Nothing's Bad Luck

by C. M. Kushins

  Ry Cooder had made a surprise visit to Sunset Sound on that night and was instantly taken by Warren’s focus and drive. “It’s unbelievably sad and unbelievably brave,” Cooder later said. “You get that kind of intense focus, and every word and every note is heartfelt.… Everything is accentuated and becomes meaningful in an oblique way. There’s subtext all over the place. I went in another mental atmosphere for quite some time after that.”

  If ever there was a gesture that meant the most to Warren, it was Bruce Springsteen’s dramatic appearance toward the end of December. When he’d learned of Warren’s illness, Springsteen had decided to postpone his own holiday plans to be sure to take part in the new album. Young producer Noah Scot Snyder remembered the session for “Disorder in the House” vividly. “It was like a cosmic event,” he said. “There was something so magical about the energy he brought. When he came in, I’m all ready for him to be picky about how he wants to record the guitar, the amp, whatever. Then, all he does is turn the amp all the way up. So, after he plays, he kills the amp.” Watching Springsteen destroy the speakers while ripping through an angry lead guitar solo, Warren couldn’t keep the grin off his face.

  “I’ve never heard Bruce play like that in my life,” Calderón later told Geoff Boucher of The Los Angeles Times. “What he brought emotionally into the room, the way he handled himself and gave of himself—well, that to me is a national treasure.”

  Snyder added, “See, with all those amazing guests on the album, it wasn’t unprecedented for [Warren] at all. His albums had always had huge names on them, because they all respected him and I don’t think he was intimidated by them, either. I think they all understood each other and worked well together, and that was the point of that album—getting it done and having the best sound.”

  Following his public announcement, Warren had his fax number rerouted to his management office and began ignoring phone calls and emails from everyone. Again, there were two reasons. While the sessions for The Wind were, by all accounts, going as amazing as they could under the sad circumstances, Warren still wanted—and, with the clock ticking, needed—to remain as focused as possible. His focus was there, as was his genuine delight at seeing the likes of Mick Fleetwood, Tom Petty, T Bone Burnett, Mike Campbell, and David Lindley all brushing aside their own schedules to see him and help him see his final artistic vision through to the end. Warren proudly remarked to The New York Times that the ambitious, twelve-hour-long November studio sessions were “like, This is Your Life, unplanned and unrehearsed.”

  But what wasn’t there was his energy. He’d outlived the initial three-month prediction, but his body was feeling the strain of the cancer spread—and the copious amounts of painkillers that Warren had been taking. His claim to The New York Times that work was “the most effective drug there can possibly be” was true; but in order to work, he needed real drugs. He confided to Goldberg, “I told my doctors that my [substance abuse] program required me to avoid these drugs, and they said that is not an option.” As Goldberg saw it, Warren could now “have his cake and eat it too.”

  Billy Bob Thornton had bought his home in Beverly Hills from Guns N’ Roses lead guitarist Slash, and so his home was fully equipped with what had once been Snakepit Studio. He later recalled that during a session at the home studio, Warren had been mixing a $500 bottle of scotch with the liquid morphine that he carried around in his coat pockets. When Dave Barry visited Los Angeles and took Warren to dinner—another meeting that both friends were aware would be the last time—Barry couldn’t help but notice the amount of drugs Warren had on him. As a friend who had been acquired later in life, he had never seen Warren drink, smoke, or do drugs; in fact, none of his Rock Bottom Remainder buddies had ever seen that side of him—the side that had gotten him banned from clubs all over Los Angeles and Rolling Stone. But that was a long time ago—wasn’t it?

  As Barry recalled, Warren was to meet him at his hotel for dinner, camera crew in tow. “That night remains one of the highlights of my life, in a weird kind of way,” Barry later recalled. “You don’t always get that kind of opportunity with a friend.… As I’ve gotten older, I know that people die, that people you know and people you love will die—and it’s so rare when you know it, and you have the chance to talk with them about it and come to a kind of peace about it—if and when you actually can.

