Nothing's Bad Luck

by C. M. Kushins

  “He drank way too much, yet somehow he was able to stand with his back to the piano,” Gruel also recalled, “reach backwards with his hands and played all the correct notes… The rest of the show was really awkward for all involved. I don’t know why I worked for him after that, but it was a long and loving relationship.”

  Impressed with Gruel’s work at the concert, Warren visited Westwood Musical Instruments the following week and, after trying a few guitars and making chit-chat with owner Fred Walecki—whom Warren warmly considered “a cross between Baudelaire and Johnny Rotten”—made his way to Gruel, persuading him to join the road crew permanently. “He came in one day,” Gruel remembered, “we started talking and he finally said, ‘Would you like a full-time job on my tour?’ I said, ‘Doing what?’ And he goes, ‘Taking care of me, basically.’”

  Although he started off as a general crew member, Gruel’s expertise from years of assisting other acts, such as the Grateful Dead, his impressive photographic work, and his overall kind and bawdy attitude quickly put him up in the ranks of Warren’s team. By mid-1980, Warren playfully, yet honestly, referred to Gruel as his unofficial aide- de-camp—a badge of honor that the jovial man’s man would wear proudly for his full tenure as road manager.

  At thirty years old, Gruel had already lived a lifetime of travel, music, and art. Originally from Michigan, he had moved to San Francisco in 1971 by trading his Chevy Vega for a gram of LSD, which he flipped for a panel van and the open road. Upon his arrival in the Bay Area, he made the acquaintance of Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir. “I was shooting pool with Bob Weir’s wife, Frankie, who was starting her own little country band,” Gruel remembered, “and I got a job hauling equipment.”

  His second gig with Warren at the Universal Amphitheatre went off without a hitch, although seeing Warren on the road quickly gave Gruel a good idea of the experiences that awaited him within Warren’s camp. “I’ll never forget my first job on the road with him,” Gruel later said. “I remember Warren’s wife, Crystal, going down the hallway to get vodka for him out of the bar. He was in the middle of a very serious alcohol problem, but he still had this wonderful wit and humor about him that really was just wonderful.”

  Like all those who had slowly made their way into Warren’s closest circle of friendship and trust, Gruel was characterized by his seemingly infinite patience and understanding of Warren’s faults. As Paul Nelson had attested, “Gruel, who stands six-feet-five and weighs in at around 250 pounds, is so tough that you can strike a match on his muscles. After you’ve lit your cigarette, he’s so polite he’ll go get you an ashtray.”

  Gruel’s appreciation for the music and culture Warren introduced him to solidified an admiration for Warren the artist, and a protective friendship toward Warren the man. At the Chateau Marmont, it had been Gruel who wrestled the .44 Magnum from Warren’s hand and dealt with the police.

  Within days of Crystal moving out, Gruel moved in.

  The ongoing turbulence and upheaval in Warren’s private life had continued throughout the recording of Bad Luck Streak. During the album’s production, Warren not only juggled the studio workload, but the disintegration of his marriage, and the dangerous freedoms that newfound bachelorhood presented. Pulling together the material for Excitable Boy had been difficult enough; this time, it had been a miracle Warren completed the work he did. And setting for himself the same high standards as the two previous endeavors, Warren would later claim his intention of using this album for “unifying the realms of classical music and popular song.” With his hedonistic extracurricular activities well known in the press, his cerebral promises for Bad Luck Streak only added to the album’s expectations. Fans and critics wanted to see what Warren had been cooking up throughout his year of debauchery.

  Like every project Warren approached, Bad Luck Streak was, at its core, a concept album. As he had done with his previous Elektra/ Asylum releases, Warren produced a balanced blend of tracks that ran the gamut of genre and intricate composition: traditional rockers, autobiographical ballads, a humorous sports biography, and an obligatory visit into foreign intrigue all made their way into his latest opus. In the wake of Excitable Boy’s success, Warren’s struggles with addiction had been made very public, giving this new release an aura of “comeback” to many critics. To compensate, the rockers rocked harder, the ballads were more heartbreaking, and the injected humor ran deeper into the bizarre. With conscious efforts in “changing and experimenting with the form of the songs,” he had also introduced the use of synthesizers into his instrumentation for the first time, making for a brilliant and strange juxtaposition with the samples of his Symphony No. 1 woven throughout the album.

