Throughout the tour, Warren made it a point to emphasize its experimental nature to the press and audiences alike, making everyone aware that each stop was another piece in the larger puzzle of his live “concept album.” It had already been decided that this new live album would honor Warren’s second album with Giant—and would cost far less than they would have to pay for a studio. Instead, Warren would proudly give over a hundred stellar performances—each professionally digitally recorded for an ambitious solo live release of greatest hits, pruned from only the very best from around the world. It was an acceptance that his own career path—as infused with literary ambition and personal integrity as it was—would most likely continue along the workmanlike “nuts and bolts” grind that kept most professional musicians forever on the road.
“Unless someone is a virtuosic singer or instrumentalist,” wrote The Los Angeles Times, “performing a solo act is a double-edged sword. It allows for the most intimate glimpse at one’s art while exposing compositional and technical warts that a full deck of musicians can conceal… During the course of his 100-minute show, in which Zevon played amplified acoustic guitar, grand piano and electronic keyboards, the audience saw plenty of both.”
Fuck record labels. All he needed was a tape recorder and a car.
Warren was back from Australia the first week of November, officially wrapping on the near-hundred recordings he and Duncan Aldrich had collected during their half year away from home. The trip’s purpose to collect copious amounts of usable recordings for a live greatest hits album, while concurrently maintaining Giant’s cash flow through ticket sales, broke from Warren’s longstanding traditions in album preparation. Under the normal circumstances of a studio release, the gap between albums would permit him the time to write new material—and he often needed quite a lot of it.
And then there would be the studio sessions themselves, of which Warren had mixed experiences. While still on tour, he had told The New Zealand Herald’s Graham Reid, “The way I come to terms with it philosophically is, as long as record companies don’t become destructive and I end up horribly in debt or completely compromised in terms of what I can do in a studio, then it’s alright.” In most instances, however, the end result would find Warren accusing fellow producers of compromising his work, while they—according to Jackson Browne, Waddy Wachtel, and Andrew Slater—needed to find ways to rope him in.
With his second album for Giant, Warren had been given the green light to creatively restructure both the very nature of a “live” album and the means of its recording. There were two specific words that he’d urged all involved to avoid: “greatest hits” and “unplugged.” Although the project had been pitched as a collection of Warren’s best-known songs—and he had delivered just that—he also chose the live setting to debut four new songs: the slide-guitar-driven “Worrier King,” an extended instrumental intro to “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” entitled the “Roland Chorale,” the recently penned-on-the-road “The Indifference of Heaven,” and “Piano Fighter,” which Warren had almost dually used for the album’s title. As The Boston Globe reported, “Last summer, as he was in the early stages of playing concerts being taped for a live album, Warren Zevon decided the album would be called The Piano Fighter, also the title of a new tune he was recording for the album. Then, he reconsidered. The forthcoming album’s new title: Learning to Flinch. It is suggested that Zevon’s therapist might have a field day with the switch.”
Making an album largely composed of older songs eliminated the pressure of writing an entire album’s worth of new material, leaving much of Warren’s creative focus on the actual showmanship of each and every gig, enthusiastically aware that every night was being taped for potential inclusion on the final release. “If we record every show,” he’d told Reid, “I figured, I’d eventually stop being self-conscious about the fact we’re recording.”
Even before leaving for the European and Australian legs of the tour, Warren’s apartment had been “knee-deep” in the DAT cassettes from the US dates alone. This initially prompted Giant to consider releasing the live album as a double-disc set. Had Learning to Flinch been recorded only a few years earlier, the final decision of whittling the recordings down to a single disc would have still filled two LPs; at seventy-five minutes in length, it was by far Warren’s longest album. Still, Warren was disappointed at having to cut his acoustic version of “Detox Mansion.”
“Armed only with an acoustic guitar and piano, Zevon plows through over an hour of old and new material recorded around the world in the most intimate setting possible,” wrote the Daily Vault’s Christopher Thelen upon the album’s mid-April 1993 release. From the comfort of your living room, you feel like you’re watching Zevon in the front row—and you’re in for one hell of a show… While Learning to Flinch may not be a substitute for a greatest hits collection, it’s the perfect place for the uneducated like myself to start learning how talented Zevon is… Pick this one up—it’s an education worth having.”
Despite critical enthusiasm for Warren’s energetic live release, with a single to be released and very little promotion, it spent a single week on the Billboard 200, peaking at Number 198 the first day of May before vanishing completely.
Following their disappointment over both Mr. Bad Example and Learning to Flinch, there were no immediate plans from Giant for any form of follow-up. Both the near-constant life on the road itself and some of the questionable venues in which he had to perform were slowly beginning to grate on Warren’s creative psyche. When he’d officially signed with Giant in early 1991—although, quite unofficially the year before, with hindu love gods tossed in as a form of “creative advance” on Warren’s end—his label debut had been deliberately structured within Giant’s wheelhouse as a traditional, folk-rock studio album. And it had tanked.
