Nothing's Bad Luck

by C. M. Kushins

  As things began to turn turbulent between Warren and Lankford, they made the decision to move once again, this time to a three-level house in the more tranquil Laurel Canyon. Unlike the Nichols Canyon house, this one was in Lankford’s name—a fact that did not, however, prevent Warren from shooting holes in the floor. Meanwhile George Gruel had moved into a place in the Palms area of Los Angeles, none too upset to be leaving the Zorada house or, as he later called it, “the House of Drama.” With the touring finally finished and no immediate future album plans indicated by the record label, the group expected 1982 to end with some rest and relaxation. Warren even acknowledged that his dependency was growing worse, seeking to temper off of the urges through an acupuncturist recommended by Jackson Browne. He booked an appointment just prior to a much-needed Hawaiian vacation with Lankford. The therapy worked, only too well, leading Warren into an instant state of intense withdrawal. Lankford was helpless as Warren suffered a seizure at the airport.

  “Kim was freaking out, the usual drama,” Gruel remembered, “so I picked her up and put her in a baggage rack and said, ‘Shut up and sit down.’ She was no help. I called the paramedics, and [Warren] ended up in the hospital for a day, and he got mad at Jackson for it. He thought he was trying to kill him when, of course, he was trying to help him.”

  The incident was one too many for Lankford. Afterward, their relationship grew more strained; she was exasperated by his apathy toward her own career. She had been notified that her character was soon to be written out of Knots Landing, coinciding with the unexpected announcement that Warren was expected to head back out on tour. Amid the growing contention between the two, she refused to go with him on the trip.

  “He was getting stoned and drinking, and I just didn’t want to be a part of it anymore,” Lankford remembered. “I didn’t want to go home again until he was gone. I had to leave my own house when he should have left.” Warren disappeared, avoiding Lankford’s ongoing demands that he come and pick up his things. When that didn’t work, she called the record label and threatened to have all of Warren’s belongings donated to Goodwill if Warren didn’t respond. He didn’t. But his business manager sent around a crew to collect everything.

  “As for the romance,” Warren later admitted, “everything ended wretchedly.”

  Lankford’s excommunication of Warren—or more accurately, his of her—represented the final nail in a coffin he had long been carving himself. With very few exceptions, he had spent the last few years severing ties with almost every intimate friend or relative who had helped during his intervention. In March of the previous year, Rolling Stone had finally run Paul Nelson’s epic profile on Warren’s battles with alcohol and addiction, granting Warren his one and only appearance on the magazine’s cover. Nelson’s own internal battle with publisher Jann Wenner over the piece had not only ended Nelson’s career at Rolling Stone, but ultimately drained his passion for writing. He was rarely published again. Worse yet, Warren didn’t seem to care; the two hadn’t spoken in almost a year. And wouldn’t again.

  In his impassioned and bitter appeals at Rolling Stone, Nelson had defended Warren’s sobriety and insisted on the cultural significance of his music, almost to the degree that his own integrity as an impartial journalist began to come into question. It finally ran after the manuscript had been forcibly taken from Nelson and whittled down by a third. The editors also tacked on their own title, “The Crack-Up and Resurrection of Warren Zevon,” which, while suitable, was another dig at Nelson’s helplessness. When Warren’s extreme relapses into booze and drugs began to circulate around the music industry, Jann Wenner’s earlier insistence that Warren Zevon would never again appear in his magazine became editorial dogma.

  As time passed, Wenner’s stern mandate would only have two exceptions; Warren would appear in Rolling Stone twice more in his lifetime, both under very different circumstances.

  Even on paper, Warren’s Live At Least Tour read like a desperate move.

  Initially, there hadn’t been definite plans for another tour at all. Playing off the positive reviews that the Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School tour had garnered, Elektra/Asylum was now grasping at straws. Warren, for his part, had also learned the major burden in being part of a celebrity power couple: the inevitable breakup can either rack up as much press as the glamorous courtship, or get lost in the shuffle of finding the next hot topic that will sell ink. In less than six months, Warren’s album had flopped and Lankford was off one of prime-time television’s hottest dramas. The promises and pontifications that Warren had drilled into interviews throughout his promotional tour all now seemed utterly invalid. Critics and editors took notice. And while Warren still had his share of devoted fans, in the face of a rapidly changing music industry, the MTV generation was already clamoring for newer, trendier acts.

