Following their in-depth interview before his appearance at the Beacon Theater, The New York Times’ Stephen Holden was nonetheless impressed with Warren’s February 10 show. “At the concert on Saturday,” Holden wrote, “the singer faithfully but without much enthusiasm delivered ‘Poor Poor Pitiful Me’ and ‘Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner’… Both the band’s lean, chugging arrangements and Mr. Zevon’s performance suggested a concerted attempt to emulate the folk-rock primitivism of Neil Young and Crazy Horse. And on two of the new album’s songs, the Neil Young–style ballad ‘Splendid Isolation,’ and the post-Orwellian fantasy ‘Long Arm of the Law,’ the music began to catch fire.”
Holden added, “In several of Mr. Zevon’s dissonant keyboard solos and in some electronic effects, one also sensed a more esoteric musical side of the singer’s personality struggling for expression.” Holden wasn’t the only critic noting a disconnect on Warren’s behalf. But while The New York Times critic had interpreted it as a limitation in creative expression, others sensed a lack of intimacy between Warren and his audience. “Rarely does [Warren] give the impression that he’s reaching into his own depths for his material, so there’s an emotional distance to much of his work,” claimed Jim Washburn in The Los Angeles Times, writing that Warren’s March appearance at the Coach House had “made that distance even greater.”
There was one other possible cause for the perceived distance left unsuggested by critics. Many were unaccustomed to seeing Warren sober. Gone were the days when he gleefully stood in the fire, infusing himself with quarts of vodka and a multitude of drugs just for the courage to face the screaming crowd—to proudly be unleashed from handcuffs and howl before them. During his first attempts at sobriety, Warren had dosed himself with pills in order to sleep through a day’s worth of temptation, purposely awaking just before showtime. By 1990, his once fragile sobriety had strengthened enough to rule out that option—but how was one to be a rock-and-roll animal when living the lifestyle was no longer possible? The mixed response to his attempts in recapturing the same youthful, “throw myself against the wall” rock-and-roll band experience indicated a need to somehow reconnect with his audience. Virgin had funded his most ambitious and creative concept project, also to mixed response; he would need to reconnect with his listeners, too. Like he had once joked to David Landau, “I’m Warren Zevon,” he’d said, smiling. “You’ve never met him before.”
CHAPTER TEN
(1990–1995)
“ALL MY SONGS ARE REALLY ABOUT FEAR,” WARREN HAD TOLD The Chicago Tribune—largely in response to the polarized opinions of Transverse City.
But controversy was nothing new. Even in his earliest press, while critics lauded his songwriting abilities, they had also consistently noted the recurring themes of violence, blood, gore, and an apparent glorification of general mayhem within the lyrics. Yet when Warren tried to reveal his tender side, there was always another round of critics ready to nail him for deliberate sentimentality; Robert Christgau had long criticized what he perceived as a saccharine sweetness to “Hasten Down the Wind,” and never let Warren forget it; he still brought it up in reviews written over a decade later. Likewise, opinions surrounding 1982’s The Envoy wavered between those hailing it as Warren’s masterpiece and others the self-indulgent vanity project that cost him a record contract—and nearly killed him.
As Transverse City had fulfilled Warren’s contract, Virgin had its own pragmatic way of determining the album’s success: letting the numbers do the talking. Of its two singles, “Run Straight Down” and “Splendid Isolation,” only the first had made it to the Billboard charts, peaking at Number 30 at the end of November. “Splendid Isolation,” despite becoming one of Warren’s most beloved fan favorites, hadn’t charted at all. Worse yet, neither had the album itself—the first such commercial failure since 1969’s Wanted Dead or Alive. But there was a substantial difference when it came to Transverse City. Here, Warren had been truly creatively invested in the project, from conception to release and promotional performance. Its all-encompassing foray into cyberpunk had been personal to him creatively, and he had fought tooth and nail to defend the genre’s importance to the album; likewise, the album’s themes of paranoia and heartbreak were personal to him on every other level. Warren later admitted, “When I looked for more material, I asked myself, ‘What is symptomatic of living in society?’” But the public had largely ignored his observations.
