a coterie of songwriters who were melding folk, country and pop into the soft rock that would dominate

the mid-1970's. In 1976, Linda Ronstadt made Zevon's ''Hasten Down the Wind'' the title song of an album, and Jackson Browne produced Zevon's first mature album, ''Warren Zevon.''

While royalties from Ronstadt's albums rolled in, Zevon built his own following. His 1978 album, ''Excitable Boy,'' reached the Top 10. But he was out of control. His songs turned sketchier, his performances unstable. He announced in the early 1980's that he was fighting alcoholism. And in the years of Madonna and big-haired metal bands, Zevon's songwriting -- smart tall tales set to piano marches and Celtic-tinged guitar tunes -- grew further out of sync with the pop mainstream. There was a five-year gap between albums, from 1982 to 1987, before he reappeared with the album ''Sentimental Hygiene,'' backed by members of R.E.M. It included ''Detox Mansion,'' a sardonic view of a celebrity rehab center. Like many of Zevon's funniest songs, it has a distinctly vulnerable spot: ''It's tough to be somebody/And it's hard not to fall apart.''

Along with other songwriters of his generation, Zevon was settling into a steady midlevel career. He made his most recent albums for an independent label, Artemis, and toured every so often, sometimes with a band, sometimes on his own. He supplied an occasional song for a television show (''Tales From the Crypt,'' ''Route 66''). And he continued to write his terse, telling picaresques, like ''Mr. Bad Example'' (a pre-Enron vision of amoral greed) and ''I Was in the House When the House Burned Down.'' He was not a major star, but he could still headline clubs, field requests from longtime fans and meet his heroes. During the sessions for ''Sentimental Hygiene,'' Bob Dylan showed up to pay his respects. ''When I walked into the studio and they said, 'Bob Dylan's here,' I said, 'Why?' 'To see you.' '' Zevon pauses. ''That's worth a million records to me.''