WADDY WACHTEL: When I left on the Everly Brothers’ tour, I didn’t drink at all. I smoked weed, and I snorted blow, and, of course, I did acid, but I didn’t drink. I didn’t like drinking. Out on the road, Warren starts asking me, “Isn’t that guy Gene driving you crazy?” I was rooming with Gene Gunnels, the drummer, and Warren was rooming with Knigge, and I went, “No, what? He doesn’t say nothing to me.”
Warren goes, “He’s always talking about Jesus to me. He’s a fucking Jesus freak.” I go, “He hasn’t said anything to me.” So, that night in our room I say, “Gene, Warren tells me you’re like a Jesus guy or something like that. How come you don’t talk to me about it?” Gene says, “Well, you don’t need it. Warren’s crazy, man. He’s like an alcoholic or something.”
I’d never known an alcoholic. I wasn’t around people who drank. I said, “What? Warren’s an alcoholic?” Then I started noticing him drinking a lot. Then, one night when we were stuck in England for two weeks, and Don Everly calls me in my room and says, “Come on downstairs. I’m tending bar.” I said, “I don’t drink.” He says, “Well, come on down anyway.” So, Don and Warren introduced me to scotch. After that, I’m drinking every night, and I’m not really noticing anything else because I’m drunk myself.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: On the ride from the airport, I remember looking at Warren when I passed the joint; his face was pockmarked, he had these tiny teeth with huge spaces between them, and his manner was intrusive, at best. I didn’t think he was handsome. He was arrogant, and he bordered on being rude, but I knew absolutely after meeting him that my life would never be the same.
I could feel his breath on the back of my neck, and he was saying stuff to make sure I understood that he was single. For days afterward I was getting rushes in the pit of my stomach remembering how the touch of his breath made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Of course, he wasn’t really single, and I knew from Waddy that he had a son, but I chose to believe what he wanted me to believe.
The next time I ran into him was only a week or so later when we were both at Hughes Market shopping for Thanksgiving dinner. I was making a feast for Waddy’s father, who was in town, and somewhere between the potato and salad bins I ran smack into Warren and Tule. He introduced me to her as Waddy’s girlfriend, but she knew exactly what was happening.
WADDY WACHTEL: The first time Warren offended me was after a gig in Greensboro, North Carolina. He was so rude and cold and scumbag-like. He was trying to sing, and he was falling off the bed, and he threw this guitar at me, “Here, take this,” treating me like some piece of shit. It turned out he was taking Quaaludes. I didn’t even know what that was at that time. He had a bottle full of ’Ludes, plus a snootful of booze, and he was despicable.
Then the next day, he’d just be the other asshole. Still an uptight guy, but able to laugh at a joke or at himself. But that night he was without humor and without caring, and it was really offensive to me. I’d never been treated like that by anyone, especially not someone I thought was a friend. I found out it was drugs, but I always say it’s a poor workman who blames his tools.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: The next time I picked Waddy up at the airport, it was his birthday, and I’d had a hand-tooled leather briefcase made for him. I remember pulling my Chevy Super Sport van up behind Tule’s Thunderbird. Warren and I politely said “hello” at the curb, but Tule didn’t even glance in my direction.
Waddy and I went back to where he lived at our friend Arnie Geller’s house, and we celebrated his birthday by getting stoned, watching a candle stuck in a wine bottle drip colored wax all over the spool table, and listening to Waddy play Warren’s songs. It was a strange time.
JIMMY WACHTEL, Waddy’s brother, art director and founder and CEO of Dawn Patrol, Inc.: I met Warren Zevon through my brother because Warren had hired him for the Everly Brothers’ band. Waddy was the first one of all of us to get a job. My early memories are that everybody was poor, everybody was out of it.
Warren was incredibly funny, incredibly smart. One of the few people who were actually literate, which was very nice for me since I had to dumb myself up for most of these people because I had a college education and nobody else did. Warren was also drunk the entire time.
WARREN ZEVON: It was around ’70, ’71—when Waddy and I played with the Everly Brothers—that I began to develop an appreciation for country music. One more thing I suppose I owe to Waddy…he always had tapes on the road, and he’d force me to listen to them. Of course, Don and Phil had grown up with country roots, but I was the literate, classical guy. I had always looked down on country music, but in the company I was keeping, I had to at least give it a shot. Mind you, I did so grudgingly and I have to credit Waddy for his insistence that, once more, he knew something about music that I didn’t.
From Warren’s sketchbook—on the road with the Everly Brothers.
CLIFFORD BRELSFORD, Crystal Zevon’s father: The first time I ever saw Warren was when we still lived in Aspen and the Everly Brothers were playing up at the Aspen Inn. Waddy was in the band, and he got us tickets. Warren was accompanying them on piano. They took a break, and my wife and I noticed how Warren stood off in a corner by himself. He didn’t enter into anything or talk to anybody, and there was something about him that made us both think, “Boy, isn’t that a weird character.”
When Crystal brought him home to meet us a few months later, he definitely lived up to the first image we’d had of him.
WADDY WACHTEL: I remember a funny thing he and I did once. We were in Toronto. Kenny Rogers had this show going in Canada, and I met this guy who’s played with Neil Young. We didn’t have any drugs, so this guy Ben goes, “Would you like a snort?” I went, “Man, would I ever.”
