Warren’s creative explanations for the tour were only half true, yet he was able to slip back into the folk figure of his youth effortlessly. “This is something I’ve talked about and wanted to do for years,” he told Powers in the same article. “I’m always surprised at songwriters who won’t admit they wanted to be Bob Dylan. I certainly did.
“There are some things I just can’t do with a band,” Warren added. “I have a way of playing guitar that appalls guitarists. I finger and just kind of clod-hop away, but it produces chords I like, voicings I like.”
The solo tour also brought out some new, folkish touches to songs Warren had written in other genres. He paid homage to Bob Dylan in his reworkings of “Hasten Down the Wind” and “Play It All Night Long,” for which he now played piano or acoustic guitar concurrently with a harmonica. For the first time, he also sang the Spanish verses to “Veracruz,” softly and eloquently, having to replicate Jorge Calderón’s unmistakable harmonies on the album’s original cut. Returning to the Roxy in Los Angeles, once host to the single greatest-reviewed concert of his career, Warren quipped of his now lone appearance, “[The Los Angeles Times critic] Robert Hilburn called my band the ‘best band in Los Angeles.’ I guess that was the kiss of death!” While the audience continued to laugh, he introduced the esteemed members of his “Stand in the Fire” ensemble, all in attendance in support of Warren’s solo endeavor, despite the fact that budgetary reasons had prevented them from taking the stage.
After the third song, Warren made one final shout of honor. “I’d like to dedicate this set, if I may, to a man who stood by me through a pretty arduous process growing up,” he said, “and that is my son, Jordan Zevon.” Now thirteen years old, Jordan was in attendance, and received his own round of thunderous applause. The young drummer had already started his first garage band and, like his father, would get more of that applause in the future.
There were times, however, where new additions to old songs took on much darker forms. George Gruel’s assertions about Warren holding a misguided grudge against Jackson Browne became evident in his new, improvised verse to “Werewolves of London.” Warren had once paid loving homage to his friend on Stand in the Fire by alternating the famous lyrics, “I saw Jackson Browne walking slow down the avenue.… You know his heart is perfect!”
Three years later, Warren hissed in its place, “Jackson’s going over to Gary Gilmore’s house, he’s just trying to get along.… Old Gary’s going to teach him The Executioner’s Song!”
While Norman Mailer references were nothing new to Warren’s onstage banter, the same could not be said for siccing an infamous mass murderer on the godfather of your daughter.
Throughout the press tour for The Envoy, Warren had emphasized the fresh start his romance with Kim Lankford had provided to him, going so far as to call her his “salvation.” Things had changed by the first month of 1983. Both in his frail condition and depressed over the true nature of the tour’s scaled-down circumstances, an air of sadness pervaded much of Warren’s banter. His humor took on a tone so self-deprecating, it bordered on character self-assassination. Audiences noticed his vocal cords strained, tired, and sometimes unable to reach the higher notes. He also nervously covered the countless false starts and flubs with sly jokes or a cheap shot at the equipment he was playing.
To interviewers, Warren saved face for the sparseness of the solo tour by emphasizing both his solo classical roots and longstanding self-image as a folk singer. Before an audience, however, he jokingly blamed his “massive fucking ego” for wanting the spotlight all to himself. Sometimes, however, the combination of pills and booze would allow for a slip in the curtain and an awkward vulnerability would silence the room. At one of the first stops in the Live At Least Tour—and only days before flying to Gevinson—Warren had hinted at his well-publicized breakup with Kim Lankford, taking on a noticeably melancholic tone before performing “Hasten Down the Wind.”
“One nice thing about being a songwriter, is that you can go back over the years and look at a particularly melancholy kind of tune that reflects a period of your life that you otherwise would have preferred to forget,” he told an audience at the Old Waldorf in San Francisco. “You kinda sing it over the years by rote because people expect it. But you never know, one day along comes fate and another terrible trauma happens and the song is singularly appropriate again.”
