“I told him he should see a therapist,” cousin Sandford Zevon remembered. “I thought that that would be the best thing for what he was facing. But Warren said, ‘No, no, no—I appreciate it, but this is the therapy I need.’ He told me all of the drugs and plans that [the doctors] had presented to him, but he said he wanted to finish the album and leave some kind of financial backing behind for his family.” Danny Goldberg had offered to Warren a personal meeting with famed celebrity spiritual guru Deepak Chopra. He’d passed on that, too.
Goldberg and Barr did as Warren had asked, and media picked up the story right away. In accordance with Warren’s intuition, every major news outlet that had largely ignored him for years began to flood Artemis with interview requests. He shook his head at the irony, but decided to pick and choose which media figures he would deal with for as long as his disease would allow him. But, as he told Goldberg, the new album had to come first.
However, Warren did make two small exceptions to his now very hectic schedule.
Warren soon heard that Bob Dylan had begun performing “Mutineer” in concert in his honor. He had cracked a smile to Jorge Calderón, telling him, “Maybe this is worth it.” When Dylan was booked to perform at the Wiltern theater in Los Angeles, Warren made it a point to attend. Anticipating his arrival, Dylan personally greeted him backstage, offering his own words of regret over the recent news and telling him, “I hope you like what you hear,” before meeting the crowd. Without introduction, Dylan and his band then launched into their covers of “Mutineer,” “Lawyers, Guns and Money,” and “Accidentally Like a Martyr.” Warren looked on tearfully as his own hero paid tribute to him.
He was soon short of breath and had to leave before the concert’s end.
Warren took one final concession before heading back into the studio for his final time. In one of his first interviews after the diagnosis, he’d joked to Entertainment Weekly that his true goal was to live long enough to see the next James Bond movie. When the franchise’s producers got wind of Warren’s comments—especially as he literally faced the battle of his life—they swiftly arranged a private screening of the film series’ yet-unreleased latest installment. It was to be the first private screening of an unreleased Bond film since John F. Kennedy had requested a copy of From Russia with Love be delivered to the White House days before his fateful flight to Dallas in November 1963. Warren had the movie theater all to himself.
And he particularly loved the movie’s title: Die Another Day.
Initially, Danny Goldberg and Brigette Barr were confounded as to how they should go about booking studio time or how the project should be presented to the public. At that early stage, it was unpredictable if Warren’s health would maintain for the recording of one song, or three; they were admittedly shocked that he had been so stern in making some form of album happen at all. “I didn’t know what we would do with the recordings,” Goldberg recalled. “We certainly didn’t anticipate that he would live long enough to do an entire album. I figured that even if he did one song, we could release it as a bonus track on a ‘best of’ or something.” Goldberg mentioned to Warren Jackson Browne’s idea of organizing a tribute album in his honor, featuring different artists performing some of Warren’s best-known works. According to Goldberg, Warren had “snarled”: “Tell Jackson to make the fucking tribute album after I’m dead. Right now, I want to concentrate on my own new album.” It was all Goldberg needed to hear. He allocated $25,000 for Warren’s new recordings and booked the first few session dates at Sunset Sound.
After Warren’s diagnosis was confirmed, Jorge Calderón was shocked that his friend truly wanted to go ahead with his plans to record. “I tried to tell him that now was the time for him [to] be with his family.… Now is the time [to] take care of yourself. If you want to take a trip, or spend your days lying on a beach in Mexico, go for it.” But Warren had an answer for that, too. “I’ve thought about it,” he told Calderón, “and what would bring me the best joy would be to do what I love the best, and that is writing songs. I want to do this album—I want to do it like we talked about. So, let’s do it.”
There was one condition. Warren had stipulated that the public be made aware of his illness, both for his fans’ awareness and for his own motivation. The by-product, however, was that he was suddenly receiving calls, emails, and letters from everyone in his past. “He kept telling me that all these people were calling him and coming out of the woodwork from years back,” recalled Calderón. “Everyone was getting him on the phone and sobbing. He was getting calls from people he hadn’t seen in years, people he’d only met a couple of times. And he wasn’t the kind of person who [could] say to them, ‘Look, I don’t have time for this.’”
If Warren was truly going to make an attempt to complete a full album, as unlikely as everyone secretly believed that possibility to be, he’d need to write quickly and have a core team of studio help assembled even quicker. With Calderón the perfect candidate as chief collaborator, co-songwriter, and co-producer, that only left the need for a solid fellow producer who could helm the primary engineering. Warren immediately called Noah Scot Snyder, whom he hadn’t yet informed of his diagnosis, let alone the new album.
“At that point, [Warren] thought he only had a few months to live,” Snyder remembered. “He asked me to produce the album with him in the same phone call that he was telling me about the cancer. I was recovering from the news while he’s asking me to do the project. I mean, at this point, he was one of my best friends. I admired this man and he mattered to me a lot. So, even if we were just doing it for the sake of recording, and no one was ever going to listen to it, it had that meaning to us all.”
