Nothing's Bad Luck

by C. M. Kushins

  It wasn’t only with his children and their mothers to whom Warren reached out. He’d always had checkered relationships with both of his parents, yet as their advancing years were coinciding with his sober ones, he turned his attention to both. Annette Aguilar-Ramos recalled that Warren was always “worried about his mother and his grandmother,” although he had been reluctant to introduce them to her. “He never thought they were a part of his life, and when he had to be the son, Warren shied away from that,” she recalled. “He bought flowers, gave people things, but when it came down to caring for another human being to the fullest extent, he put all that energy into his art and music.”

  Crystal did note, however, that Warren had worked to “amend his uneasy relationship” with his father, William, who was now in his mid-eighties and living in a small apartment in Gardena near his old gambling dens. Despite poor health and having outlived all his gangster buddies, William Zevon still acted as a “pawnbroker,” collecting the jewelry and valuables from losers at the table who couldn’t pay up. As a still-devoted former daughter-in-law, Crystal had stayed in touch with the elder Zevon throughout the years and, upon one of her periodic visits, noticed his deteriorating health. Weighing only eighty-nine pounds and bleeding from “every orifice,” William hadn’t taken care of himself in years. She took him to a local hospital for tests, which kept him under observation for weeks. Warren and Crystal spent time reconnecting in the hospital cafeteria, while Warren did the same with his father once they were alone. He thanked his old man for always being there for him and asked advice about his relationship with Jordan. He even worked on a song inspired by the massive traffic congestion from Los Angeles to Pasadena; “Gridlock” became one of Transverse City’s hardest-rocking tracks.

  Warren later told A.A. sponsor Stefan Arngrim he felt like a weight had been lifted. As a testament to his hardened resolve, throughout the entire productions of both his Virgin albums, Warren had been able to check each obstacle at the studio door—and had never once tumbled from the wagon. Which was why Warren deemed it unforgivable when he discovered his sponsor was using heroin. Aguilar-Ramos later remembered, “When [Warren] confronted him, his sponsor admitted using, and that really disillusioned Warren… it created a distrust in him for people. Then, when it turned out that his manager was doing drugs as well, it was too much. He stopped going to A.A. meetings right after we broke up.”

  Sending Warren out on tour during the second half of 1990 was the logical means for Giant to raise awareness of his signing, as well as hyping their own label launch only months before. At the time, however, he had no specific album to promote, save for the now notorious hindu love gods release that R.E.M. certainly wasn’t going to promote. The over-the-top 1980s superstar approach hadn’t worked for Virgin in marketing him, but Irving Azoff remained adamant that Giant’s carefully curated independent roster would be the proper home for an artist of Warren’s caliber. “In a way, it reminds me of what happened with Tom Petty on Full Moon Fever,” Azoff told Billboard. “[Warren] has made a singer-songwriter album. You can actually hear and understand his lyrics.”

  Likewise, Giant sought to emphasize that version of Warren while on tour. In anticipation of a more traditional folk-rock debut, his first promotional tour would be a unique hybrid representing each facet of his career crossroads: billed as the Warren Zevon Acoustic Trio, the small, folkish band performed his usual fan favorites, as well as new songs he was refining for the Giant debut. With a heavy leaning toward traditional blues covers, the trio threw in a few of the hindu love gods material that none of the original musicians had wanted to promote live. For the two-month tour, Warren was joined by singer-songwriter Gurf Morlix and Dan Dugmore, lead guitarist for Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor’s previous few touring bands—and whose “plugged-in” tendencies urged Warren to playfully rename the group “the Patrician Home Boys.”