He added, “I got my health and with this kind of cycle I might just keep going around every decade.”
For the first few months, Warren would meet up with Gevinson at different concert dates all across the country. Elektra/Asylum may have booked the tour to recoup losses over The Envoy, but they at least provided the type of accommodations for which Warren had become accustomed. “At first, we lived pretty large in four-star hotels, and it was all fun, fun, fun,” Anita Gevinson remembered. “There were good times—hanging in the ‘girlfriend box’ at the Roxy on the Sunset Strip with Springsteen, drinks with Marty [Scorsese] in the Village while watching Warren perform.”
Like all women in Warren’s life before her, Gevinson soon learned that the “Chivas and roses” that represented the early days with him never lasted. A committed relationship with Warren seemed to follow a recurring arc: a blissful beginning, slowly fading in luster once the reality of his tortured mind revealed itself; finally, there would be little left but the torture. The depth of his instability was already a sad suspicion Gevinson had carried throughout the seven years they’d known each other. As a casual, part-time companion, however, she’d never had to clean up his messes. “I knew what it was like to live with him,” Gevinson later recalled. “I had seen firsthand how he treated his former wife, Crystal—seen him drunk and in his bathrobe, waving a pistol around like a turkey leg.”
She had also taken note of the main reason downers and sleeping pills had so largely replaced alcohol as his primary addiction: he wasn’t tempted to drink when he was asleep. “He would time things out so that he would sleep up until showtime,” she claimed. This provided him with “a window of relative sobriety” during which he could perform.
Gevinson was already apprehensive at the thought of living with Warren by the time he brought it up. “I realize now that for him, Philadelphia was a place he could go where none of his friends could watch him the way they did back in LA,” she remembered. “They had staged interventions, there was shouting and shoving, people got pushed up against the wall… And like all addicts, he’d become adept at hiding his disease from anyone who might care. But that act had been wearing thin with his closest buddies in LA—Jackson Browne and others—and people were starting to give up on him.… He was no longer a functional alcoholic. He was just an alcoholic.”
Against her better instincts, she allowed Warren to move into her place at Le Chateau, which overlooked Rittenhouse Square. He immediately set up camp in her back room, which she later dubbed his “tree fort,” bringing whatever instruments and recording equipment he had on the road, as he no longer had a place of his own in which to stash it all. He also had his own bathroom, which meant he could seclude himself for as long as he wished with complete privacy. Although it was her own apartment, Gevinson took the warning signs to steer clear of Warren’s private space, but only once entered “his” bathroom, only to discover the vodka bottles hidden under the sink. “My life with Warren started out as Bonnie and Clyde,” she later recalled, “and by the end it turned into Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?… I covered for him because I loved him. I never told anyone how bad it got.”
The US leg of Live At Least was set to end in the last week of April, and as far as anyone knew, there were no plans for further bookings—or another album. Lost in his own world, Warren ignored the writing on the wall.
By effectively removing himself from Los Angeles—and everyone there—Warren hadn’t been privy to the internal rumblings within Elektra/ Asylum. In only a few years’ time, MTV had successfully changed the way audiences found new music, as well as th
e music they demanded. As one of many record labels feeling the sting of a rapidly changing industry, new leadership had been instilled at Warren’s label, and heads were about to roll.
The previous year, Joe Smith resigned from his post as head of Elektra/Asylum, paving the way for Warner Bros. talent executive Bob Krasnow to take over and clean house. Within the first six months of assuming the new position, Krasnow fired two-thirds of the label’s employees and moved its headquarters to New York. He also cut the company’s talent roster of over 150 artists by a whopping 90 percent. Those artists who had previously proven themselves as tried-and-true hitmakers for the label were none too happy with Krasnow’s unapologetic explanations to the press, defending his strategy to stock up on younger talent. “Some people play so as not to fail,” Krasnow told Billboard. “There’s no way to win doing that. If Elektra is to succeed, we will have to gamble heavily on contemporary talent.” When Krasnow’s plan brought the company back as a hit factory to be reckoned with, his later comments were a tad more smug. “I went through the roster with a hacksaw,” he later told The Los Angeles Times. “It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out they needed to get rid of most of those acts and start over.”