Carl Hiaasen recalled that for the two months following his diagnosis, Warren threw himself completely into the new album, while “dodging phone calls from acquaintances that he’d long scratched off his list of friends. ‘Everybody wants closure,’ he complained.” David Marks had tried, as had Violet Santangelo. He exchanged a few emails with Duncan Aldrich, had notified Julia, and Annette, and his loves.
One friend who noticed his silence, but later admitted to understanding, was Jackson Browne. Warren had never contacted him. Browne, however, later told Rolling Stone that he knew Warren would be working harder than ever to finish his final album, and remained sympathetic. “[But] in order to do what he did, [Warren] had to jettison anything extraneous, to limit himself,” Browne said. “He couldn’t spend time bidding farewell to the many people that wished they could spend time with him.”
Eventually, Browne was able to get Warren on the phone one last time. “He wanted to finish this record. And no matter how much we celebrate the album and the people who came around to do it with him, making a record is real work. He had to retreat into his most personal, essential friendships.”
Browne was right. Warren had been forced to halt progress on a number of promising projects when the diagnosis had come. He and Paul Muldoon had collaborated so successfully on their two tracks for My Ride’s Here that they had already laid the groundwork for an ambitious, theatrical stage musical. Tentatively entitled The Honey War, Warren and Muldoon had concocted a humorous and biting tale of a dispute over gaming rights to a Native American casino. With a Carl Hiaasen–flavored crime story, Muldoon’s signature wordplay, and Warren’s “grunge classical” compositions, the stillborn musical was one project that both collaborators were sorry to see fall by the wayside.
Soon after, while on line at Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood, Warren bumped into the famed keyboardist and founding member of the Doors, Ray Manzarek. “I need some lyrics,” the legendary rocker had told Warren. “We’re putting together a blues album. I need something dark and Raymond Chandler, that dark side of Los Angeles.”
Warren made his single exception. “You’ve come to the right man,” he said.
“I know I have, man,” said Manzarek. “So, let’s see if we can put a song together. Send me the lyrics.”
“Well, I’ll
do what I can, Ray,” Warren said. “I’ll be dead in six months.”
Warren made it very clear that it was time to buckle down. Almost as soon as he had been signed to Artemis, Danny Goldberg’s overall strategy was to bring him into the most modern and appropriate setting for his demographic—while staying hip. It was a delicate balance, and there was a bit of a challenge in marketing Warren to new listeners. One of Goldberg’s first orders of business back in 1999 was contacting VH1 about dedicating an episode of their one-hour weekly documentary series, Behind the Music, to Warren’s career. The network executive had looked at Goldberg point-blank and asked him, “Want to know why our viewers won’t care? Because I don’t.” In its place, they offered a segment for Warren on their Where Are They Now? series, a less serious anthology show that mainly profiled one-hit wonders. Knowing he’d find it indignant, Goldberg didn’t even mention the offer to Warren.
Of course, all that had changed once the media had a hook they could cover. For the first time in his career, Warren was able to tell The New Yorker, “Too late.” Instead, Barr arranged six high-profile interviews: Rolling Stone, Billboard, People, The New York Times, and USA Today—all selected to reach the largest possible readership.
When Goldberg now reached out to VH1, he got a very different response than he had only two years earlier. With the “death angle” known to the producers, and with an assortment of Warren’s high-profile musician friends anticipated for the recording sessions, not only would the network profile Warren’s career—they wanted a director in the studio for an in-depth “fly on the wall” documentary of the making of Warren’s album. As PR-savvy as ever, Warren not only allowed it—he let the camera crews follow him to the oncologist, to the tailor, and to New York for what would later be deemed a historic night on the Late Show with David Letterman.
The sessions for Warren’s yet-to-be-titled final album were still well under way, despite the fact that as of his flight to New York, Warren had just made it past the second month of the doctor’s initial prediction of only three months. He was well aware of that fact as he and Barr touched down at JFK, and the fact that it would be, in all likelihood, both his final television appearance and his last visit to the city that had launched his mainstream career nearly thirty years earlier. It had been a physical struggle for him to even board the plane. As he later told Danny Goldberg, “I wasn’t going to do it, but then I remembered how Sammy Davis Jr. in Yes I Can wrote about dancing when he had cancer, so I figured I should make the effort.” And both Letterman’s people and Artemis appreciated it: Warren was flown first-class and given a penthouse suite at Morgan’s on Madison Avenue. He brought with him a small copy of Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke, claiming the German poet wrote “about a universe where everybody’s dead except for a brief shining moment when we’re not.” Along with Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago and the Holy Bible, the small book of poetry was one of three books Warren continued to reference for inspiration throughout his battle. He later famously rephrased Arthur Schopenhauer, claiming, “We love to buy books because we believe we’re buying the time to read them,” although he had read the vast majority of his over three thousand personal book collection.
For his appearance with David Letterman, the host extended an offer that had only been bestowed to one other guest, Vice President Al Gore; on October 30, he would be the show’s only guest, amounting to an almost full-hour interview and three songs: “Mutineer,” “Genius,” and “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner”—one of Letterman’s personal favorites. “He rehearsed each of them with our band, including one that had a string quartet [that he] arranged,” music director Paul Shaffer later recalled. “That afternoon, as we rehearsed those three songs, even though I said, ‘Warren, just try to mark it and don’t blow your voice,’ he couldn’t help it. It was so much fun playing that afternoon. He was a little more tired in the evening, as anybody would be, but especially somebody as sick like he was. But I remember those rehearsals were amazing.”