Critics who had noted Warren’s apparent “distance” during the Millennium Paranoia Tour weren’t privy to another probable cause, one he’d kept to himself throughout the album’s promotion: Virgin had dropped him before he’d even headed out on the road.
Initially viewing the success of Transverse City as a means of re-upping his contract, having the prior knowledge that such a deal was already off the table created for Warren a number of new pressures: he’d still have to be on his best behavior throughout the promotional tour, and he’d still have to give a dynamic show throughout the entire run—no longer for the good of Virgin, but now in the hopes of attracting yet another new label.
Adding insult to injury, the Millennium Paranoia Tour still required several press dates—for which Warren had to stay silent regarding his relationship with the very label footing the bill. He kept his tempered frustrations in check, even when his termination became public knowledge following the tour. “I liked them,” Warren later told The Chicago Tribune of his former employers at Virgin. “I liked them very much. And I think that there’s an unfortunate tendency we artists have—when a record doesn’t sell big—to say that it’s got to have been their fault. But I think there may have been a little confusion there. I think that as much as I liked them, they looked around at each other one afternoon, like maybe an hour-and-a-half after I signed the contract, and said, ‘Who is this guy?’ Perhaps one of them said, ‘I think he’s like Jackson Browne with novelty hits.’ But I didn’t turn out to be Steve Winwood.”
The hammer had fallen at the end of January. Warren and the production team saw the writing on the wall when Virgin pulled the plug on funding during Transverse City’s final stages. Determined to see the project through, however, Warren ignored the red flags.
Andrew Slater couldn’t afford to ignore them. As both co-producer on the album and as the manager who’d signed Warren in the first place, Slater had just as much to lose. He quickly assembled a contingency plan. Over three years earlier, the camaraderie between Warren and the members of R.E.M. had not only yielded some of the strongest tracks on Sentimental Hygiene, but when that album had wrapped before schedule, the quartet had celebrated with a raucous jam session. Reminiscent of the long, freestyle psychedelic blues jams he’d savored with David Marks decades earlier, Warren joined Bill Berry, Peter Buck, and Mike Mills for a night filled with covers of Bo Diddley, Robert Johnson, and Muddy Waters, and—at least for the younger musicians—plenty of celebratory booze. The band wailed through hard-edged, modernized covers of blue classics “Crosscut Saw,” “Mannish Boy,” “Wang Dang Doodle,” and—at Slater’s playful suggestion—Prince’s recent funk-rock hit “Raspberry Beret.” According to Warren, the sessions also yielded covers of Eddy Arnold’s 1959 country hit “Tennessee Stud” and another Ernie K-Doe hit, 1961’s “Mother-In-Law”—although he admitted to losing track of the master recordings.
Slater still had the recordings, and by 1990, R.E.M. was quickly becoming one of the biggest bands in the United States. Now facing the problematic challenge of having to find Warren yet another record label, he viewed the old master tapes as a bargaining chip in both his and Warren’s favors. Slater’s former mentor, Irving Azoff, had recently taken a back seat at Front Line Management and was in the early stages of forming his own independent music label as a joint venture with Warner Bros. As Azoff had a longstanding history with both Warren and Slater, it only made sense to bring him the R.E.M. collaboration before anyone else. Unfortunately, both Warren and the members of R.E.M later claimed none of them
knew about the negotiations taking place. When Slater successfully sold the recordings to Azoff’s newly named Giant Records—entitling the one-shot hindu love gods after the clandestine name the group had used around Athens, Georgia, in 1984 and billing the release as a “supergroup” of sorts—none of the principal players were pleased. To R.E.M., half a decade after collaborating with Warren as a favor to Slater, the dog had finally learned to shake hands.
“I think it’s really great but unfortunately, there’s a whole side to it that’s very black and ugly,” Bill Berry later claimed of the deal. “Basically, we were exploited. We love Warren and don’t regret doing it at all, but his management and record company kept begging us to support it with publicity and a tour or something. But we can’t just drop what we’re doing. It was just one fun drunken night long ago.”
