Nothing's Bad Luck

by C. M. Kushins

  The siblings hadn’t cracked Billboard’s Top 10 since 1962—almost a decade—and yearned for a comeback. Both were seasoned musicians, and neither had lost sight of the country sounds that had influenced them as teens. Their latest albums relied heavily on the music that they had grown up listening to with their father, guitarist Ike Everly, and the close family friend who had groomed them, Nashville legend Chet Atkins. As luck would have it, the brothers needed a piano player who could replicate that style for the upcoming tour.

  Marks arranged an audition for Warren, who proudly unveiled his latest work-in-progress, “Hasten Down the Wind,” a melancholy ballad written for Tule. Immediately impressed, Phil Everly’s only question for Warren was if he could play like Floyd Cramer.

  Of course he could. He was hired on the spot.

  A steady paycheck, the promise of future studio recording sessions, and the invaluable experience of networking with a few famed musicians were just the icing on the larger cake. As musical director, Warren could also flex his bandleader muscles. Working under tour manager Don Wayne, his first assignment was to assemble the brothers’ new band. He reveled in the creative control he was given.

  None of the musicians he hired were novices. Already familiar with the Everly songbook and style, bassist Robert Knigge was retained for the tour. On drums, Warren hired Gene Gunnels, an alumnus from a psychedelic rock ensemble called Strawberry Alarm Clock. Of course, Warren would be handling all keyboard duties, just leaving the crucial vacancy for a powerful guitarist.

  Robert Wachtel was born on May 24, 1947, in the Jackson Heights section of Queens, New York. When he was only six years old, his mother, Rhonda, died after a long battle with lung cancer. Devastated by his wife’s death, Harry Wachtel adopted a stern approach to his two sons’ upbringings. Although Robert and older brother Jimmy both had early aspirations toward art and music, their father pushed for more stable career paths. Even as a young child, Robert—or “Waddy,” as he became known to friends—had been fascinated with the guitar and wanted one of his own. However, the last thing Harry Wachtel wanted for his son was the life of a professional musician. If it had been up to him, young Robert would have become a doctor.

  “My first guitar was a Kamico,” remembered Wachtel. “It was a gorgeous thing to me when I was a kid, and eventually my dad broke down and got me a Gibson L-7 hole guitar when I was ten. I always had it with me and about the next year, I convinced my father into getting me a Les Paul. I ended up using that one for years.”

  Although Waddy Wachtel was destined to raise hell as a rock and roller, his earliest musical influences came from brother Jimmy’s extensive collection of jazz records and from a piano-playing cousin who showed him the basics of reading sheet music. A few years later, a guitar instructor named Gene Dell helped broaden Wachtel’s appreciation for the electric guitar and taught the left-handed boy to adapt his playing backwards, “normal” in a right-handed world.

  As Wachtel entered his teens, he attracted the attention of neighbor Rudolf Schramm, head of the NBC staff orchestra and music teacher at Carnegie Hall. Taken with the young man’s natural talent, Schramm agreed to give instruction in music theory and composition three times a week. By sixteen, Wachtel was often “in the basement, smoking cigarettes and drinking ginger ale, writing a million songs.” Wachtel found gigs around New York City before forming his own band, the Orphans, which toured throughout New England over the next few years. In 1968, he moved his latest band, Twice Nicely, to Los Angeles, and took his nineteen-year-old girlfriend, Crystal, along for the ride. By then, Wachtel had become an experienced gun-for-hire in the studio, solidifying his status as a go-to session man. With that reputation growing, he soon disbanded Twice Nicely and was a regular figure around the Los Angeles rock scene.

  In 1971, he got wind that the Everly Brothers were scouting for a guitarist. “I got a call from a friend of mine to come over and discuss some recordings we were planning,” Wachtel remembered. “We’re in the middle of discussing a session that was coming up and all of a sudden, he goes, ‘Oh, by the way, the Everly Brothers are looking for a guitar player.’ And I just went, ‘You gotta be kidding me? That’s my gig! I know every song and every part.’ So, he handed me a phone number and said, ‘Yeah, call this guy—Sandy Zevon.’”

