The Wild Honey Foundation organized a tribute concert for Warren Zevon on October 24, 2025, titled “Join Me in L.A.: The Songs of Warren Zevon,” at the United Theater in Downtown Los Angeles. The event featured an all-star cast including Jackson Browne, Jorge Calderón, and many others, performing Zevon’s music to benefit the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO) and the Ed Asner Family Center. The concert was a collaborative effort with the Zevon family and celebrated Zevon’s songwriting legacy.

David Hochman

There was something fitting about the timing. As the Dodgers blundered the opening game of the World Series last night, hordes of Warren Zevon devotees filed into downtown Los Angeles’s United Theater, smirking through loss and ready to stare down mortality with gallows humor intact. If you’re going to mourn anything—a baseball game, a brilliant songwriter taken too soon, the insane state of the world—you might as well do it with style and a bit of bite.

Last night’s tribute to Warren Zevon was a benefit concert for The Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization and the Ed Asner Family Foundation.

Alon Goldsmith/alongoldsmith.com/

“Meet Me in L.A.: The Songs of Warren Zevon” delivered exactly that. Organized by the Wild Honey Foundation and the Zevon family, this three-hour, 31-song marathon (see set lists below) felt less like a nostalgic oldies night than a necessary reminder that Zevon’s acerbic wisdom is as essential in 2025 as when he wrote them. We still need the excitable boy’s unflinching takes on violence, redemption, and the absurdity of the American condition. It was also an emotional night; by the end, even those wry grins had melted into joyful tears.

Over the course of three hours and 31 songs, Warren Zevon’s friends, family and collaborators celebrated the “songwriter’s songwriter” whose biggest hit, “Werewolves of London,” is always a crowdpleaser. Photo by Alon Goldsmith https://www.alongoldsmith.com/

Alon Goldsmith/alongoldsmith.com
Celebrating Warren Zevon on the eve of his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction

The timing carries extra weight: after years of near-misses and head-scratching omissions, Zevon will finally enter the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame next month. Yes, it’s in the Musical Influence Award category rather than the main Performer tier (a technicality that somehow feels perfectly Zevon). Still, it’s vindication for a songwriter’s songwriter who influenced generations while remaining criminally underappreciated by the masses.

The evening opened with Jordan Zevon, Warren’s son, channeling his father’s distinctive baritone on “Johnny Strikes Up the Band.” There’s no escaping genetics or ghosts in the music business, but Jordan seemed to understand that the best tribute is more about continuation than imitation. The format took an old school, Last Waltz revolving door approach, with an all-star ensemble of veteran musicians and vocalists cycling through Zevon’s catalog, from deep and deeper cuts to the hits that should have been bigger.

Although he only had one top 40 hit, Zevon earned the respect of his generation’s greatest talents, including Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Neil Young.

Alon Goldsmith/alongoldsmith.com

Jackson Browne, who produced Warren’s classic 1976 self-titled album and co-produced Excitable Boy, headlined the evening alongside Dwight Yoakam, Shooter Jennings, Chris Stills (Stephen’s son), Steve Wynn, Marshall Crenshaw, Fountains of Wayne, and iconic sessions players and Zevon collaborators, including Bob Glaub and Leland Sklar.

A musical education for Warren Zevon fans who only know ‘Werewolves’

For those who only know “Werewolves of London”—Zevon’s sole Top 40 hit, inspired by Phil Everly as a joke and recorded with Fleetwood Mac’s rhythm section—this tribute was an education. Born in Chicago in 1947 to a Russian-Jewish gambler father and Mormon mother, Zevon trained as a classical pianist before finding his voice in the California soft-rock scene of the 1970s. But calling him “soft rock” is like calling a switchblade a letter opener. His songs packed pulp-fiction narratives, literary allusions, and hard-boiled candor into four-minute screenplays where death was often the punchline and tenderness the surprise ending.

A sold-out show at the United Theater in Los Angeles last night honored Warren Zevon’s legacy.

Alon Goldsmith/alongoldsmith.com

Last night’s highlight reel told the story of Zevon’s range: Yoakam brought out the country twang of “Carmelita,” that heartbreaking junkie’s lament that Yoakam himself had recorded. Susan Cowsill delivered a luminous “Mohammed’s Radio,” reminding everyone that Zevon could craft mystical beauty alongside his tales of mercenaries and werewolves. Browne’s version of Desperados Under the Eaves confirmed that it’s perhaps the most beautiful song ever written about holing up in a cheap motel room with the shakes of alcoholism.

An evening full of soul-stirring musical moments

But the evening’s transcendent moment belonged to Billy Valentine, who transformed “Accidentally Like a Martyr” into a gospel soul stirrer, stretching Zevon’s meditation on romantic sacrifice into something that felt like absolution itself. It’s a devastating song about pain and heartbreak yet somehow without self-pityhad the entire crowd on its feet by the end.

Zevon always understood that humor and horror share the same address. How else could he manage to make a song like “Excitable Boy,” about a young psychopath, sound as bouncy and upbeat as a ’70s sitcom theme? You feel that most in songs like “Keep Me in Your Heart,” recorded for Zevon’s final album, The Wind, when he knew he was dying of mesothelioma. Zevon’s longtime collaborator and close friend Jorge Calderón laid it bare with an emotional performance near the end of the tribute that gave the lyrics added resonance:

Shadows are fallin’ and I’m runnin’ out of breath

Keep me in your heart for a while

If I leave you it doesn’t mean I love you any less

Keep me in your heart for a while…

Sometimes when you’re doin’ simple things around the house

Maybe you’ll think of me and smile.

Warren Zevon tribute set list

The set list from last night’s show, part 1

Wild Honey Foundation

Set list, part two

Wild Honey Foundation

Proceeds from the concert benefit the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, where Jordan Zevon now serves as national spokesman, and the Ed Asner Family Center. The Wild Honey Foundation, which has mounted tributes to Big Star, Buffalo Springfield, and The Band since 1994, continues its mission of keeping great music alive while supporting autism research and musicians in need.

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