Causing all hell to break loose back in Los Angeles seemed like a perfect homecoming. As New York City had consistently been picked as the starting point for Warren’s previous tours, the five-night engagement at the Roxy in West Hollywood was billed as the grand finale of his US tour. For a truly definitive representation of the Bad Luck Streak tour, the entire lineup of Boulder returned for the hotly anticipated residency, alongside David Landau on lead guitars. When Warren announced that the concerts were to be professionally recorded for a live album release, there was cautious excitement; while being part of a major rock album came as a pleasant bonus to the younger members of the band, Landau later admitted having heard rumors that the album was more of a contractual obligation, with Elektra/Asylum weighing their options regarding Warren’s future with the label. As Landau said later, “It was exciting to do, but I also got a sense that Warren’s success was on a downswing.” His suspicions were deepened by Elektra/Asylum’s plans to have the live album rushed out by the end of 1980, curiously releasing two of Warren’s mandatory projects within the same year.
Whether or not Warren was aware he’d been treading on thin ice within the industry, he approached the prospect of a live album with even more optimism than Bad Luck Streak itself. With the studio album, Warren had wrestled with the burdens of writer’s block and his rapidly disintegrating marriage; now, he would be crafting an album primarily made up of prewritten material. He’d be able to emphasize his wild energy and stage persona. Rather than negatively interpret Elektra/Asylum’s plans for the album’s quick turnaround as their putting a shelf life on his contract, Warren viewed the live recording as the crown jewel of the tour—a proper representation of this era in his career in all its maniacal majesty. With Warren fueled by a combination of painkillers and steroids that helped keep his alcohol intake tempered, Jackson Browne knowingly labeled it his “karate-on-speed period.”
The engagement ran from August 17 through the 21, and each night included a varied form of the same set list, culling from fan favorites and crowd-pleasers that had electrified audiences throughout the tour. For the occasion, Warren broke down and wrote two new songs, making the release something other than a live “best of” compilation: “The Sin,” a hard-edged track in the self-deprecating vein of “Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School,” and “Stand in the Fire,” a thunderous commencement anthem penned just for the opening of the show. Appropriately summoning up the rock-and-roll spectacle Warren envisioned, the song not only lent its title to the promotional materials for the Roxy shows, but for the eventual album itself.
Warren later compared to Paul Nelson the experience of playing the Roxy to returning home in triumph, candidly admitting, “Let’s just say that it was like rescuing a little boy who had fallen through the ice. Rescuing him while the whole world was watching.”
For Stand in the Fire, Warren cherry-picked ten of his best-known radio hits, a few of his personal favorites, and some of the hardest rockers off Bad Luck Streak. As had become a practice on both his studio albums and in live performance, there was one cover song; rather than performing the flagship single “A Certain Girl,” Warren opted for two favorites from his youth, performing a medley of “Gunslinger” and “Bo Diddley,” both hit oldies by the R&B artist. David Landau was on hand to record and mix the final selections, and Jimmy Wachtel returned for the promotional photos and graphic design—all adding to the polish and consistency of the live album within Warren’s string of releases.
As a stand-alone album released within the same time frame of Bad Luck Streak, the live recording served as its spiritual companion piece, making a perfect balance of the cerebral and the kinetic, with each record emphasizing a different side of Warren’s mystique. Released on December 26, 1980, Stand in the Fire spent a disappointing ten weeks on the Billboard chart, peaking at Number 80 on February 14, 1981. Although live albums were never regarded as the sure-fire bestsellers of even the most popular artists, the sixty-spot drop within only half a year of Bad Luck Streak left the ambiguous notions of a market oversaturated with Warren, or a public that still didn’t know him well enough to rush out for either release.
As had been expected due to the largely positive reviews of his tour, Stand in the Fire earned some of the finest reviews Warren had received since his 1976 debut. Still, some familiar critics remained tainted by the residue of the polarizing Bad Luck Streak. “The three best songs are all from Excitable Boy,” wrote consistent critical frenemy Robert Christgau in The Village Voice, “and only one of the two new originals stands the fire, but any Zevon album that bypasses ‘Hasten Down the Wind’ and ‘Accidentally Like a Martyr’ is the one I’ll play when I need my fix.”