Going into Learning to Flinch, Warren had made the best out of the sly comeuppance doled out by Giant for stumbling out of the gate—sales-wise, at least. Both critics and audiences had enthusiastically approved of the solo shows that had made up the album, but those were the built-in demographic of his most devoted fans. Attempts by both Virgin and Giant to expand Warren’s mainstream appeal beyond the initiated had expensively failed. It mattered to neither that the music he was making was among the most focused of his career. But it mattered to him—as well as the fact that Learning to Flinch’s entire road show production had inadvertently been the ultimate crash course in independent production. He and Aldrich had only needed to use Red Zone’s facilities for postproduction; they’d made the entire album by themselves.
If Warren could get as far away from the watchful eyes of record executives as Helsinki, while still recording an album, there was no reason why he couldn’t do the same at home. When he and Andrew Slater had trekked to Neil Young’s mountain home to record his parts for Sentimental Hygiene, both had been astounded at the state-of-the-art home studio the rocker kept hidden behind the redwoods. Young had spent years assembling his Broken Arrow studios and kept it as modernized as any professional facility in Los Angeles; he even had a small, hand-picked staff of trusted engineers who assisted in his personal recordings and the studio’s daily maintenance.
While Warren couldn’t afford an extravagant setup such as Young’s—not on an income based largely on touring and residuals—his most recent work wouldn’t necessitate nearly as much gear anyway. He knew Young not only used Broken Arrow to produce full albums; the convenience allowed him to produce professional-grade demos and sketches, helping him along in refining new songs. Warren was happy to listen to his homemade playback on his Corvette’s stereo—but a modest home studio would allow for as much tinkering or refining as he saw fit.
In April, Billboard ran a lengthy feature in their Arts & Music section. “Zevon primarily recorded Mutineer at his home digital studio, giving him an independence he had never enjoyed before,” Melinda Newman wrote. “And the droll Zevon, who has never been known to use hyperbole, says that freed
om has allowed him to make the record ‘I’ve always wanted to make.’”
“When you look up the word ‘autonomy’ in the dictionary,” Warren had told Billboard, “there’s a picture of me with a fishing cap on.”
He could have ended the statement just as accurately without the wardrobe accessory mention, but Warren now wore his beloved pink fishing cap as a badge of honor—as much as he did his aforementioned autonomy. With Mutineer, the two were one and the same. He had given the album its title before even penning the ballad that would share its name; the word itself said it all—his long-gestating act of rebellion, the one that had never been an option before digital technology brought the tools of autonomy into his West Hollywood apartment on Kings Road. Here, his decisions would be his own, along with the frustrations. With that in mind, he christened his home setup “Anatomy of a Headache,” an apropos reference to the migraines he had begun to suffer during the last leg of the tour, and to his latest fascination with the human brain and the specific areas affected by diverse headaches; he hung a color-coded poster of the annotated cranium above his engineering station.
The songs compiled for Mutineer dated back as far as the beginning of 1992. He had started work on “The Indifference of Heaven” after binge reading the works of postmodern English novelist Martin Amis and becoming particularly engrossed with 1991’s Time’s Arrow. Inspired by the writer’s distinct and stylish wordplay, Warren penned one his most poetic works. Duncan Aldrich recalled, “I don’t know many people, and certainly not many musicians, who were as literate as Warren—sitting with three books on his lap while handing me the TV remote.”
Warren had still been with Annette Aguilar-Ramos at the time he started the song. She recalled that when Warren shared the first few verses of his earliest draft, she had remarked, “I’m glad you live in your world and I live in mine.” They broke up again soon after and Warren shelved the song, later completing it with the fresh emotions that his breakup from Julia Mueller had provided—or as Warren later remarked of the song, it was “the first of many depressing songs about my flaxen-tressed fiancée.”
When Warren had dropped off the final masters for his original score to Michael Mann’s Drug Wars in August 1990, his A&R man, Bob Bortnick, had told him of a perfect girl he wanted to set him up with: it was his own wife’s best friend, an actress who’d just recently moved to Los Angeles named Julia Mueller. He gave Warren a copy of a film she’d been in, The Unbelievable Truth, and said he’d have her call him the next day to see if they hit it off.
“It’s funny, I had only heard of Warren because my first boyfriend in college was a huge fan,” the now Julia McNeal later recalled. “But because of that, I knew all of his earliest albums really well. But, I knew absolutely nothing of his earlier ‘exploits’ during that time.”
Warren and McNeal had a few rocky first dates, with his apparent quirks taking time to win her over. On their second, he took her to his old fail-safe, the Ivy. She came to accept his frequent acts of oddness once it became clear that she was dealing with a true artist’s mentality. She recalled a memorable exchange early in their relationship: “The first time I ever came over to his apartment—I think we were on the way to go shopping, which he loved—I arrived, and he was still getting ready in the bathroom. So, I’m standing there waiting for him, not knowing until later how long he took to wash up meticulously and wash his hands many times before being done, and I noticed his old-fashioned typewriter on the glass coffee table. I looked and there was a half-written song in it.”