Likely, Warren retained his innocence—and slight annoyance. “I didn’t have anything to do with the packaging or anything,” he later claimed. “[R.E.M.] think I’m exploiting them, and I think they resent [that], but it has nothing to do with any of us. I told my manager, ‘This is yours. I don’t want to see it, I don’t want to argue about it, I don’t want to hear about it. Whatever you want, whatever you’re gonna do, it’s up to you.’” He added, “Well, we ultimately would have preferred it not come out at all, I think. It sold for like a dollar.”
Although losing favor with the guys from R.E.M. was something that had upset Warren personally, he had a fundamental problem with albums rubber-stamped with his name. The Chicago Tribune noted, “Zevon, who has a reputation for perfectionism in the studio, needed to make some mental adjustments before feeling comfortable with the idea of releasing a jam session done one afternoon a few years ago for fun.” Zevon elaborated: “At first it was a little troubling to me, the idea of putting out performances that hadn’t been and really couldn’t be polished up. Because I spend a lot of time polishing. Maybe a lot of wasted time, some of it useful time. I assume that’s why we all learned studio techniques all our lives.”
Regardless of the artists’ ambivalence toward the hindu love gods release, the R.E.M. connection—and the surrounding controversy regarding their resistance to it—brought Warren higher Billboard chart numbers than his final album for Virgin. Within two months of its release, the album peaked at 168, while its only single, “Raspberry Beret,” hit Number 26 on the newly formed “Alternative” chart—peanuts to R.E.M. at the time, but just the moderate boost needed to attain its true goal. Within the year, Billboard reported, “Warren Zevon will make his Giant solo debut in October with Mr. Bad Example.”
He had started talking up the next album almost a full year before any official announcement had time to run. With hindu love gods newly on the shelves, Warren told The Chicago Tribune in December, “My old friend Waddy Wachtel is going to produce the next record, and we’re going to start in February.… It’s Irving Azoff’s label. He’s managed me for a number of years, and I’m still associated with what was his management firm. So it’s not straying far. Irving knows what to expect and what not to expect from me, which may not always have been the case with other labels.”
There was nearly a five-month gap between Warren’s return from his final tour for Virgin in May and the scaled-back folk tour that Giant would be backing toward the end of October. When he’d referred to Azoff’s Front Line in the past tense to The Chicago Tribune, his insinuation was only the tip of the drama that had built up between him and Slater during the final weeks of Transverse City. The behind-closed-doors deal that had resulted in both the hindu love gods release and the public rift with R.E.M. had been the final straw. While Slater’s valid attempts to make Warren a superstar had fallen short of Virgin’s expectations, other members within the music industry had taken notice of the young manager’s ambition. He later recalled that concurrent with Transverse City, he was “working with Lenny Kravitz, the Beastie Boys, and Don Henley,” while co-producing Warren’s album. “Despite the success, it was a terrible time,” Slater later told The Los Angeles Times. “How can you feel good about yourself when you don’t take care of things? I couldn’t find the right combination of things, chemicals and alcohol, to make me feel comfortable with myself.… I started missing occasional meetings because I’d wake up late or have a hangover. When I felt bad, I wanted to feel good. When I felt good, I wanted to feel better. It just kind of took me out of reality.”
It had started simple enough, as Slater was young and a whole new world of Hollywood success had opened to him quickly. He later recalled, “I was always unhappy, and I realized my own disease was progressing. I was trying to get sober, which triggered me going into treatment.… When I went into rehab, Warren was finally in good financial shape, sober, had a healthy touring base, and was about to release a new record.” Slater admitted that he and Azoff now had “a difficult relationship,” and in the best interests of Warren’s Giant deal, he didn’t want to “alienate the president of his new record company.” Azoff replaced Slater as Warren’s manager with old friend and fellow producer Peter Asher. It devastated Slater, who was still in rehab when he heard the news directly from Warren. He later recalled, “[Warren] says, ‘Look, Andy, I just got off the phone with Irving. He said that if I fire you and make a change in management, he’ll really work my record and I’ll get better promotion and marketing.’” According to Slater, Warren claimed that at forty-four years old, it could be his “last chance.”