  “Warren showed up with his video guy at my hotel in LA,” Barry said, “and I thought ‘This is going to be horrible, it’s going to be awful, but I got to get through it because it’s for Warren.… Luckily, later, when I got back to my hotel room, I was still laughing. He had turned it into one of the funniest dinners I had had in my life! It was like a miracle. It was funny, and yet, it was like, ‘Hey, goodbye, I love you.’ And it was perfect.”

  But Barry had also noticed the clinking of tiny bottles in the pockets of Warren’s overcoat; on the way to the hotel, Warren had stopped for a fresh supply of liquid morphine, which he set up in a row on their table during the meal. “He brought the bag in to show me how much they’d really loaded him up,” Barry said. “[Warren] had kind of joyfully leaped off the wagon that he had been on for so many years. I was certainly not going to criticize him for that. I don’t know what I would do.” Barry didn’t judge, but instead kept his friend laughing hysterically until they parted ways, both saying “I love you” to each other on the way out of the lobby.

  Warren was much more open in his deliberate decision to go out in a sanctioned blaze of oblivion with the one person capable of understanding, while also being forthright in her attempts to prevent it. “When Warren found out he was going to die, he said ‘Fuck it. I’m going to drink and I’m going to do the Elvis drugs,’” recalled Ryan Rayston. “Not drug-drugs, like cocaine, but the drugs that were prescribed to him, the heavy-duty painkillers… he was telling everyone he had the flu, but he was really drunk.” She knew from their years as intimate friends that Warren had always had a playful public nonchalance regarding death because he didn’t fear it; it was the prolonged process of dying that he feared the most. “It was not a battle he wanted to fight, but he fought it and he wasn’t afraid,” she recalled. “He had a lot of faith. He believed in God, and he actually started going to church again after September 11, after years of being away from it.… We would talk about everything—God and spirituality, women in his life, books, music, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and, of course, death.”

  Although he hadn’t attended an A.A. meeting in years, Warren still followed the core mantras and prayers that he had once claimed saved his life. Rayston still attended her own twelve-step meetings and, very concerned for Warren’s health, consulted her own sponsor. She was told that there was nothing you could do but pray for someone who had made such a decision—so she did.

  Despite Warren’s fading condition, and the consistent fogginess from the morphine and pills that he only partially attempted to hide, the team was able to cut nearly all the tracks that they had penned. They’d already scheduled a brief recess from recording during the holiday season, but, as Danny Goldberg recalled, “When the album was almost finished, the session suddenly came to a grinding halt. I was worried that the end was near, but Jordan later explained to me that the problem was that Warren’s medical needs for painkillers had trumped his A.A. discipline and left him without the inner compass he had carefully nurtured over two decades.”

  Jordan had told Goldberg about the oblivion Warren had created for himself at home. He no longer left the apartment, but rather had all groceries, medications, and booze delivered. He had been on a drinking binge for weeks. “When we finally got into his apartment, it was like death had already come,” Rayston remembered. “There were bottles and trash everywhere.”

  Carl Hiaasen recalled that once he’d heard from mutual friends just how bad things had gotten for Warren, he planned to fly to Los Angeles. At the time, Warren wasn’t opening the door or answering the phone for anyone. “I was fearing the worst,” he said. “Apparently, it
was pretty bad, but he told me that the holidays always put him in a depression. It was just multiplied indefinitely by the knowledge that this was going to be his last Christmas and New Year’s.” Calderón had heard Warren share the same sentiments. “The bravery he had shown, and the humorous way he looked at his illness, really took a turn,” he said. “He’d say, ‘It’s not only Christmas and New Year’s—it’s my last Christmas and New Year’s.’ He really went down, I mean really down and depressed… He was thinking he was going to die any day.” Warren’s old OCD also began to rear its head, with the color orange replacing gray as his latest totem; it was his new “good luck” color.

  Calderón was also “at the end of his rope just trying to finish the last few songs.” Carl Hiaasen advised him to leave a message on Warren’s machine saying that if he wasn’t going to push himself to sober up and lay down his final vocals, the label would hire fellow musician John Hiatt to finish it in postproduction. “You’ll get a call,” he told him.