  In the intimate, all-guitar acoustic setting, Warren won over the club crowds and earned far better reviews than with his expensive 1989 space opera. With both the smaller, club-oriented tour and a new, workingman’s folk-rocker persona well established, critics were noting Warren’s genre versatility in a positive light. For the first time in years, he was playing to an age-appropriate crowd, often to a warmer welcome. The trio’s eclectic song choices were also a draw. Warren told The Los Angeles Times, “There’s no setlist or anything; we just do it and see what happens.” He cited a recent show in Seattle where old friend Joe Walsh happened to be in the audience; the former Eagle promptly ran up and grabbed a guitar, much to the audience’s enthusiastic approval. The quartet jammed on a true “heavy-metal folk” version of “Ain’t That Pretty at All.” Admittedly, Warren was having a blast playing with his fellow guitarists. “Tonight, we’re in San Francisco,” he said. “Maybe we can do that song for four hours, if you know what I mean.”

  On the last day of the year, the trio was booked for a gig in Fort Lauderdale. There, Warren gave his final interview for 1990. “I started as a classical composer and then became a folk singer,” he told the Sun-Sentinel. “For me, a hit would be a fluke. But I don’t see why I can’t keep playing anyway.”

  Warren had started dating media personality Eleanor Mondale soon after she’d interviewed him in February for WLOL-FM in Minneapolis while he was promoting a three-night residency at the downtown club 1st Avenue. Family and friends had noticed Warren’s bragging rights about dating the high-profile daughter of a former US vice president. The rambunctious young journalist was known for her quirky, and often scandalous, behavior both on and off camera. With conflicting schedules, their relationship had only lasted a few months.

  Yet, even while on tour, Warren had stayed in touch with Annette Aguilar-Ramos, the two even meeting up during the periods when both were single. However, any hopes for a reconciliation were dashed by Warren’s apparent cavalier attitude toward monogamy. She recalled that following their breakup in 1989, the “little bad boy became a real bad boy,” enjoying his life on the road, and the various freedoms that came with it. “I kept trying to regain what we had had in the beginning of our relationship—that monogamous, committed relationship,” she later said. “But, Warren had tasted the other side and liked it.”

  Production on Mr. Bad Example began just after the start of the year. For the sessions, producer Waddy Wachtel booked Dodge City in Glendale, and the Sound Factory in Los Angeles—home to the production of Excitable Boy thirteen years earlier. Many of Warren’s oldest and strongest collaborators made their respective returns this time around, giving the album the feel of both a fresh start and a reunion of like minds. With Wachtel at the production helm, he was free to hop in for any lead guitar, background guitar, or vocal harmonies as needed; likewise, bassist Bob Glaub, master of all stringed instruments David Lindley, and Toto founding percussionist Jeff Porcaro all made up the recurring core lineup. Most exciting to Warren, however, was that his son Jordan would, for the first time, be on board in the studio full time. At the time, nineteen-year-old Jordan had advanced as a drummer and had already played successful gigs at his father’s old stomping grounds, the Roxy and Whisky A Go-Go. “Who is this guy, Jordan?” John Hughes of the Sun-Sentinel jokingly asked, prompting Warren’s proud reply, “He’s the greatest person I know.”

  Both in and out of the studio, Warren’s life had been a whirlwind since leaving Virgin records. In accordance with the twelfth and final step in the Alcoholics Anonymous dictum that had helped him restructure his postoblivion life, Warren had attempted to make amends with his entire family. But he also spent that period chain-smoking through romantic relationships, each one of which helped fuel the album’s emotional resonance with new material just in time for Mr. Bad Example.

  With very few exceptions, all the songs Warren brought in to the Sound Factory had been inspired by an archetypical amalgam of the women recently in and out of his life: he had still been with Annette Aguilar-Ramos during the album’s earliest stages and their breakup had led to his
penning “Searching for a Heart” only one day later; likewise, his newly invigorated friendship with Crystal, the brief affair with Eleanor Mondale, the periodic phone calls to Anita Gevinson—nothing came of them, but he took a shot—and a fresh relationship with actress Julia Mueller had provided a veritable menagerie of muses.