  True to their word, Browne and Wachtel declined their previous roles as acting producers, although both would perform on various tracks. Instead, Warren opted to co-produce the album alongside Greg Ladanyi, giving himself just enough creative control to shape the finished version as he saw fit, while having Ladanyi’s expertise and professional demeanor as anchors for the sessions’ workflow. It was Warren’s first attempt at such a working relationship since his aborted collaboration with Kim Fowley on 1969’s Wanted Dead or Alive.

  Much had changed in the decade since Warren’s disastrous first solo attempt: he now not only had additional years of experience on the road and in the studio under his belt, but two moderately “hit” albums and a significantly larger budget with which to work. But much hadn’t changed either, the least of which was the frantic egotism that could manifest when the booze and drugs flowed liberally throughout the studio. Without Browne or Wachtel to guide the new project’s consistency and overall polish, the shape of Bad Luck Streak was left up to Warren’s own whims, making for a finished collection that somehow autobiographically symbolized its creator’s own mental state at the time: conceptual and energetic, pensive and self-reflective—and with flashes of brilliant imagery, melody, and advanced composition. “He was very prepared when he went into that studio,” George Gruel recalled.

  In the end, the strongest material of Bad Luck Streak outweighed how uneven the album seemed to some, especially without the keen collaborative hands of Browne or Wachtel. If Warren was a perfectionist when it came to presenting a work that would meet his own standards, Browne offered the same creative obsession when presenting a finished product to the executives who had staked it.

  But that wasn’t to say that Warren hadn’t written some new incredible material, miraculous considering the events surrounding the album’s preproduction. From the very first moments of the album’s title track, listeners of Warren’s previous albums were made very much aware that they were still in capable hands. Following the opening bars of an idyllic stringed overture, the tranquility is abruptly halted by the unmistakable crack of two gunshots—Warren’s trusty Smith & Wesson Model 29 .44 Magnum, fired off like a starter’s pistol, signaling the grand commencement of his rock and roll.

  The album’s striking opening had been achieved with the creative use of Warren’s gun fired directly into a wine barrel filled with sand. With a lot of trial and error—and plenty of nervousness on the part of producer Ladanyi—the team aimed multiple microphones at the receptacle and watched as Warren took aim himself, blasting the barrel as a wild substitute for a traditional handclap to start the song.

  “Nobody had a clue if it would work,” said George Gruel, recalling the anxiety that the improvised stunt caused among the crew members. “What if the sound concussion blows out the studio window between the console and the room? What will it do to the mics? Will the sand contain the 244 grains of lead? Kaboom! Kaboom! in perfect time with the track. Window still intact. Mics not smoking. Warren still standing. We dug through the sand and found the distorted blobs of lead. We did it.”

  As an opening track, “Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School” deliberately plays upon the bad-boy public persona that Warren had quickly cultivated as a traveling solo act, but with a pleading and regretful self-awareness of his crime
s. “I been acting like a fool—I swear to God I’ll change,” plays more as a painful negotiation than a declaration of love, meshing the track’s hard-rock sensibility with one of the artist’s most vulnerable writings. No more universal than Eric Clapton’s similarly gut-wrenching “Bell-Bottom Blues,” Warren’s musical cries to Crystal were transparent, despite the tongue-in-cheek meaning of the song’s title: “dance academy” had been a nefarious euphemism for “brothel” since the mid-seventeenth century—much to Warren’s intellectual amusement.