  Warren had much greater incentive for pulling himself together one final time. Ariel and Jordan had both visited his apartment for Christmas Eve—and it hadn’t gone well. She hadn’t seen her father in such a state of lethargy and inebriation since she was a child. Upon learning of his illness, Ariel had moved up the date of her wedding to better Warren’s chance of being in attendance. She had been visiting him with regularity up until his joyous leap from the wagon, and told him that, as bad as she wanted to be with him during these last days, she could not do it if this was the version he was going to be. She’d sit in the other room if he was going to sneak scotch into his Mountain Dew can.

  After Christmas, Warren locked his door to the outside world for good.

  It was only after Jordan staked out his father’s house prior to a grocery delivery that he was able to corner him into opening the door. Jordan began keeping a closer eye on his father. Danny Goldberg recalled, “In these final months, there was no one other than Jordan [Warren] could trust. Jordan helped him reduce his drug intake, hired a Jamaican woman to read the Bible to him,” and he and Jorge got Warren to do his final vocal on the last song he wrote, “Keep Me in Your Heart.”

  But there were two others to complete first. Warren had been working on “El Amor de Mi Vida” since before his diagnosis; it was now one of the very last songs he was to record. Calderón had recorded his own Spanish chorus and mixed portions, all during the weeks he’d been awaiting Warren’s unlikely return. Warren only needed to sing the song’s first two verses to wrap the cut. With his body weakening, but his mind sharper without the booze and far less pills, he had been able to complete his parts. Likewise, he’d been able to muster the strength to nail the dirty blues number, “Rub Me Raw.” Calderón was impressed with Warren’s ability to “reach all the way down and find a deeper sentiment” in the song and credited it with Warren’s own raw emotions coming through. It was, however, the song that everyone was pushing for Warren to make it his own.

  In getting him fit and strong enough to complete the album, the ultimate goal had always been for “Keep Me in Your Heart” to be completed by the voice of Warren Zevon. “I said, ‘Warren, you have to finish that song,’” Calderón recalled. “‘That song is yours. That’s a goodbye song.’ I told him to keep going, but he was having all kinds of trouble emotionally.” But Warren knew how crucial it was for him to finish that song. As “Mutineer” had been a love song for his fans, so “Keep Me in Your Heart” was for his family, friends, fans—and the grandchildren he would never get to know.

  Warren’s albums had always been more autobiographical than he was willing to admit. Even the most seemingly unrelated, fantastical, goriest fables were deeply rooted in where his heart and mind were at a given point. Likewise, the women of his life also acted as the right muse for the right version of him at that time: he had been his most dominant with Crystal, a dark version of himself that later morphed into a deep friendship, but only once he had become his better self; Anita Gevinson had never judged the darkest side of Warren’s behavior, a doomed relationship that inadvertently inspired his need to get on the wagon by himself; Kim Lankford and Merle Ginsberg had reinvigorated him and reminded him of the successful, driven rock star within; Julia had reminded him that a “quiet, normal life” was, indeed, somehow still attainable; Ryan was the spiritual sister he never had; and Annette, well, she was his “El Amor De Mi Vida.”

  But after a lifetime of muses, it only made sense that Warren’s final album, in and of itself, existed for his daughter.

  Warren’s and Ariel’s relationship was the only one that always had been in a shaky state of flux, for nearly her entire life. Now, when it came time to focus all of his creative energies and reach into himself for the greatest amount of personal strength and drive as he could muster during his final battle, Ariel’s pregnancy was the incentive to keep him working and breathing. Against the judgment of his friends and colleagues, Warren had deliberately disappeared into the studio, knowing that work would be the only means to keep his wheels turning, and a deliberate PR blitz would—as it always had in the past—guarantee his focus and diligence. But most importantly, in completing The Wind, he would reach the finish line of witnessing his daughter give birth to her sons. When he had learned of her pregnancy, it had been the spark to reignite his sobriety. The album—its writing, production, recording, and public announcement—all that effort was in order to bear witness to the most important day in Ariel’s life.

