The two finally met for the first time in person in New York in September 2001, just weeks following the attacks upon the Twin Towers. Among their discussions of art and literature, Warren expressed his own disillusionment over the terrorist acts, and pushed for Muldoon to collaborate with him. They discussed the potential for a long-term musical theater project together—but for now, Warren insisted that Muldoon try his hand at rock-and-roll writing on My Ride’s Here. Inspired by Warren’s faith in him, Muldoon soon registered a music publishing company in his own name for the new lyrics, ordered subscriptions to Spin and Guitar World magazines, and began to furiously email back and forth with Warren regarding their tunes. Among the playful debates over what instruments would work best for their new songs, “Macgillycuddy’s Reeks” and the album’s title track, “My Ride’s Here,” Warren made a point to calm his new friend.
“Rest assured,” he wrote Muldoon, “I’d be that much prouder and happier if you co-write everything. I’m quite content playing Keith to your Mick.”
Warren acknowledged that many fans and critics would question the necessity of leaning so heavily upon collaboration with literary giants, especially when his own reputation was firmly rooted as a lyricist. “Part of this rather savage criticism I’ve seen about the album is that people think there is something deeply lazy about collaborating with all these writers,” he later commented. “But the simple answer is that I love singing their words.”
The majority of My Ride’s Here was recorded back at Anatomy of a Headache. Over the past few years, Warren had continued to upgrade his home equipment with as many of the latest advances as he could afford. As the original vocal demos for Life’ll Kill Ya had been made using ADAT, he had sought significant upgrades before starting on the new album. It was while shopping for the much-needed gear that he met Noah Scot Snyder, a young engineer and musician who was fascinated to hear about Warren’s major “made at home” rock release. “It was like so many Hollywood connections—I met Warren because we bought gear from the same guy,” Snyder later recalled. “At the time, he had been recording to ADAT, which was an industry standard at the time, and I was familiar with it. So, we started casually talking about his equipment and the whole home production arrangement he’d been putting together and how he was learning Pro Tools and things like that.”
Working entirely solo at home, Warren wasn’t quick to admit his frustrations in installing the much more sophisticated digital editing suites that were now, thankfully, also regarded as an industry standard. “I got the impression that [Warren] was on the verge of really disliking some of the people getting him his equipment and doing the installing,” Snyder remembered. “I could see the anger just in his explanation.… If Warren didn’t like you, he wasn’t afraid to let you know that. But the same thing went the other way; if he liked you, he’d make you feel like a work of art. If he met you and he thought you were a putz, he’d treat you as such.”
Soon winning Warren over, Snyder was invited to aid in both installation of the new gear and a listen at some of the new demos that Warren had in the works. Talk soon began of collaboration. Snyder recalled, “The first project I did with him was My Ride’s Here.… [Warren] thought I was this hotshot because I was only like twenty-five years old at the time, and he was eager to learn new techniques. He was a very demanding guy, but he made me do a lot. There was a lot of trust and I gained experience very quickly… We got very close towards the end.”
Even with a sophisticated home setup, there was only so much that Warren could record in the confines of his apartment. For at least two tracks, it was mandatory that the small team move into a professional studio space—if only to accommodate the size of a harmonic ensemble. “Hit Somebody!” had been a true studio date, calling for the full CBS Orchestra. For the closing track of My Ride’s Here, Warren ended in the grand style of his earliest albums, crafting a haunting ballad with bitter, jealous lyrics and an ambitiously classical string quartet section.
Producer Noah Scot Snyder warmly remembered the recording session for “Genius” as his closest look into Warren’s classical influence and abilities. “That song was our only string date together,” he recalled. “He wrote each part by himself, and did notation on the computer… the violins, the viola, and the cello. But for Warren to not only know the music, but to be able to write out the parts? It was more than a level of understanding, it was a full level of knowledge. The music was so easy for him. He used to say to me, ‘Once the lyrics are done, the song is done.’”