  Wachtel had grown up loving the Everlys’ music and knew all their tunes. He figured he was a shoe-in for the job, but it wasn’t exactly love at first sight between him and the Everlys’ new bandleader. The day of the audition, Wachtel showed up looking every bit the part of a rock and roller, sporting a ponytail, long beard, rumpled T-shirt, and clogs. “All of a sudden, in walks this guy wearing a seersucker suit and a fedora,” Wachtel recalled. “Warren goes over all the songs with me and goes, ‘You just listen and we’ll play it—then you can play with us.’ And I said to him, ‘Well, okay, but we can skip this step, since I know all these songs.’ Warren just looks at me from behind the piano and goes, ‘No—you just listen,’ really pissing me off. When we finally got to a song called ‘Walk Right Back,’ I knew Warren was playing it wrong because it has this really specific lick in it. So, I corrected him and that really pissed him off, and he goes, ‘I know how this goes—I’m the bandleader!’ But Bob Knigge, on bass, says, ‘Hey, wait, I think this guy is right.’ So for a while, there was this little rub between Warren and me.”

  Wachtel was confident that his ability to play all the Everly songs had earned him the gig, but Warren was sure to add a final jab at the end of the audition. Wachtel remembered, “Before I leave, Warren says to me, really irritated, ‘You probably got the job, but one thing—you have to cut off the beard.’ I went nuts. I said, ‘What the fuck are you talking about? I’m not even working for you yet—and where are the fucking Everly Brothers, anyway?’ ‘Oh,’ he goes, ‘they’re in the studio making an album.’ So we went back and forth like that, and on my way out, Warren yells across the room, ‘Okay, wise guy, what’s this?’ and plays, like, the one classical piece I knew. I yell back, ‘That’s Beethoven’s Fourth in G, asshole,’ and I walked out the door. That week, Warren had to call me to say that I got the job, and I knew it killed him to have to do it. We were like oil and water at the beginning, until we realized how great we worked together.”

  The strained nature of the relationship didn’t last long. Once Warren and Wachtel began playing together, their musical kinship became fiercely apparent. While the two musicians were masters of different instruments, both had been musical prodigies in their youth and shared a natural inclination toward theory and composition. When Warren sat at the piano and Waddy gripped his axe, the two seemed to communicate almost telepathically. Soon, mandatory rehearsal dates spilled over into all-night jam sessions.

  Warren was still building up a repertoire of new material for a possible second solo album and soon viewed Wachtel as a confidante and collaborator. The guitarist became privy to Warren’s latest musical sketches long before anyone else, often adding new ideas into the mix.

  The tour launched at Knott’s Berry Farm on September 3, 1971. With Warren at the helm, the Everly Brothers band then set off for a string of dates throughout Western Europe, beginning in Holland and cutting through England and West Germany. Being an integral part of the tour was a finishing school, of sorts, for Warren, who later claimed that the experience had acted as “a fantastic introduction to the road.”

  He took note of the professionalism that the brothers displayed night after night, as well as their indifference to such a transient lifestyle. One particularly turbulent flight to a gig booked at a ski resort seemed, for him, to sum up the life of a seasoned musician. “It was the kind of flight where they serve you coffee and a moment later, it’s on the ceiling,” Warren later recalled. “I looked around and Don was sitting in his seat with pitch-black, dark glasses on, calmly reading Time magazine—and the plane was all over the place. And I looked around the other side, and Phil—he was smiling. He had his camera out, taking pictures out the window
of the engine that was failing. And I thought, ‘This is cool.’”

  Over the course of the tour, Warren and Wachtel also grew closer. Like David Marks, Wachtel opened Warren’s eyes to new musical genres, particularly the country sounds that the classically trained pianist had often overlooked in his youth. “Late at night, back in the room, we would always talk music and argue,” Wachtel remembered. “We were always talking and arguing about music. I’d play him some John Lennon song, and he’d have something to say about it, and I’d go, ‘Man, you’ll die never having written anything as good as that,’ and we would laugh and jam. But, we always agreed on the Rolling Stones, we were both fans of them. At the time, Warren knew a lot more about blues than I did. Heavy stuff, way past just the British blues that had been popular.”