Growing tired of waiting for Warren to finally make his appearance, McNeal assumed it was safe to take a peek. She recalled the fit he threw upon walking in on her reading the work-in-progress: “Then he came out and I asked, ‘Is this autobiographical?’ He went absolutely ape-shit—like he couldn’t contain how upset I think he really was, intruding on an artist’s process. Which was right out in the open, mind you. But he kept yelling, ‘Who told you to read this? I don’t write autobiographical things,’ all this stuff, and then stops and just starts hysterically laughing. He thought it was hysterical that I was so honest about looking at it and asking questions. But I learned he didn’t necessarily want it known it was autobiographical—and not ask too many questions.”
They would eventually be together for over two and a half years, despite his infidelities on the road that he later admitted to her, and a six-month hiatus fueled by his own jealousy. When Warren and Duncan Aldrich returned from the extensive world tour that composed Learning to Flinch in November 1992, it was agreed that McNeal would move into Warren’s apartment. He hadn’t been home for more than two minutes when he’d looked at her. “So, what do you say we get married?” he asked her.
Warren had a few more tours in the following weeks, but with a diligence to remain faithful, he kept his pre- and post-gig activities to bookstores and museums—in Paris, he paid a surprise visit to Ariel—all while sending funny, romantic postcards to McNeal from out-of-the-way spots he and Aldrich had found. They reunited in Hawaii and began to shop for engagement rings. There, Warren told her how remorseful he was that he couldn’t afford the expensive ring he felt she deserved and relayed a story about an old friend of his who had to put a faucet washer on his fiancée’s finger—neglecting to mention that he had been the one who’d slipped the washer on Crystal so many years ago. They left Hawaii without a ring. McNeal was admittedly unsure of their future together.
“There was a density of artist that was always inside of him and was always present, and it kind of couldn’t be messed with—but he did a lot of preparation, both for his work and his image,” she recalled. “I would say that external suggestions to that would mess with his own, clear image of what he wanted and how he saw himself—his own awareness of presence. But part of that was image, and he could be quite insecure about it.”
Warren’s insecurities regarding his image and career, and McNeal’s own resentment toward the infidelities that were still hard to digest, eventually led to their relationship’s end. She later recalled that they broke up due to the jealousy Warren felt toward her major role in an upcoming film, coupled with a remark made toward his recent appearance with David Letterman. It was a remark meant innocently enough but proved the final drop in the “roller coaster” that McNeal felt their relationship had become.
“Warren was going to do Letterman,” she recalled. “I’d watched him on the show… But I thought he seemed nervous. So, he called the next day and I said he was wonderful, and right away he said, ‘What?’ I was like, ‘No, you looked great. What you said to Letterman was great.’ He said, ‘What, Julia? I know you don’t think it was good.’ Finally, I said, ‘Okay, you seemed a little nervous…’ His reaction was, ‘Oh my God, how could you say that to me?’… He literally cut me off for saying that to him.”
McNeal moved out one week before Warren’s forty-seventh birthday. He had already been working on “The Indifference of Heaven” at the time, but now added a few new lines. With a third fiancée gone, there was only the sound of the front door closing forever. She had left town and the town burned down.
“The Indifference of Heaven” was not the first instance with which one of Warren’s songs had been the product of multiple muses. Not only would the timelines of his writing usually intersect with various relationships, but there were the occasional groupies and one-night stands thrown into the mix while touring. “Warren would complain about being lonely,” Aldrich later recalled, “but, unless he meant it, nothing would happen.… Merle was there for a while. Then Annette.… Julia seemed serious for a while. When [the relationships] were over is when he’d complain that he was lonely and, like magic, these women would appear.” He recalled that on one occasion, Warren had seduced an enthusiastic groupie waiting outside a gig. Only later did Aldrich laugh and remind Warren that he’d already slept with the woman during his last tour.
As was the new practice thanks to the convenience of the appropriately named Anatomy of a He
adache, Warren was able to stop, start, overdub, remix, and add new layers to every track—meaning that many of the songs for Mutineer contained varied recording dates and a postproduction schedule that adhered to Warren’s convenience at home, although Duncan Aldrich was on hand for the engineering of master takes and the final mix. For the first time, however, Warren was able to attempt the very “perfectionist” act that had been the biggest rift in his ill-fated collaboration with Kim Fowley in 1969—the playing of any and all instruments himself, and seamlessly layering his numerous instrumental parts into a single track.
“That album was basically recorded at Warren’s house,” Aldrich explained. “I encouraged him to be himself and not lean on a thousand superstars, especially if we were going to be self-producing it. We brought in people, as needed, and I think Warren liked the one-on-one collaborating, like with Jorge [Calderón] and [author] Carl Hiaasen. I think Warren liked being off the hook sometimes with the lyrics, and liked focusing on his arranging and composition.”
Despite the lush sound of a full backing band, Warren had performed and recorded the majority of “The Indifference of Heaven” solo, save for old friend—and Linda Ronstadt’s acting manager—Peter Asher, who proved an ideal partner to swing down to Warren’s apartment and lay down harmonies. It was a small touch that Warren found particularly amusing, later noting, “That was one of the reasons that it was terrific to get Peter to sing it. Because it was like having an English intellectual singing harmony.”
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