Despite the amazing roster of literary talent on Warren’s most literary of rock albums, Goldberg wasn’t as impressed with My Ride’s Here—although he kept it to himself. “Although I liked several of the songs, the album seemed less focused to me than Life’ll Kill Ya,” he admitted. “The one fully realized song on it, ‘Genius,’ was a classic Zevon masterpiece, but it was particularly ill suited for radio play, even Triple A, because of the length of time it took to get to the chorus.”
Critics had mixed opinions on the album as well, although a few older admirers saw the harder-edge release as an improvement over the folkish country rock that had largely defined Life’ll Kill Ya.
“My Ride’s Here makes two crucial improvements on Zevon’s honorable 2000 Artemis debut, Life’ll Kill Ya,” wrote Robert Christgau in Rolling Stone. “First, it rocks harder (and louder) without stinting on the musicianly colors that have always redeemed his sessionman whomp. Second, it doesn’t dwell much on his love life, which, after decades of dysfunction, we have the right to judge a not especially interesting permanent disaster area… This reflects the structural strategy of most of these lyrics, which boast input from detective novelist Carl Hiaasen, poet Paul Muldoon, sportswriter Mitch Albom and the right honorable Hunter S. Thompson: Start with a recognizable narrative conceit, Lord Byron’s luggage or Jesus at the Marriott, and take it somewhere strange in word or incident.”
When it came time to consider a promotional tour for My Ride’s Here, Warren faced the one conundrum that he’d not anticipated in crafting a lush home production: he’d need a band to replicate them live. That problem proved the first, and only, rift between him and Goldberg. “Warren had done well with the last tour,” he remembered. “It was solo and acoustic and the reviews were good. With the next one, he was insistent that he needed an entire band. Artemis couldn’t afford that so, he decided not to tour at all. It meant no promotion, and that was really the largest benefit to come out of Life’ll Kill Ya.”
It had become clear to Goldberg that even after two albums together, Warren needed a hands-on manager to prevent him from inadvertently dive-bombing his fourth opportunity for a longstanding relationship with a record label. He was able to get old friend Irving Azoff to take him back on. “It wasn’t a hard sell,” Goldberg recalled. “He knew Warren was a genius and he knew that both the artists he already worked with and the wealthy baby boomers he did business with admired Zevon.” Under Azoff’s guidance, Warren’s daily business affairs would be handled by Brigette Barr, who knew Warren from her days working with Peter Asher. She recalled that when they were reintroduced, the first thing Warren had done was grab her hand to check for a wedding ring. Her first order of business would be in organizing with Warren upcoming tours to both compensate for the missed opportunity with My Ride’s Here, and also to continue to make some money while he geared up for another album.
Goldberg recalled that when he next saw Warren for a meeting at the Ivy at the Shore in Santa Monica, it was apparent the next project together would go smoother. “The new songs I’m writing I can perform acoustically,” he’d said. Goldberg interpreted this as Warren’s regret over his previous decision, even if he wouldn’t say it directly. He also knew that Warren had feared the poor sales of his follow-up album would lead to an axe from Artemis’s roster.
Warren also regretted that of all the esteemed co-writers who had worked on My Ride’s Here with him, Jorge Calderón hadn’t been among them. As per a u
sual routine, the two old friends would meet and go to the movies together. On one typical outing soon after Warren’s sigh-of-relief meeting with Danny Goldberg, Warren had turned to his old friend and said, “I want to start working on another album right now. Let’s do this one together. Let’s go back to what we know how to do, and let’s do it in my house.” The two hugged, both walking off with the agreement that they’d begin work as soon as Warren returned from tour. Barr and Goldberg had found an ideal fit for Warren: a Canadian folk festival with folk-rock and country sensibilities—a perfect fit for his solo acoustic style. It could also act as a refresher for a future solo tour, the one he’d promised Danny Goldberg he’d make work. They’d discuss it when he returned home from Calgary.
While promoting Mr. Bad Example in 1992, Warren had just started opening up to interviewers about his own views on celebrity and the turns that his career had taken. At the time, he had just signed with Giant Records and, at least on paper, things had looked promising. Richard Cromelin of The Los Angeles Times had taken that opportunity to ask Warren if he’d ever felt “intimidated” by either the quality of his older work or the brink of superstardom that he had once circled. As an analogy, Warren had used the career of Norman Mailer, one of his oldest literary heroes—and whose espionage epic, Harlot’s Ghost, Warren had recently read while on that tour.