  It was only to recoup their losses over The Envoy that the label even considered sending Warren out on tour again. This time around, bare bones wouldn’t even do the circumstances justice: no band, no bus, no large venues. No television. Everything Warren was expected to need for his performances would have to fit into a rented station wagon. Compared to the triumphant homecoming of Stand in the Fire, the only thing that seemed to be missing was a hat to be passed among the audience for loose change.

  In a fog of drugs, alcohol, and denial, Warren nonetheless prepared to start the new year on the road. He would be alone—save for George Gruel, the one friend he hadn’t yet tossed aside. Paul Nelson was gone; Crystal had opted for a new life abroad, taking now six-year-old Ariel to Paris; Warren remained convinced Jackson Browne had attempted to sabotage his health via acupuncture. And Kim Lankford had moved on—but only after Warren had vanished first.

  The last matter was of little concern to Warren, or so he behaved; he already had another lady in waiting.

  The Live At Least Tour kicked off the second day of 1983 at the Park West Club in Chicago. It was the first time since The Envoy’s absurd lip-synching tour that Warren took to a stage alone. This time, however, he got to play all the instruments—and he didn’t have to share the spotlight. “Reaganomics isn’t the only reason I’m on this solo tour,” he told an audience in upstate New York. “Once a folk singer, always a folk singer!”

  In private, Warren offered a different reason for his need to disappear. “When you’re a moving target,” he said, winking over his glasses, “they can’t hit ya.”

  Part Two

  HEAVY METAL FOLK

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  (1983)

  IN 1976, ANITA GEVINSON WAS A YOUNG WAITRESS WORKING full time at a fish market in Philadelphia the first time she met Warren Zevon.

  On a night in mid-June of that year, she and a girlfriend from the market headed to nearby Bryn Mawr, planning to hang out at the Main Point, a legendary music venue and coffeehouse. Known for its intimate setting and trendy vibe, the tiny venue had developed a reputation among the hipper performers as an obscure yet popular spot. Over the last decade, such countercultural icons as Captain Beefheart, Leonard Cohen, Leon Redbone, and Tom Waits had all played surprise gigs there; likewise, some of Warren’s old gang, including Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt, had used the venue to host sold-out acoustic sets. During Warren’s first tour for Elektra/Asylum, it had been wisely selected as a moderately sized place to accommodate his “song noir” styled debut. “I feel great,” he told the crowd, “and here we are after our triumphant engagement at McDonald’s in Libya.”

  Two years before its studio recording and release, Warren even unveiled a ferocious version of “Werewolves of London” to a very enthusiastic and amused audience. “I’ve heard some out on the west coast,” he opened, lightly tapping the signature piano riff. “I’ve heard there’s a bizarre cult of werewolves in Bryn Mawr.… I guess you know how to howl, when the moon is full? Well, the moon is always full! Ah-hoooooo!”

  The audience was putty in his hands—especially Gevinson, who not only had a passion for rock and roll but, admittedl
y, for “the boys in the band”; Daryl Hall and Billy Squire could be listed among her future beaus. So, it came as no shock to the club owners when Gevinson stayed for Warren’s second set, then talked her way backstage. She and Warren chatted and flirted, but he was quick to mention his pregnant wife back home.

  “Warren told me that he was married right away,” Gevinson remembered. “I think when people are out on the road, the last thing that they are looking for is to meet someone they want to, necessarily, keep in their lives. But, for some reason, that’s what happened. He ended up being in my life for the next seven years.”

  Following their first encounter, Warren was immediately racked with guilt. He drank himself into a stupor before boarding his return flight home and was still inebriated when Crystal came to pick him up from LAX. That night, he confessed to her his numerous infidelities while on tour. She later recalled, “He assured me over and over again that he had told each woman, before he slept with her, that he was in love with his wife and would never leave his marriage. I wanted so desperately to believe that we could make it, but deep down I knew this was the beginning of the end.”