When Warren was introduced for the live taping, Shaffer and his orchestra blared their own take on “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” much to Warren’s approval. Once he and Letterman were seated, even despite the shared knowledge that this would be the final time, their humor was as genuine and natural as ever, with the same candor and playful glibness that had defined their very first interview in 1982, when Letterman had earned Warren’s respect in his approach toward the topic of alcoholism and his well-publicized intervention. “I guess a couple of months ago, we all learned that your life has changed radically, hasn’t it?” Letterman now asked. Without missing a step, Warren offered, “You mean you heard about the flu?”
But it was when Letterman asked Warren if his new battle had taught him anything about life and death that the words were uttered that, for many people, epitomized Warren’s core philosophy. He shrugged and told Letterman, “Not unless you know you’re supposed to enjoy every sandwich.” At the episode’s conclusion, Letterman warmly thanked Warren and visibly held back tears as he repeated his friend’s new quote under the show’s end credits. Before he left the Ed Sullivan Theater that night, Warren handed his guitar case to Letterman. It was the very same case he’d had with him many times over the years, containing his Gibson electric-acoustic. “Take care of this for me,” he said.
Letterman was not only taken with Warren’s gesture, but of the strength he had so clearly displayed on what everyone knew was to be his final public appearance. A few weeks later, Warren’s words still haunted his old friend, who admitted to The New York Times, “Here’s a guy looking down the barrel of the gun… And if a guy wanted to indulge himself in great hyperbole in that circumstance, who wouldn’t forgive him? But that was perfect, the simplicity of that. If this guy is not a poet, who is?”
That night was also the last time Warren was to see his cousin, Sandford, the man who had solidified his lasting path to sobriety nearly two decades earlier. In recent years, they had not only stayed in touch, but Warren would make frequent visits to the East Coast for the two to play rounds of golf together. Outside the Ed Sullivan Theater, Warren told his cousin to send his love to the boys at home.
“Warren was in great physical shape the last few times I saw him,” remembered his younger cousin, Lawrence Zevon. “It just made his illness even more startling. He was sober and exercising and—tying it all together with his touring schedules—visiting art exhibits and all the cultural things he loved. In those last few months, I watched on TV—the Letterman appearance and then on the VH1 special—all these strangers, like the guy who made his suit, get to express their sadness, and all those who actually got to say goodbye. In a way, that frustrated me. I wrote him a long, heartfelt email about how upset I was about his illness and he responded to the effect, ‘You take what life deals you.’ Despite his bravado, I knew it sucked for him. And us.”
Making a major television appearance as an official swan song to public performance killed two birds with one stone; it not only provided a grand finale to Warren’s life as a dedicated professional entertainer, but it was also his goodbye to anyone not in his innermost circle, or directly involved with his album. His interviews were done, and so was his much-needed farewell to Letterman—the best friend his music ever had, as Warren liked to remind him.
The world had seen Warren for the last time, still dapper, witty, and undeniably brave. It was the way he wanted to be remembered. No one needed to see the descent he was about to take.
Warren and Jorge Calderón had officially started the recording sessions the second week of September. Luckily, they wouldn’t be starting from scratch, as Warren had two songs written and prerecorded from his home studio: “Dirty Life and Times” and “She’s Too Good for Me.” When they went into Sunset Sound for the final master, the sessions went off to a thundering start with Ry Cooder, Don Henley, Billy Bob Thornton, and Dwight Yoakam creating the backing band’s overdubs.
Danny Goldberg remembered his first day visiting
the studio. “The song they were working on was ‘Dirty Life and Times,’” he said. “[Warren] felt good about the lyric because it wasn’t maudlin. I suggested that it might not make a bad album title, which Warren politely appeared to consider, although he wisely jettisoned the idea later on and went with The Wind.”
The first song that Warren and Calderón wrote for the album, however, was “El Amor de Mi Vida,” which was for Annette Aguilar- Ramos; Calderón had to pen the Spanish lyric, which translated to “love of my life.” Calderón recalled the first few energetic recordings with the visiting esteemed guests. “The first session we did with live musicians was for ‘Numb as a Statue,’ which was one of the songs we wrote in a day,” he said. “Then we did ‘Prison Grove’ at Sunset Sound. I remember that being a long day. Warren could sing, but it was apparent he was having problems with stamina.”
Warren’s physical limitations had slowly begun to show and during the sessions for “Prison Grove,” Calderón was not the only musician who noticed. Warren had jokingly called the track his “Robert Redford in prison song,” comparing the somber jailhouse tune to the 1980 drama Brubaker. Calderón, however, saw the metaphorical lyrics as something significantly deeper, telling Warren, “You know, your body’s the prison.” Impressed at the self-revelation, Warren later remarked, “[Calderón] knows me better than I know myself.”
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