“You know, to be really truthful, I suppose you occasionally think that,” he admitted to Cromelin. “But then, people always regard writers’ earliest work as their best. I mean, nobody’s ever gonna say anything but [Mailer’s] The Naked and the Dead was the guy’s best.” Warren had paused before adding his final thought to the matter. “There may be a way that writers are taken seriously twice if they’re lucky,” he said, “at the beginning and the end.”
On the same tour, he’d echoed identical sentiments to Entertainment Weekly’s Bruce Fretts—only not quite so guarded, or elegant. “If you’re lucky, people like something you do early and something you do just before you drop dead,” he’d said. “That’s as many pats on the back as you should expect.”
Part Four
THE LAST TEMPTATION OF WARREN WILLIAM ZEVON
CHAPTER TWELVE
(2002–2003)
AT THE VERY BEGINNING OF 1997, WHEN WARREN TRULY sought it the most, he’d met the last great love of his life.
In Ryan Rayston—a beautiful young screenwriter and author whom he’d accidentally met at his favorite grocer—he found the ideal female companion who met his every single need, save sexual. He already had that one covered many times over. But Rayston, as he was soon to discover, also suffered from migraines and OCD; she was in a twelve-step program and had her own bouts with creative self-doubt and writer’s block. And with no record contract, no more Duncan Aldrich—and some members of the press erroneously using the word “retired” in an infrequent press mention—Warren was in a state of personal and creative limbo when he met his lovely new kindred spirit. At first, Warren’s initial response was to leap at the chance for a romantic date. Their very first exchange, however, set the playful tone that would take on a sibling camaraderie and warmth.
“We met casually at a local gourmet supermarket called Chalet Gourmet on Sunset and Fairfax,” Rayston later recalled. “We had made eye contact and then just started talking. I knew who he was, and I was familiar with his music—so we made plans and exchanged numbers. But then I had this massive migraine and turned off my phone and had to get in bed right away. I never called him and he left me a vicious message. Instead of letting him get away with it, I called him back and let him have it. ‘I had a fucking migraine, Warren!’ and he goes, ‘Oh. Oh, then you’re forgiven.’”
Rayston added, “We had an extremely close friendship. No judgment, no bullshit—although we fought—and a whole lot of love.… We both had OCD, and there are things that are simply understood in that ritualized madness that may seem crazy to someone looking in, but to those locked in it, [there’s] a transformative freedom just having someone ‘get it.’”
There was one particular ritual that Rayston admittedly “got” immediately. She not only lacked judgment in Warren’s compulsive mantra but offered the unspoken reply that demanded confirmation. “Nothing’s bad luck, is it?” he would ask her.
“No,” she always knew to answer.
After Warren returned from Calgary, Canada, in August 2002, Rayston would no longer know the answers to every one of Warren’s questions, but she would hear them all—every doubt and fear, and witness every fall.
“My songs are all about fear.”
Warren had stated it plainly during his Transverse City promotional tour in 1989, later adding “paranoia” into the mix of his recurring themes. Almost a decade and a half later, not much had changed—only the sources of fear and paranoia. It wasn’t a specific fear that led Warren to visit a doctor upon his return from Canada; rather, a fear that had kept him away to begin with.
Warren hadn’t visited a physician since January 1990. After all the self-inflicted damage to his body that he had survived nearly two decades ago, it had taken the overpowering omens and ever-present specters of his OCD to keep him as far away from the possible bad news a doctor visit could bring. And even then, there was only one medical practitioner he would even consider seeing—his dentist, and only then in an absolute emergency. In the better part of two decades, nothing had seemed important enough to Warren to tempt fate. But in the weeks building up for his trip to Canada in July 2002, he’d made too many excuses for his frequent shortness of breath. When Ariel had taken notice, he’d waved it off as pushing too hard at the gym.