Warren’s various personal and career debacles had blindsided him to his fellow artists’ own frustrations. While still with the Eagles, Glenn Frey and Don Henley had been two of Elektra/Asylum’s highest-selling artists. Feeling a lack of support for their respective solo debuts, both had taken to the media to express their anger and confusion. “[Elektra/Asylum] started signing all kinds of acts, from Tony Orlando & Dawn to Pink Lady,” Henley claimed. “I looked at the roster in the late seventies and there were like 80 or 90 acts, and I think I recognized about five of them—and, of course, we [the Eagles] were paying for all that.”
When it came to the new leadership’s role in the company’s shifts, Henley pulled no punches, adding, “[Krasnow] made some comments to the press about ‘all the old dinosaurs we have on the label,’ and it really pissed me and Glenn off.” When the label passed on demos for Frey’s next album, The Allnighter, he brought it to Warner Bros. and scored his biggest solo hit with them. Likewise, Henley was more than happy to sign with old friend David Geffen’s new label, presenting him with Building the Perfect Beast as his label debut. Like Frey, the label switch marked Henley’s first solo bestseller. But Henley was far from finished. In February 1983, he and manager Irving Azoff took Krasnow to court, claiming that the CEO was in “breach of promise” in allocating the necessary funds to get Henley’s first solo endeavor off the ground. According to Azoff, Krasnow had agreed to underwrite over $33,000 that Henley had to put up himself for his previous album’s promotion—and was refusing to pay up. “The deeper significance of the suit involves the sudden deterioration of relations between the new Elektra regime and Azoff,” reported The Los Angeles Times, “who represents several of the label’s most potent artists, including Henley, Joe Walsh, Glenn Frey and Warren Zevon.”
When yet another Eagle alumni and Azoff client, Joe Walsh, followed suit and signed with Warner Bros., it triggered what would become longstanding animosity between the Elektra/Asylum executive and Azoff’s clients. The Los Angeles Times picked up on it, claiming Walsh’s move was “apparently just the latest installment in the Hatfield-and-McCoys-style family feud between Walsh’s Front Line Management company and newly appointed Elektra chairman Bob Krasnow.” Front Line Management, of course, was owned and operated by Irving Azoff.
The feud would have lasting effects on all involved. Later, Krasnow would go on to become co-founder—along with, among others, Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner—of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, for which the Eagles would only be inducted as a group, never as singular artists, and Warren completely ignored.
Of the old Southern California “mellow mafia,” only Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt remained signed with Elektra/Asylum.
Warren knew none of the drama back home. After the Live At Least Tour, no one knew where he was or how to reach him. From her new home in the Parisian neighborhood of Belleville, Crystal had attempted to reach Warren numerous times—both because six-year-old Ariel’s only intimacy with her father was clutching an album cover of his, and also because he was countless months behind on child support. When calling friends had led to nothing, as did calling Elektra/Asylum, she taped a voice message from Ariel and sent it to him, via the record label. Although Crystal didn’t expect a response, Warren got Ariel’s message in the mail. Gevinson later recalled, “Warren hit ‘stop,’ popped the tape out, and padded to the back bedroom in his bathrobe. I could hear him playing it over and over all night.”
Soon after, Crystal received a postcard in the mail. “He wrote to ‘Old Girl’ and said something about sitting on the square in Philadelphia drinking coffee and thinking about what should have been,” she later recalled. “No return address, no mention of [Gevinson] or that he was actually living there.”
Only days later, Warren headed back to Rittenhouse Square once again and picked up the latest Rolling Stone, a magazine that, according to Gevinson, was capable of enraging him should he find any favorable reviews garnered by old friends in Los Angeles.