“I had loaned money to him and made it my life’s mission to get him back in the record business when he was drunk and living in Philadelphia,” Slater later said. “I had taken him to rehab three times, and he was a member of the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. His life was going pretty well. Then, when I had a problem, he wasn’t there.”
For Warren, his now four years of sobriety had been an uphill struggle. Since returning to Los Angeles in 1985, he had made it a point to surround himself solely with positive influences—a major challenge while being part of the music industry and LA scene, and he had continued to attend A.A. meetings throughout the entire production of Sentimental Hygiene. However, many were unaware of the personal obstacles being thrown at him during the making of its follow-up. Since Warren’s move back from Philadelphia, Crystal and Ariel had both returned from Paris, then returned to Paris—then, finally back to the US again. With so many gaps between their visits, Warren was unaware of the pressures his ex-wife had long felt as a single mother, or the drinking problems she herself had slowly developed.
Warren was clean, sober, and in a healthy relationship with Annette Aguilar-Ramos in May 1988, when he received the unlikeliest of phone calls from Crystal. “I said, ‘Warren, I think I’m an alcoholic,’” she later recalled. “He said, ‘Crystal, that’s wonderful.’ I didn’t think there was anything wonderful about it at the time, but he was right.” Warren immediately called his own sponsor, Stefan Arngrim, who was able to put Crystal in contact with a local A.A. chapter. “When I got home, Warren and Ariel were there,” she remembered. “Then he held me for a long time.” He left her to tell Ariel about the night’s A.A. meeting, and the decision she had made to seek help. “She begged me not to go,” Crystal recalled. “She said, ‘I don’t want two parents who are alcoholics.’”
Although it would take time to work his way back into the good graces of his long-neglected children, Warren’s aiding Crystal in her own sobriety marked the beginning of a deepened, platonic relationship between them. In addressing her own addiction, Crystal had come face to face with the demons that had plagued Warren throughout their marriage. It was only when Ariel had informed her mother of the corporal punishment she’d been doling out during alcohol-infused blackouts that Crystal recognized a desperate need for help. The incident was all too familiar to her. Warren had been calling to check on her for weeks following her start at A.A., and when the topic finally came up, she was surprised by the narrowness of his apologies, as he left out so many incidents that had remained darkly memorable to her. Sh
e recalled that he had “made amends for the time he’d given me a black eye before he left for Japan [in 1978],” but was confused that Warren “only referred to that incident.”
Crystal explained the realization that soon came to her: “I understood that Warren had been in a blackout every time he’d gotten violent with me. He never knew half the things he’d done.… I carried around resentments over that stuff for years—and Warren never even knew what he’d done.” In the weeks that followed, Warren called Crystal twice a day to see how she was handling her sobriety, constantly reminding her of his personal favorite of all the Alcoholic Anonymous prayers, the one he constantly repeated like a mantra: “Relieve me of the bondage of self.”
Crystal wasn’t the only one Warren reached out to help. Longtime friend and collaborator Niko Bolas had gone through his own personal struggles; when he needed help, he knew who to call. “[Warren] was one of my first sponsors when I went into my own twelve-step program,” Bolas later remembered. “I’m in the same program, and he was a pretty important guy in my life… He was awesome, and I don’t give a shit who you tell.”
Using all the focus and energy sobriety brought to his forties, Warren attempted to spread that sentiment around. Virgin may not have found him all that awesome, but as he prepared yet another transition to another record label, Warren continued to wipe the slate clean both inside the studio and out. By the time Crystal and Ariel moved to Ashland, Oregon, at the end of 1989, he hadn’t been able to connect with his now rebellious teenage daughter, but the proper amends had been made with her mother. Even before her move, Crystal had noticed his efforts. “For the first time, Warren filled in for me,” she later recalled. “He took Ariel to Alateen meetings and flute lessons; he dropped in just to hang out with her. He was doing the same thing as Jordan, but for some reason, he always saw them separately, which is a shame, but he was learning how to relate to his children, and that’s what mattered.”
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