  By Excitable Boy’s production two years later, Gevinson had started her professional career as a radio DJ in her native Philadelphia and was quickly developing a loyal following. It wasn’t long before Warren reached out to Gevinson again, this time during the debauchery of his pseudo-bachelorhood days recording Excitable Boy. He had kept tabs on her and knew to reach her at her new post at WMMR in Philly. “I flew into Boston to meet him at least one more time after our first meeting,” she later recalled. “I guess I did it to find out if my feelings were as real as they felt. He picked me up as we went to see Toots and the Maytals, and he danced with them in this crazy suit that he wore. I just thought that he was this amazing, fun guy that I just couldn’t stay away from.”

  That had been two years ago. Gevinson was now coming to the West Coast for an upcoming wedding and the two arranged to meet. During her extended stay, their relationship became unspoken knowledge among Warren’s friends and fellow musicians, and she was present during some of his Excitable Boy sessions. “I visited him when he was living in Sunset Towers on Sunset Boulevard,” Gevinson recalled. “He was recording his Excitable Boy album and I hadn’t seen him in a while. One of the first things he said to me was, ‘You have to meet Uncle Waddy.’ He had to go to the studio the next day, so I went with him and as soon as we got into the parking lot, I went crazy when I saw guys unloading a truck with Jackson Browne.”

  Gevinson sat in the studio during Warren’s vocal tracks for “Accidentally Like a Martyr,” after which she got her first glimpse at the secret his friends seemed to keep hidden. She recalled, “Jackson seemed astounded that Warren was driving. See, I didn’t know his reputation behind the wheel, and it was kind of like this unspoken thing not to let Warren drive. I knew then that it was a matter of, ‘Nobody wants to tell you what’s really going on.’” Amid the glitz and glamour of living in Warren’s rock-and-roll world, Gevinson was caught off guard by the actual depth of his alcohol intake. “I guess I was a little naïve about how much drinking he was doing, but I had never met anyone like him, and I just thought that was all part of the life,” she said.

  Admittedly, she “didn’t see the early warning signs of how deep the alcohol addiction was,” but many presented themselves during that one week. “[Warren] would drink mixed drinks during the day,” she remembered. “He always liked vodka, and he might add a little orange juice. I was so enamored that I didn’t see how bad off he was.”

  Warren and Crystal eventually reconciled but he attempted to keep in touch with Gevinson. She recalled, “Warren called me from Hawaii when he wrote ‘Lawyers, Guns and Money’ and he was there with Burt Stein, and he played it for me over the phone. I said, ‘Shit, Warren, they’re never going to play that!’ And he just goes, ‘Oh, they’re going to play it.’”

  Like many of the women who had fallen victim to Warren’s charm, Gevinson was admittedly a sucker for simply listening to him. She recalled, “His voice on the phone was always amazing. It would just stop you in your tracks when he would say, ‘This is Warren.’” According to Gevinson, Warren’s ongoing self-consciousness about his singing voice never wavered, however. “There wasn’t anything about it that he loved,” she said. “Just look at his friends, the Henleys and the Jackson Brownes. He always wanted to be able to make those little tweaks to have the crossover appeal into superstardom like those guys.”

  Excitable Boy was greeted by an equally excited public. He reached out to Gevinson just before the promotional tour was set to begin. “I got a phone call from him soon after and he invited me to stay with him and Crystal,” she remembered. “This was the end of the era of ‘free love,’ and everything, and still kind of into those lifestyles—so I really didn’t know what he was getting at. I was flattered, but that something—that was just out of my world, you know.”

  It was during that tour Warren reached the peak of his sales and popularity—just as it had been during this stop in Philadelphia that the Zevons were triumphantly treated to limos, swanky hotels, caviar, and champagne. And their next encounter with Gevinson.