  Warren, in turn, continued to share his latest compositions. One of Wachtel’s personal favorites was “Carmelita,” a haunting ballad about love and heroin. He was soon putting together his own finger-style guitar arrangement of the tune and playing it for other people. Neither man was a stranger to the dark content of the song. Both musicians had already done their fair share of drugs in the past, indulgences that only increased as the Everly Brothers tour rolled on. While Wachtel had smoked plenty of marijuana, snorted cocaine, and dropped acid in his youth, he had never been much of a drinker. There, Warren had him beat.

  Between Warren’s growing dependency on alcohol and both Don and Phil Everly’s own thresholds for all-night bar binges, it wasn’t long before the substance abuse on tour was out of control. As had been the case with David Marks and Kim Fowley only a few years before, Warren’s new bandmates noticed the shift in his demeanor when the drinking and drugs took hold. When the tour finally returned home for its US dates at the end of November, Wachtel finally saw, firsthand, the effects that drugs and alcohol could have on Warren’s behavior and productivity. Warren, high on alcohol and Quaaludes, threw his acoustic guitar at Wachtel, who shrugged it off but didn’t forget it.

  It was the type of episode that had become all too common with Warren and his treatment of friends and family. Both his life and burgeoning career had slowly become defined by stretches of genuine warmth and creative genius, yet punctuated by jarring moments of extreme jealousy and ingratitude. In the end, Warren’s charm and intelligence would always win out, bringing back those closest to him time and time again. The conflict made Warren’s music deep and autobiographical, but his creative process dangerously self-destructive. This cycle would continue for years.

  After a few final stops in Ohio and Milwaukee at the beginning of December, the band made it home just in time for the holidays. For Warren, things with Tule were turbulent, at best. When the band landed at LAX, he surprised Wachtel by asking for a lift—but not home. Wachtel’s girlfriend, Crystal, had come to pick him up. She had heard much about the infamous Warren Zevon.

  “Waddy had called me all the time from the road and had already played me ‘Carmelita’ over the phone,” Crystal remembered. “He was just enamored of the songs that Warren had been writing. When I went to pick him up at the airport, he told me that Warren was on the outs with his partner at the time, Jordan’s mother, and asked if we could drop him off at the Tropicana hotel. I had this Chevy sports van and Waddy was sitting in the front seat, rolling joints, and Warren was in the back seat. We kept looking at each other in the rearview mirror and there were definitely sparks right away.”

  Crystal couldn’t shake the instant connection she felt with Warren, who remained quietly seated in the back of the car. Save for a few wry quips, he certainly did not come off as the intellectual party animal that Wachtel had built up over the phone. Intrigued, she couldn’t keep her eyes off the pensive wiseass in her rearview mirror. She was instantly hooked. Warren’s attraction to Crystal was equally strong and just as fast. Unbeknownst to anyone involved, the seeds of a love triangle were already forming. Crystal’s playful intelligence, combined with her acceptance of bad-boy behavior, made her the ideal companion for the likes of both Wachtel and Warren Zevon. She could keep up with the literary and intellectual banter going on around her, while dropping acid and giggling with even the brashest of the rock-and-roll roadies. Crystal later claimed that with Warren, it had been “love at first sight.”

  Although things with Tule were merely on the rocks, he lied to Wachtel’s companion and claimed that he was already single. Crystal took note of the fib. When she bumped into Warren and Tule at a local grocer the following week, Warren lied again, sheepishly claiming that Tule had started dating Wachtel. “For the next few weeks, it seemed like I was bumping into him everywhere,” Crystal remembered. “I’d see him at the supermarket, the dentist office—and this was LA, a very big town.”

  Between Warren’s “aww-shucks” boyish charm and the flirtatious glances, both he and Crystal knew there was an unspoken chemistry. Wachtel was either oblivious to the attraction between his buddy and his girl, or—more than likely—indifferent to it. With his own career in the Los Angeles music scene taking off, he let the indiscretion slide.