  The time came for Warren to lay down his vocals for “Keep Me in Your Heart,” the only song left to complete. He was at his weakest. Noah Scot Snyder had to devise a way to loop the microphone on a long chord down from Warren’s loft, so he could sit comfortably on the couch in order to sing with strained breath and voice. Calderón, Barr, and Ariel watched as he completed three perfect takes then, out of steam, sat back breathless on his “divan of doom.”

  Where once he had said in interviews that his songs were all about fear and paranoia, Warren had recently changed his tune. Only weeks earlier, the filmmakers from VH1 had spoken to Warren about his legacy and the motivation that was keeping him working. Even now, his feelings were the most optimistic he had shared publicly in years. “I think that writing songs is an act of love,” he said. “You write songs because you love the subject, and you want to pass that feeling on.”

  “Keep Me in Your Heart” was the final song Warren performed. He had smiled as Calderón and Snyder announced the album was wrapped.

  On June 11 Ariel gave birth to twin boys: Augustus Warren Zevon- Powell and Maximus Patrick Zevon-Powell. Even in his weakened condition, Warren had still managed to make it to the hospital, having left nothing to chance by renting a hotel room directly across the street from the hospital, as well as retaining a personal driver to wait on standby for Crystal’s call. And he even had a press release issued. “[Warren’s] doing alright,” his new publicist, Diana Baron, said of his condition. “Listen, when he first started talking about his illness, he was hoping he could make it to see the next James Bond movie. And that was last Christmas. So, every day is a blessing.”

  As they looked at their grandchildren together, Warren stood at the foot of the hospital bed and took hold of Crystal’s hand. “This is where we’re supposed to be,” he said to her. “Don’t you see it, old girl? We made it. We made it to the front porch.” Later, he took her aside. “Come on,” he told her, “I know where the chapel is in this joint. Let’s go thank the Big Guy in the sky.”

  Even as Warren remained primarily bed-bound, there were other blessings he would witness. The Wind was released on August 26, 2003, to universal praise and his best sales in a decade. Danny Goldberg was elated to be able to share the news of the album’s success. “The Wind SoundScanned forty-eight thousand the first week and debuted at Number 14,” he recalled. “The only time an album of his had attained a higher chart position was when Excitable Boy had gone to Number 8 twenty-five years ago. We knew in the first week that we had
a gold record.”

  Not only were the sales for The Wind the highest Warren had scored in many years, but the critical praise was also unrivaled. While some critics cautiously mentioned the difficulty in assessing the final work of a dying artist still within their mortal coil, much of The Wind’s highest accolades objectively compared the work to Warren’s strong previous endeavors. Unceremoniously, Warren was most proud that his work had not only come through for himself, but for Danny Goldberg and all of Artemis, as well. “The last thing he said to me was, ‘I’m so happy that the belief you had in me is paying off for you.’ That was typical. He was very conscious of everybody’s role in his life. Very few artists have that kind of responsibility.”

  Likewise, his VH1 special had been a hit on the network, driving more sales. The night it aired, Warren was in his weakest condition yet. Ryan Rayston had come over, as she had continued to do for weeks. They had planned to watch the documentary’s debut together. When she arrived, Warren was in bed and asked her to look under it. She recalled, “I looked under the bed and the bottles of alcohol were gone. He had stopped drinking.”

  When they locked eyes, Warren told her, “I fought too hard not to go to God sober.”

  After all the accolades had come in, Warren joked to Crystal about the recognition that had long awaited him. “I better die quick so they’ll give me a Grammy nomination. It’s a damned hard way to make a living, having to die to get ’em to know you’re alive.”

  Warren called Rayston on September 6, telling her that he had been having breathing issues but still wanted to know if she could bring him soup from Bristol Farms and maybe a tapioca pudding. After they had hung up, her phone immediately rang again. “Yes, Warren?”