  Before he had given it a proper title, Warren had referred to the album’s opening track as simply “the hate song,” before settling on the more listener-friendly, though no less bitter, “Finishing Touches.” Lyrically, the hard-driven opener seemed to speak for every cuckolded, frustrated, and disillusioned male who’d ever been two-timed by the woman he loved. Incredibly cathartic and one-sided by nature, the angry anthem benefited from appropriately aggressive lead work of Wachtel, whose bluesy riff opened both the track and the album, evoking the start of “Johnny Strikes Up the Band.”

  Even amid the charging rock of the album’s overall tone, Warren worked in two of the most beautiful love ballads he’d penned in years—both of which would remain in his live repertoire far past the release’s promotion. In later years, he claimed that “Suzie Lightning” was the best song he felt he’d ever done, and the song included some of his most welcomed characteristics. More or less a power ballad, Warren cited a Bartok postcard sent to him by Bob Glaub from an excursion to Budapest as inspiring the globe-trotting references in the love tune, while buddy Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini was then filming a miniseries in Yugoslavia. The aforementioned “Suzie” in question was a name cribbed from a B-movie Warren had caught on cable in his hotel room; he’d simply loved the name. As for the emotions behind the song, only later did he admit the real-life “Suzie” was “a composite of women who’d recently made [him] unhappy—and vice versa.”

  Jorge Calderón had always remained Warren’s friend, but their collaborative songwriting relationship took a long hiatus in the years following Warren’s 1983 purgatorial stint in Philadelphia. Calderón had been admittedly confused by his friend’s later experimentations into the science-fiction genre and largely assumed Warren had gone off into his own artistic direction without need of any more help. But with the pressures of debuting with yet another new record company, Warren was apt to continue their always beneficial brainstorming sessions. He later recalled of the session that yielded their deliberately self-indulgent polka, “One evening, Jorge and I drank too much Turkish coffee, we were seeing Kirlian auras.” Calderón recalled the memorable night, too: “[‘Mr. Bad Example’] had too many lyrics—on purpose… We used to go to Noura Café. Warren went at least once a day, and they had Turkish coffee. We would have the chicken plate, and then he would order a humongous thing of Turkish coffee… but man, we would sit there and drink cup after cup—we were so high, it was almost psychedelic.” The two returned to Warren’s apartment, still “laughing like kids,” when they sat down to write the song. But penning the notorious adventures of the self-aggrandizing, world-weary playboy narrator of the song was too goofy for the old friends to take seriously. Calderón added, “But, we were falling down on the floor laughing… I’d complete his line, he’d complete my line. Just laughing…” With its “verse after verse” composition and no bridge, the song quickly became a fan favorite, always ensuring a huge rise out of Warren’s audience in live performance—mainly due to the virtuosity required to recite the entire laundry list of misdeeds. It also provided him with a new nickname to match the new era of his career: throughout his later tours, “Mr. Bad Example himself” became a very appropriate introduction.

  The sessions for Mr. Bad Example not only brought back familiar faces—David Lindley’s fiddle on the Southern Confederate anthem “Renegade,” and his assortment of lap steel guitar, sez, and cumbus on “Quite Early One Morning” were welcome returns—but new faces also arrived to add to the overall folk-rock, country flair. Dwight Yoakam came down as a mutual friend of Warren’s neighbor, actor and musician Billy Bob Thornton, inspiring one of the most overtly Western tracks, “Heartache Spoken Here,” on which he joined Jordan for the lush harmonies. “Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead” had been the very first of the songs written. As co-writers, both Waddy Wachtel and LeRoy Marinell work their way into the lyrics as characters encountered through the doomed journey.

  Throughout the album’s promotion, critics took note of the seamlessness with which Warren was able to slip into the more mature folk-rock genre, inquiring of his influences—or if it was merely a new creative leaning in contrast to the ambitious spectacles that had surrounded his two Virgin albums. According to Warren, much of that influence could be traced back to his work with the Everly Brothers during the early 1970s. “At that time, I was exposed to country music,” he said. But many of his personal favorites among his peers had veered into similar directions.