  He was sure that Gevinson would be in attendance for his May 7 appearance at the Academy of Music. When he was proved correct, he used his good-luck streak to give Crystal an indecent proposal. “In the exhilaration over Warren’s sudden star status, he asked me to do something I could never have imagined I would agree to,” Crystal later wrote. “He thought we should take Quaaludes and invite her back to our hotel suite after the show… take the drugs and have our little orgy.” But she did agree, at least to give it a try. It didn’t get far, however, before the three of them heard newborn Ariel crying in the next room. Immediately regretting her decision, Crystal ran off to rock her baby daughter back to sleep. Gevinson remembered, “It was obvious that [Crystal] wasn’t into this.”

  Although she reveled in the world of rock and roll, Gevinson had never allowed herself to lean toward the dubious distinction of “groupie,” or the more generous “road wife.” A free-spirited young professional with all the frills that being a local celebrity in Philly afforded, Gevinson admitted to shying away from any form of monogamy. While long-smitten with Warren the rock star, she had never intended to play house with Warren the man. “Kim [Lankford] had had enough of his bullshit,” Gevinson claimed. “Frankly, I would have preferred that she stay in the picture. My attitude was, ‘Let her play mommy; we’ll play house on the side.’ It’s always better to be the girlfriend than the wife, especially in ‘Warren World.’”

  She added, “I don’t know if I had a higher tolerance for Warren’s behavior, but I knew that I’d been around enough rock stars to understand the dynamic—it’s their world and you’re just in it. I’m not judgmental, but with Warren, I always knew from the beginning what I was in for. I never felt the women in his other relationships knew what to expect. And with Warren, I don’t throw the word ‘genius’ around easily, but I know now that they each have that one demon that they fight, the one that tries to keep them from their talent.”

  Her career in Philadelphia was on an upswing. Through Gevinson’s new job at WYSP, it was commonplace for daily commuters to drive past billboards of her in full, sultry pin-up mode. Successful and independent, she was completely unprepared for the weary and beaten version of that man who showed up at her Rittenhouse Square doorstep in 1983. “I knew the difference between the public Warren Zevon and the private Warren Zevon before I even signed on for the Girl Friday duty,” she recalled. “I hadn’t heard from him in two years, but then things began to cool between him and his girlfriend [Kim Lankford].… She refused to go out on the road with him, so when he was coming to the East Coast, he called. A lot.” He left her eighteen messages to ensure she knew he was on the way. Wasting no time, Warren was already booked for a January 27 performance at Penn State when he decided to fly into Philadelphia three days early to meet her. Throu
ghout his Live At Least Tour, Gevinson accompanied him on the road as much as her radio schedule allowed. “Things were chaotic at the station and I thought going out on tour would be, finally, our chance, of sorts,” she recalled. “I mean, I had known him for about six years already, but never single.”

  The Live At Least Tour crisscrossed throughout New England, upstate New York, and Philadelphia. If a gig was three hundred miles or less, they’d rent a station wagon and drive.

  In the middle of February, one stop in particular boosted Warren’s spirits, allowing him to see a lifelong dream fulfilled: playing a true solo recital. George Gruel remembered, “Warren was beaming when he played the [Philadelphia] Academy of Music. It was a real concert hall and it thrilled him, to no end, to realize that he was playing his music where so many great symphonic performances had taken place.”

  With what enthusiasm he could muster, Warren used the solo format to rework much of his known songbook. For the first time, he began to rearrange older fan favorites and create new, complex arrangements for the material usually dependent upon a full backup band. It was a healthy exercise for Warren, whose songwriting had hit a drought—although out of necessity, the tinkering with known arrangements for the versatility of unpredictable tour circumstances would become a skill Warren mastered to an exact science.

  Critics took note of the innovative solo approach Warren was bringing to his signature rock-and-roll material. Following a sold-out February 28 show at the Bottom Line in New York, Ron Powers of the Associated Press reported, “Performing solo, [Warren] says, gives him the freedom to perform his songs as he originally wrote them—without the key changes and compromises that come with band arrangements.… At his club engagement, he alternates between six- and 12-string guitar. The only other instrument on the stage is a grand piano.”