While claiming that Warren seemed to be enjoying “his ongoing public exorcism,” Boo Browning of the Washington Post also noted that he had “rediscovered the art of turning his scathing wit on himself, a quality conspicuously absent from Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School.” Browning added, “It’s as though someone or something grabs Zevon by the collar and jostles that stuff right out of him—not just the music, either, but all that crushing optimism and Pollyanna pessimism, all that life-affirming blood and gore, all that alliteration and onomatopoeia, too. And never has Zevon been all shook up like he is on Stand in the Fire, his latest, live album.”
Popular late-night host David Letterman later concurred with Paul Nelson’s early assessment, calling Stand in the Fire the greatest live rock album he’d ever heard.
Although the tour was a success, it had only covered the United States. It was acknowledged that Warren had a solid international following, and with Stand in the Fire available as a form of “teaser” for those potential audiences, a European leg of the tour was in the works. Stand in the Fire had powerfully captured on vinyl the experience of the Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School tour, and with the live album in record stores, Warren was temporarily free of pressing deadlines and obligations—and happy to be settling into his new home with Kim Lankford.
As for the triumphant climax of a tour during which all hell had broken loose, Warren had the best memento he could have asked for:
“After the Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School tour in 1980, we had a lot of T-shirts left over,” George Gruel remembered. “Warren and I decided to donate them to a mental hospital. We got a photo sent to us of quite a few of the patients wearing the shirts. On the shirt was an Uzi laying on top of ballet shoes, similar to the back of the album. It made quite a photo.”
Stand in the Fire had been released the final week of the year, making for the disadvantage of missing the holiday season—yet allowing Warren a suitable “release” for the start of 1981. Warren began the year reveling in the curated balance of mild-mannered literary rock star before plans for any European dates were booked, sharing with Lankford their own form of casual domesticity.
Paul Nelson, still in the throes of his own battle with Rolling Stone regarding his massive, always-in-progress opus on Warren’s addiction and “recovery,” had remained a constant friend throughout this period. He viewed Warren’s new relationship and outlook on life with a hopeful optimism. “I fly to LA in October,” he later wrote. “Zevon and Lankford have moved into a new house, this one not cursed with red bathtubs.”
Warren had viewed the Zorada house as the summation of his ongoing road to sobriety and redemption; with his fresh start embodied in his “controlled” use of substances, fitness regimen, and increasingly serious relationship with a young starlet, Warren had taken Nelson’s old advice to heart: this time, he was going to enjoy it all.
During his trip to Los Angeles, Nelson had planned yet another of his famed surprises for his old friend. Under the guise of a simple visit to Warren and Lankford’s home, Nelson was actually in town for an exclusive interview with mutual hero Clint Eastwood—and had invited the movie legend and his then girlfriend, Sondra Locke, to the Zorada house. Nelson wrote, “Eastwood remembers Warren from three years ago (‘He did everything but drink vodka from a s
ilver boot then’) and is delighted at the change.”
One of the more glamorous aspects of Warren’s new life was his status as one-half of a celebrity “power couple.” Thanks to both his own current star power and Lankford’s substantial industry recognition, Warren’s social circle widely expanded past the superstar musicians who were already some of his closest friends. Hollywood stars and members of the literati could now all be counted among his regular visitors and companions. During their last visit to New York, Nelson and Jay Cocks had orchestrated for the couple an intimate dinner in the Manhattan home of Martin Scorsese. Awestruck by one of his cinematic heroes, Warren was humbled to learn that his music had, apparently, helped the famed director get through his recent divorce from Isabella Rossellini. In return, Warren had dedicated Stand in the Fire “For Marty.”