  While he long cited Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding and Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska as two albums he found to be true, individual artistic statements, they were both heavily grounded in early American country tradition. Likewise, the solo works of Neil Young, J. D. Souther, and later turns by friend and early mentor Jackson Browne all demonstrated where many of the former “bad boys” of California rock and roll were headed: back to the dusty roots of the music itself. And much like the quiet yet steady fanfare that Warren’s acoustic trio had received in the months building up to Mr. Bad Example’s recording sessions, Warren’s own fan demographic was keen for the earthy rock sounds. Not only had the intimate, acoustic atmosphere truly emphasized his lyrics and left ample room for jamming, but it had aided in his needed connection with the audience itself. And acoustic touring was significantly cheaper.

  The lessons learned from the foray into country and folk recording would have lasting effects on the composition and arrangements of Warren’s future works.

  The album closed with a love song that could most accurately demonstrate the overall tone and genre in which Warren, now forty-five years old, was comfortably working. “Searching for a Heart” had been written nearly two years earlier, immediately following his first breakup with Aguilar-Ramos. It was soon after, during the sessions for “Nobody’s in Love This Year” for Transverse City, that jazz horn player Mark Isham had courted Warren for contributing to a movie soundtrack he’d been assembling. As a multi-instrumentalist, Isham not only made a living with high-quality session work, he also scored for television and film, and was in the middle of a project for filmmaker Alan Rudolph. The film, Love at Large, was an adult-driven neo-noir suspense love story set in Los Angeles; in a word, it was almost all of Warren’s musical themes on the big screen. Warren had already completed writing “Searching for a Heart” by the end of Transverse City’s postproduction stage but held it over for a later album. When he played it for Isham, however, the composer immediately wanted it for the film and put Warren in touch with the director. Warren later recalled, “Alan told me he’d use anything I wrote, and he said Neil [Young] had written a song for his last movie—‘He took the script home and wrote it that night!’ I said, ‘Did it have a bridge?’” Baby boomer auteur Lawrence Kasdan loved the track so much he also used it in his new film, Grand Canyon, a spiritual sequel to his earlier hit The Big Chill.

  “I liked both films,” Warren later claimed. “They both stiffed.”

  Unfortunately, even amid glowing critical reviews, so did Mr. Bad Example. Neither single hit the charts, nor the album. Not only had many original members of Warren’s winning 1970’s lineup returned for the Giant debut, but even Jimmy Wachtel came on board for the album’s design: a deliberate juxtaposition of Warren from his Excitable Boy days, now ponytailed, older, dragging a cigarette in gritty black-and-white; the unspoken companion to the 1978 bestseller. With the amount of star power, focus, and working well within the confines of a meager budget, the team was shocked at the public response—especially when reviewers largely considered the album to be Warren’s true return to form. “Warren Zevon tried being a nice guy on his last few records, going the whole sensitive, confessional, emotional nine
yards,” wrote Chris Heim of The Chicago Tribune, “and a fat lot of good it did him. So now he’s gone back to what he knows best with Mr. Bad Example.… Zevon’s latest… serves up another round of stories about adventurers, soldiers of fortune and other losers at life and love in songs like the title track, the ironic ‘Model Citizen,’ ‘Renegade’ and (in the same humorous vein as his ‘Werewolves of London’ or ‘Poor Poor Pitiful Me’) ‘Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead.’”

  The Los Angeles Times’ Richard Cromelin was equally laudatory of the album. “Warren Zevon might finally be outgrowing the ‘Excitable Boy’ epithet that’s been applied to him since his 1978 album of that title,” he wrote, “but even sober and mature, he remains a loose cannon in the Eagles-Linda-Jackson axis of L.A. pop, the rowdiest guest in Hotel California.… On Zevon’s latest album, a man stomps a dying relationship into oblivion. The title character swindles his way around the world and revels in his treachery. A crack addict sinks deeper into anxiety. A ‘model citizen’ approaches the breaking point in suburbia. In ‘Quite Early One Morning,’ they finally drop the big one… [the album] recalls the tradition of Zevon’s defining works—scathing, satirical works.”