  Crystal Ann Brelsford may have been a true product of the 1960s, but she had been raised in a much more traditional household than her freewheeling adulthood let on. The stable home-life provided by Clifford and Barbara Brelsford had instilled in their daughter a maturity and moral conservativeness that would often clash with the hedonistic surroundings of her young adulthood.

  As a teenager, wanderlust had led Crystal to Sugarbush, Vermont, where she met and fell in love with Waddy Wachtel. When Twice Nicely moved to Los Angeles in 1968, she went along for the ride. For the brief period that the rock band was under the wing of Cowsills’ patriarch, William “Bud” Cowsill, Crystal worked a job in the Cowsills’ fan club office. Eventually, Wachtel began to rack up his fair share of groupies and Crystal grew disillusioned with the “openness” of their relationship. With two foster children in her care, she fled Los Angeles and attempted to start a new life in British Columbia. To remain there, Crystal married a Canadian citizen.

  On her wedding night, Wachtel phoned, announcing that he had just gotten a plum gig as the new guitarist for the Everly Brothers and was about to head off to Europe on tour—even though the music director who hired him was kind of an asshole. Conflicted by the romantic feelings that Wachtel’s call had stirred up, the now recently divorced Crystal returned to Los Angeles and the two reconciled. While on the road with the Everly band, Wachtel phoned nightly and shared stories and anecdotes about the tour.

  Soon enough, Crystal noticed that the name Warren Zevon had become ever present in her boyfriend’s adventurous tales.

  Warren and Crystal’s mutual attraction came to a head weeks later.

  Wachtel had been booked to record an antiwar song at Sound City Studios for friends Keith Olsen and Curt Boettcher, a successful production duo that had previously scored hits for the Association and blues rockers Fleetwood Mac. For the session, Wachtel had invited as many friends as possible to add lush background vocals to the track. Amid the drunken chaos of the recording session, Warren strategically sidled next to Crystal, slyly putting his arms around her and making certain that they had to share a single headset. Once the recording was complete, the full group headed for Benny K’s, a hip venue where Wachtel and his musician buddies played a regular gig.

  Following the performance, Warren offered to drive both Crystal and Wachtel home, knowing that the guitarist had been crashing at the home of a mutual friend, Arnie Geller. He purposely dropped Wachtel off first, keeping his girlfriend all to himself. At the house, she had recently rented an upright piano for the benefit of her two foster children and invited Warren in to try it out. Knowing an opportunity when he saw it, he serenaded her all night—then the two finally consummated weeks of sexual tension.

  “That night, we both found ourselves at the same place at the same time while Waddy was playing,” Crystal recalled. “And that was that—it was very quick. He came home with me and had just started to write ‘D
esperadoes Under the Eaves.’ We had this amazing, romantic night, but in the middle of everything, he’d suddenly come up with another line or another idea and then run to my piano! Then, he’d sit back down with me and we would be romantic again—and then he’d get up again and go back to the piano.”

  At dawn the following morning, Tule called the house looking for Warren. He took the call in the other room and, after a few moments, returned. He asked Crystal to drive him home to gather his things.

  The Everly Brothers band had a few precious weeks off before launching the extended US leg of the tour in January 1972. During the break, Warren officially set up camp at Crystal’s home. He used the opportunity to get to know her foster children—Cindy and Bart—and to tinker with new songwriting projects on the house piano.

  His drinking hadn’t gotten any better. It wasn’t long before Crystal realized that Warren viewed alcohol as a creative stimulant, like many of his literary influences. He was particularly amused by a nickname he had coined for himself—“F. Scott Fitzevon”—and rather than admit to the darker implications of addiction, he would often wear that persona as a badge of honor.

  Crystal, however, didn’t see much honor in how Warren’s mood could shift while under the influence—especially with two small children in the house. Arguments were commonplace. Within the first few months of their relationship, she fell victim to his frequent verbal assaults, primarily regarding her former boyfriends. Booze and jealousy seemed to be the usual catalysts for Warren’s rage and she learned to give him a wide berth. The couple separated more than once, with Warren again finding himself crashing on friends’ couches or at the Tropicana.