Many of Lankford’s Knots Landing castmates would stop by the Zorada house on a regular basis, sometimes socially, or often to run lines for that week’s script. Paul Nelson had been present during a jovial visit by Lankford’s co-star, Jim Houghton. But while that night had ended with clever conversation and card tricks, a separate visit by dashing leading man Michael O’Hare ended in blood. Upon discovering O’Hare’s amorous intentions for Lankford, Warren drunkenly proclaimed his own intention to spit on the young actor’s mother’s grave. It was only a matter of time before Warren had mouthed off to the wrong person, and O’Hare was it. After chasing Warren into the backyard with a hatchet, the actor tried to drown him in the decorative koi pond. Once George Gruel and Aaron Norris were able to get O’Hare subdued, the actor got in a single vicious punch, sending one of Warren’s teeth flying.
Not all of Warren’s dinner parties ended in fisticuffs. In fact, some friends suspected his brazen, ego-driven arrogance was being worn as a misguided badge of honor. Famed novelist Thomas McGuane was one recent acquaintance who, as a writer, could sympathize with Warren’s outwardly conflicted nature. McGuane, too, held near-impossible standards for his own work, citing a mantra that echoed Warren’s own creative philosophy: “Find a way to avoid trivializing the serious stuff without undermining the comedy of it.”
Aside from penning bestselling novels, among them the critically praised Panama, the Montana-based McGuane also practiced a stoic form of “genius for living well,” according to McGuane’s neighbor, fellow writer William Kittredge. In recent years, Hollywood had beckoned McGuane to try his hand at screenwriting. The forty-year-old wordsmith had experienced moderate success with The Missouri Breaks, starring Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, and had just completed his script-doctoring for Tom Horn, a star-vehicle for Steve McQueen. McGuane’s former reputation for drinking and “some drugs,” plus two divorces, had once earned him a nickname of his own, “Captain Berserko.”
Predictably, Warren was drawn to it all. As had been the case with Expos pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee, he now deliberately sought out McGuane to make a formal introduction. The novelist was staying at Warren’s notorious old haunt, the Chateau Marmont, while working on Tom Horn, making it easy for Warren to track him down. Over the phone, the two hit it off right away. Lankford recalled, “Warren really respected and loved Tom… [He] was in town and staying at the Chateau Marmont—the worst of worst places. We had him come and stay at our house.”
After expressing a mutual appreciation for each other’s work, Warren and McGuane decided to take a stab at writing a song together. In the past, Warren had only acquiesced to collaborating with trusted fellow musicians; in now working with McGuane, he began a lifelong practice of soliciting authors he admired to partake in his creative process. “Warren was pretty enthusiastic about writers,” McGuane later recalled, “and I think writing was what interested him, in a way, more than anything else he did.”
McGuane had also fought tooth and nail for an emotional stability that Warren still strove to achieve, and their creative styles reflected some core differences. The author later described their dynamic over those three days as similar to “passing ships,” adding, “I’d be up doing things in the day and [Warren would] be sleeping.… I was very fond of Warren, but we really didn’t have the world’s greatest comfort level because he was so intense… But that was his style, everything dialed up to ten.”
Despite their conflicted schedules, Warren and McGuane had a busy three days. Despite the partying, the two were able to complete a song together, something Warren could toy with until the next grueling round of album preparation. The two stayed in contact and the new comradeship affected McGuane enough to be mentioned in an interview that soon followed. “McGuane was in Hollywood recently to write rock-and-roll music with his friend Warren Zevon, whom he considers a fine musician, as well as a fine songwriter,” wrote Jim Fergus of Rocky Mountain Magazine. “Although the life of rock-and-roll artists seems to recall the dark sinkholes of Panama days, McGuane now has the overview of a man who has been there and memorized the way back. He and Zevon, who is renowned for excesses of his own, have performed small, mutual rescue missions for each other; they are both fond of Ernest Hemingway’s admonition to F. Scott Fitzgerald: ‘Of course you’re a rummy… most good writers are. But good writers always come back. Always.’”