  The dramatic incorporation of the gunfire had also been part of Warren’s overall scheme to have a music video to accompany the album’s release. Two years earlier, the label had green-lit the production for a modest promotional video to accompany “Werewolves of London,” hoping the extra push would garner their flagship single even more attention. In a few simple takes, Warren and the band were filmed performing the song, the footage intercut with good-sport Jorge Calderón running amok through the street wearing a werewolf mask. With few television venues to screen the short film, it remained a fun experiment that had worked to entertain the participants more than attract viewership. Nevertheless, Warren had enjoyed the side project and saw both the creative and marketing potential in producing more videos. In his ongoing attempt to remain clean and relatively sober, part of his new regimen included martial arts training, as well as ballet lessons with JoAnn DeVito, the esteemed choreographer who had trained John Travolta in preparation for his career-defining turn in Saturday Night Fever. The latter of these two new passions would not only provide a suitable motif for the album’s cover, but Warren found it equally perfect for a promo video that could be both elegant and titillating.

  “The classical intro and the song were conceived together as a rock video, which no one would pay for, since no one seemed to know what a rock video was,” Warren later recalled. Although music videos would soon become an integral part of the marketing and promotion of hot new music, the secondary project proved too expensive—at least to the increasingly impatient executives paying Warren’s studio bill.

  The majority of the album’s sessions employed not so much a “core” ensemble, but a roster of familiar faces that were implemented from song to song, many of whom were freshly off of Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty Tour. Although this practice would contribute to the negative criticism regarding the album’s lack of continuity, cherry-picking his lineup gave Warren the opportunity to craft the individual sound of each track according to the unique musical sensibilities of each player. Rather than see this as a roadblock, Warren treated each track as the creation of a standalone entity, ultimately leading to a collection of well-polished gems that, unfortunately, lacked the tapestried sweep of Warren Zevon or the persona-defining Excitable Boy. Regardless of any shortcomings that A&R would find, the sterling collection nonetheless contained a few solid possibilities for airplay.

  For the raucous title track, frequent collaborator Rick Marotta came straight off Warren’s notorious “Jett Rink Tour” to perform his signature drums and percussion; likewise, David Lindley brought his lap steel guitar and Leland Sklar provided bass, both coming straight from Browne’s road show. Following the positive experiences of working with the Sid Sharp Strings on the epic recording of “Desperadoes Under the Eaves” in 1976, Warren retained the ensemble to interpret the album’s numerous orchestral compositions. More so than any previous jaunts into the studio, the recording of Bad Luck Streak gave Warren this rare opportunity to flex his arranger’s muscles, and he pushed for as much time with the large string section as the budget would allow—including using the session as an excuse to record portions of his Symphony No. 1, long relegated as handwritten sheet music in the purgatory of his desk drawer at home.

  In concert, Warren often performed covers of other artists’ works, particularly the rock and pop songs that had ignited his imagination as a teen. Aside from the loving renditions of favorite Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen compositions that he would incorporate into his set lists throughout the years, he would also occasionally perform some poppy bubblegum hit that was then tearing up the airwaves, a humorous jab at the mainstream appeal that always seemed to slip through his fingers. Now, in another first since his long-forgotten 1969 cover of the New Orleans Mardi Gras anthem “Iko Iko,” Warren opted to cover a favorite from his youth: “A Certain Girl,” an old R&B staple penned by hitmaker Allen Toussaint under his publishing pseudonym “Naomi Neville.” It had first been a minor hit in 1961 for soul singer Ernie K-Doe, then a rock-infused B-side for the Yardbirds, featuring one of the earliest commercial recordings of Eric Clapton on lead guitar, three years later. Warren had performed his own wild rendition in concert throughout the Excitable Boy tour, using the song as an excuse to leap from his piano bench and offering audiences his own personal pyrotechnics, and making a studio arrangement all that much easier to produce.

  For Warren’s modernized and energetic recording, he pulled out all the stops in bringing the energy of his live version into the studio, making this session date a rare reunion of “the Gentleman Boys”—joining album constants percussionist Marotta and bassist Sklar were Jackson Browne, Jorge Calderón, and Waddy Wachtel, all of whom made themselves available for a brief return to the sonic symbiosis of the previous two albums. But despite his bustling schedule at the time, Wachtel recalled his confusion that Warren had retained Marotta for the album’s sessions, yet had never attempted to persuade he and Browne to return as producers. “I remember saying to him, ‘We just scored a hit record the last time out, and you only know Rick [Marotta] through me, but you’ll fire me and Jackson?’ He really wanted to do his own thing with the album, so I said, ‘Good luck to you,’ and Jackson and I came down for only a few songs.”