Likewise with Brigette Barr, who saw Warren often enough to have noticed the difficulties he seemed to be having. “I told him that when he came back from Canada, he absolutely had to see a doctor,” she remembered. “He said to me, ‘I don’t go to doctors, I don’t believe in doctors. I don’t want to know what he has to say.’ His biggest fear was that if he went to the doctor, he would get bad news.”
No one gave him a harder time than Jorge Calderón, who began nagging Warren to take the matter seriously as far back as July. “Then he went up to Canada to do a few outdoor shows,” he remembered, “and he told me the same thing. He called from Canada, and he said, ‘I don’t know, it must be the altitude’… I said, ‘Warren you have to go see a cardiologist.’” Calderón explained that a possible obstruction in his arteries could be the cause of his breathing problems. “Oh, no,” Warren had said, “it’s just stress. I get stressed all the time.” Finally, Calderón and wife Yvonne were able to whittle him down enough to agree to call his cousin, Sandford—the only cardiologist he’d trust to speak with. As if Warren couldn’t have guessed, his cousin had advised the same thing: he needed to see a doctor right away. On August 25, he acquiesced and visited Dr. Stan Golden, his friend of over twenty years who, incidentally, happened to be Bob Dylan’s cousin.
The shortness of breath seemed odd. Warren hadn’t touched a cigarette since 1997 and had never lapsed from his sobriety. In recent years, he had stuck, more or less, to a gym routine that included weight lifting and frequent trips to the tanning salon on Sunset Boulevard. Now in his midfifties, up until his breathing issues, Warren had been in the best shape of his life. Having clipped his famous ponytail and slowly developed noticeable muscle mass, he even looked fitter than he had in years. Golden was convinced that, especially with heart troubles on his mother’s side of the family, Warren truly needed a good cardiologist; Golden not only recommended one but accompanied Warren there. From the waiting room, he called Calderón. “You’re going to be proud of me, Jorge,” Warren had said. “Guess where I am? I’m at the cardiologist’s office.”
Calderón was initially relieved that Warren had buckled down and finally listened to every person in his life that had been concerned. He told Warren to call him when he found out more details. “The next call was several hours later,” Calderón recalled. “I was worried because it had been so long, but he cal
led and said, ‘It’s not so good.’ When he told me, I fell to my knees. I couldn’t talk. It’s like his voice went away, and I couldn’t talk.”
Warren called Carl Hiaasen from the office, too. “They gave me a glass of water and told me to sit down,” Warren told him. “I knew it was bad.” He revealed to Hiaasen the doctor’s words. It was bad; a bleeding in the lungs had led to further tests, all of which revealed a form of lung cancer. It wouldn’t be until more results came through the following day that Warren even learned the aggressive form he had—a rare, particularly aggressive type: mesothelioma. Worse yet, it had spread to his liver. They had been very honest and very blunt—he wasn’t expected to make it past three months. Much to Hiaasen’s surprise, Warren appeared very level-headed. “This is a lot harder for you than it is for me,” he told Hiaasen. “If you had gone to bed as many nights as I did in the old days, knowing that you had taken so much stuff that could kill you, and not knowing if you would wake up, this is not as shocking as you think.”
Warren added for clarification, “I’ve been writing this part for myself for thirty years and I guess I need to play it out.”
Even in Warren’s closest circle, nearly everyone agreed that this was the time he should be focused on his health and his family. But Warren was adamant to Danny Goldberg that he wanted to use whatever time he had left for productivity, insisting he start an album as soon as possible. He’d recorded albums in less than three months before—what could he put together with the amount of time that the doctors had given him?
“Warren told me that since his children were grown up, his legacy was his music,” Goldberg remembered. “His wiseguy intellect had previously resisted formal or sentimental words like ‘legacy,’ but there was no reason for that now.” He also insisted that Artemis issue a press release regarding his disease now, and the plans to continue recording. He’d even informed Goldberg, “I told Brigette we really have to use this. I want her to be the most manipulative, exploitive manager she can be. I want her to milk this for all its worth.” It was the same tactic he’d used with his rehab stints: if his fans knew he had a massive goal, it would be harder for him to let them down.
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