Months later, McGuane reciprocated Warren’s hospitality by hosting a dinner in his honor at his Montana home. Warren flew in from Los Angeles with another new friend, mystery author Jim Crumley. The two got stoned in the airliner’s bathroom and had drinks at the local Livingston Bar and Grill with fellow writers Michael Koepf and McGuane’s neighbor, William Kittredge, before heading up the valley to McGuane’s vast property.
McGuane had invited a number of esteemed guests; Warren spent the memorable night partying with poet Richard Brautigan and actor Jeff Bridges. By the time Peter Fonda arrived, McGuane steered him toward the more sober guests in the kitchen, telling him, “There’s some people out there who’re having trouble speaking English.”
Characteristic of both Warren and McGuane, their song, “The Overdraft,” was a hard-driven near-rockabilly composition with biting lyrics and an outlaw narrator—a balance that McGuane also felt suited Warren himself. “To me, Warren is a very enigmatic character,” he later recalled. “He had his life in rock and roll, and he idealized some of his grimmer aspects. At the same time, part of his mind was given over to high culture. High art. Serious literature. Classical music. It was an anomalous combination of traits, which was one of the things that was so interesting about him.”
By midyear, it was decided that Warren would head off to Europe. But despite having two albums to push for promotion, Elektra/Asylum had already begun cutting their costs toward artists that failed to meet profit expectations. In a curious move Warren would be hitting only a small number of specific European venues, and it would be without the support of a band. But that was only the start of the bizarre compromises.
In later years, Warren would hone his one-man gigs into tour de force performances of varied instruments and genres, with everything from his songbook recontextualized as intricate solo pieces. He was aware ingenuity had been the product of necessity, his tour budgets ever-shrinking.
In this first instance, he wouldn’t even be playing in concert—nor singing. After negotiations with the label, it was strangely arranged for Warren to appear on various European variety shows, lip-synching a cycle of three preselected hits. Following the raucous glory of the All Hell Is Breaking Loose Jungle Tour, pantomiming in front of a nonspeaking studio audience made no sense. “After Stand in the Fire there was the 1981 tour where [Elektra/Asylum] just sent me and Warren,” George Gruel remembered. “I had a two-track tape of three songs under my arm and we did every European version of American Bandstand.”
Confused by the label’s strategy, and usually doped up on painkillers, Warren nonetheless planned to make the most out of the trip, particularly the rare opportunities for in-store appearances and gobbling up an entire continent’s worth of “local color” to aid in the writing of his next album. As road manager, Geor
ge Gruel worked with Claude Knobs and George Steel from Asylum European A&R in booking as many major cities attainable, at least guaranteeing Warren the star treatment when greeting his foreign fans. “He did a lot of interviews and radio-talk in whatever city we were in,” remembered Gruel. “Secluded and as secretive as he could be at times, he enjoyed the hell out of meeting people.”
This brief tour, though so strangely structured compared to the heavy-rock albums being promoted, at least provided Warren with a much-needed change of scenery and the semi-solace of a road journey sans an entire band and crew. Using the dubious experience of his American Bandstand European adventure for as much raw material as he could draw, Warren cleverly circumvented his old formidable foe, writer’s block. By the time they had adventured through Paris, Rome, Germany, and Belgium, he had enough material for the next album—although, according to Gruel, Warren’s idea of research was more akin to method acting. “That’s where Warren gathered the information for The Envoy,” Gruel remembered. “We were in Belgium, and he’s upstairs in the casino thinking he’s James Bond with his zillion-dollar suits on. It was a movie [to him], basically.”
Gruel later offered another telling recollection, one that called for Warren to keep a memento of the affair. “One night when we were in Hamburg in some fancy hotel, Warren got all dressed and James Bond–like and went upstairs to the casino… [He] ended up with a not-so-good-looking hooker and her bulldog.” When later designing The Envoy graphics with Jimmy Wachtel, Warren insisted a purple ten-mark casino chip from that night be added to the back cover, hidden among the collage of various intrigue-themed items.
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