  George Gruel remembered that Warren would come into the studio fully prepared for the day’s sessions with cassette tapes of his audible “sketches,” or ready to demonstrate the intricate parts on the instruments available while Ladanyi and Wachtel looked on. “When [Warren would] play it,” Gruel said, “I could already see Waddy thinking about the lead and rhythm parts. They’d start to jam on the song in the studio, this is where the magic happened.”

  As a bonus, Eagles alumni Don Felder stopped down for the “A Certain Girl” session, adding even more electricity to the lead guitar of Wachtel coupled with Jorge Calderón’s rhythm work. In his selection of the song, Warren kept one other reason close to his chest: the song’s signature refrain—“What’s her name? / I can’t tell ya!”—had become more autobiographical than some of the tunes Warren had written. He’d wasted no time in finding another woman in his life, and it wasn’t long before the spare seat beside the engineer’s console vacated by Crystal was taken over by twenty-four-year-old Knots Landing starlet Kim Lankford.

  “Jungle Work” was a new collaboration with Calderón, giving listeners the rock and roll soaked in sweat, blood, and intrigue they’d come to expect from Warren. The instant fan favorite played as both a thematic sequel to “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” and one of his earliest experimental compositions from 1969’s Wanted Dead or Alive, the psychedelic “Gorilla.” Here, Warren told the gripping tale of a late-night siege undertaken by an airborne SWAT team, all armed to the teeth with M16s, Ingram guns, and a willingness to parachute into hell for their hard-earned pay. As spiritual descendants of the ghostly mercenary Roland, the guns-for-hire in “Jungle Work” express the morbid joy of their vocation with the primal chant that forms the stoic chorus: “Strength and muscle and jungle work!”

  The session for “Jungle Work” featured the core lineup from “Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School,” sans David Lindley’s lap steel guitar; in his place, Joe Walsh lends a ferocious lead guitar—making him the second Eagle member to make an album appearance. The song’s co-writer, Jorge Calderón, added more guitars and vocals, rounding out the mercenary anthem’s thumping harmonies.

  In what could be considered Warren’s third great love ballad—after, chrono
logically, “Accidentally Like a Martyr” and “Hasten Down the Wind,” both for Jordan’s mother, Tule Livingston—“Empty-Handed Heart” was an unflinching letter of regret written specifically for Crystal. “Sometimes I wonder,” its narrator confides, “if I’ll make it with you,” sadly accepting that with allowing the relationship to wither and end, they have “thrown down diamonds in the sand.” With the parting words of advice—to “leave the fire behind you and start,” presumably, a new life—Warren appeared to offer his wife a final farewell.

  For the session, Warren gathered the closest he had to a “core” group—Rick Marotta, Leland Sklar, and himself on piano. In the second of two memorable appearances, Waddy Wachtel returned, lending a power-driven lead guitar to the song’s bittersweet tone. Perhaps the most appropriate guest on the track, however, was Linda Ronstadt, who performed a heartbreaking descant against Warren’s own primary vocal melody line. The result was a near-operatic conversation between two lovers, parting ways at the end of the affair.

  While a four-bar classical overture opened the album itself, the twenty-six-second track entitled “Interlude No. 1” that followed “Empty-Handed Heart” was actually the first of two extended samples from Warren’s extracurricular passion project, Symphony No. 1. Having the budget to enlist Sid Sharp’s full orchestral string section had proved the perfect opportunity to have some of the work-in-progress performed and professionally recorded, and its inclusion on Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School would finally demonstrate Warren’s composing abilities for all to hear.

  As an unfinished opus, Warren’s symphony was the longest-running project he’d ever worked on, having started toying with it in his late teens. As the years passed and financial setbacks dictated the instruments and equipment available, Warren’s classical composition had mandatorily taken a back seat to more pressing projects. But with whatever downtime—and sobriety—his schedule allowed, Warren would sit down at the piano and add to the symphony with incremental progress. Still, the project haunted him like a ghost of his younger, purer self.