Despite the magazine’s ongoing coverage of the massive shifts within the music industry, Warren had either been too apathetic or too lethargic—or most likely, a combination of both—to suspect he would be directly affected by his own record label’s new leadership and restructuring agenda. Had he read about Glenn Frey and Don Henley’s recent career lows, he may not have cared—but he might have noticed his name documented as a fellow “potent” client on Irving Azoff’s roster within the industry trade magazines.
Returning from the newsstand and thumbing through the May 27 issue, however, he immediately spotted a heading in the “Random Notes.” It read, “Zevon Dropped by Asylum,” and followed with a short blurb explaining the decision as a result of Elektra/Asylum’s ongoing rebranding campaign. Of the 150 artists dropped by the label, Rolling Stone had singled out Warren for the focus of his misfortune and, in that, Jann Wenner had broken his own mandate, allowing Warren’s name to once again make headlines in his magazine. It wouldn’t happen again for nineteen years.
“[Rolling Stone] had it in this little box, as if it were an obituary,” Warren later said.
“He went to pieces,” remembered Gevinson. “It was devastating for him, especially the way it was handled. He became deeply, deeply troubled.” Clutching the magazine, Warren stormed to the back room. He didn’t appear again for three days.
It had been eight years since he had penned “Desperadoes Under the Eaves.” Now, in the back room overlooking Rittenhouse Square, the air conditioner hummed again, louder than before.
“I got to where I wasn’t doing as good a job of bookkeeping as I should have, and that was a sign that something was going awry,” George Gruel recalled. “There was nothing going on. There wasn’t another album planned. Nothing was lined up to go back in the studio.”
Gruel remembered that, although he didn’t remember an official end to the friendship, with Warren drifting on the other side of the country, things between them sadly just “fizzled out.”
Years later when compiling his own heartfelt memoir of photographs and memories, Gruel found among his boxes a small sticker—the spare individual labels that came with blank cassette tapes. On the road, Warren used to write on any available blank surface if inspiration struck and pen had to meet paper. On this, he had written his own epiphanic mantra for the secret to songwriting:
start songs—remember: a
Title becomes a chorus becomes a verse becomes a line
But above it, Warren had scrawled the philosophy behind the mantra:
keep going regardless.
“I remember being in the living room, while he’d be working on one of his classical symphonies at the seven-foot Yamaha grand,” Gruel later remembered. “Many were the times that I’d lay flat on my back, on the carpet, with
a fat one, directly under the piano’s soundboard.… I would quickly be transported to a special place. We had a wonderful ride.”
Without a record contract, Warren’s only means of income would come from touring—at least until the possibly of a new contract elsewhere sprung up. All former Eagles members who had gone solo were now thriving on rival labels. At one time, Tom Waits had been the epitome of David Geffen’s original Elektra/Asylum vision, but by 1983, the iconoclastic hipster poet had also had enough of the label’s new direction; he had wisely signed up with the smaller, independent Island label, which allowed him to self-produce his Swordfishtrombones passion project with complete autonomy. Had he been in better physical and mental condition, it would have been an ideal scenario for Warren to likewise attempt. But with the knowledge that he was back to square one, he couldn’t even summon the focus to write.
However meager, Warren did have one final chip in his favor. Front Line Management was yet to drop him as a client. He could appeal to them for performance bookings and, when mentally ready, demo funding. Gevinson recalled, “Despite Warren’s shaky fortunes in the States, European promoters were hungry for a tour.”
Having a European fan base was a good safety net, yet if it ever came down to the direst of circumstances, a self-funded tour of the United States would be far cheaper. Still, without any recording contract, performing live was now more of a personal responsibility than a promotional strategy. “[Warren] never really made a lot of money and he never really cared that much—until those times when you really needed money,” Gevinson claimed. “Even though he knew he wasn’t around for them that much, he was guilty when he couldn’t send money home for his two children. I didn’t realize that touring was important to him both for the money and as an escape, until I went out on the road with him. I think it just becomes easier than living in the real world.”
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