He had these huge lines of white powder in this drawer and it looked like heaven to me. I take a big old snort, and the next thing you hear is “Oooowwww, what is that shit?” “Speed, man.” So, I told Warren, “These guys have a lot of speed.” Anyway, they were going to come see the show and bring instruments so afterward the bands could get together and jam.
They laid out this pile of meth on this drawer, and Warren and I couldn’t snort enough of it. He and I look at each other and we’re so despicable, both of us, we go, “Let’s steal some of their speed. They won’t miss it.”
So, we steal some, and we feel like we’ve gotten away with murder. It’s six in the morning, and these guys are getting up to leave. There’s still a pile of speed and we figure the guy’s going to pocket it, but he turns around and he goes, “You guys keep that.” And they left Warren and me looking at each other thinking we are the lowest scumbags in the world. We suck, man. We steal from people who give us stuff. Nobody could sleep for a day, and by that night, we couldn’t even think straight, so we threw it all away.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: When I ran into Warren next, I was sitting in the dentist’s chair. A few years earlier, Waddy’s band had met Brian Wilson, and we’d spent some time hanging out at his house in Bel Air. One of those nights, Brian told us about this great dentist, Elliot Gorin. I heard Warren’s voice in the waiting room. My heart started beating so fast I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I asked Dr. Gorin if Warren Zevon was a patient of his. He said, “As a matter of fact, he’s in the other room.”
He told Warren I’d asked about him, and suddenly there he was. We fumbled all over ourselves trying to think of what to say…giggling like idiots and repeating stuff like “It’s so strange to run into you here.” Warren was there to get his teeth capped. So there I am hanging out next to the dentist’s chair while Warren’s getting about twenty shots of Novocaine so he can get his tiny teeth filed into little points to fit the caps over. It was so bizarre and I kept thinking I should go, but I was glued in place.
Finally, the dentist told me it would get embarrassing for Warren if I stayed, so I went. I was about halfway across the waiting room when he yells out, “Crystal, I’ll see you VERY soon.”
WADDY WACHTEL: We were recording my a
ntiwar song with Keith Olsen and Curt Boettcher out at Sound City in Van Nuys. I got people to come by the studio to do a singing track by saying it was going to be like a party. I still didn’t know much about drinking, so I got one bottle of Ripple, and it was gone in about two minutes.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: Warren walked in just as we were going into the studio for the first take. It was like we were the only two people in the universe. While we were making moon-eyes at each other, Waddy and Keith were telling everyone there weren’t enough headsets, so people would have to share. By the time Warren and I got into the studio, there were two headsets left. Warren picked up a headset and handed it to somebody, saying, “Here, take this.” They started to argue and he literally shoved it at them and moved away so we could share one headset.
So, there we are, cheek-to-cheek, Warren’s arms around me, with Waddy in the control booth producing the session.
ROY MARINELL: Warren, Waddy, and I became pals and we hung around and played tunes together in the afternoon over at Arnie Geller’s house. Warren would play his songs and I thought…eh, eh…those are nice enough songs…then I played them with him and realized, whoa, these are more than nice songs. The construction of them was magnificent. Warren really was one of the great writers. They were just such clever setups. And lyrically, of course, everybody knows he was brilliant.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: Waddy, Roy, and a couple other musicians were playing their usual Friday-night gig at Benny K’s, this dive on Santa Monica Boulevard. They only made ten dollars a night, but they could play whatever they wanted and we all had a great time. For the first time, Warren showed up. An hour later, we were on the dance floor, wrapped around each other kissing. Everyone was dancing around us while we stood perfectly still in the center of the floor, kissing and groping for the length of two full songs.
JIMMY WACHTEL: We were at Benny K’s and there was a big fight in the bar. Arnie Geller and I worked over some old dude. I believe Billy Cowsill made a remark and these two guys attacked the band. Very funny. The last real fight I was in. The place is now a gay bar. I guess Crystal and Warren went home together, but I wasn’t paying much attention to that at the time.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: I was so self-absorbed, I’d forgotten that I’d brought Waddy to the gig. I’d given my car to someone so Warren could drive me home. That meant we had to drive Waddy home as well. He was not pleased, and he did what he could to drag out the drive home, insisting we stop at Jack in the Box for tacos. We finally dropped Waddy off, declining his offer to come in for a joint. When we made it to my West Hollywood duplex, we became very shy.
At the time, I was a foster mother for these two kids, Cindy and Bart. I thought it was important for them to grow up with music, so I had a rented upright piano. So, the kids are asleep in the two bedrooms at the end of a long hallway, and Warren and I are standing there in my living room, which was also my bedroom, not sure what to do next.
Coincidentally, Jackson Browne’s first album was on the turntable, and that’s what broke the ice. Warren said, “You like Jackson Browne?” I nodded, and he said, “Good. That’s good.” He sat down at the piano. My landlord lived on the other side of the wall, but I couldn’t have cared less. Warren said, “Here’s something I just wrote.” He played “Frank and Jesse James.”
Before I could recover from what I’d just heard, he turned to me and said, “I could live here.” And that was pretty much it. I’d found the love of my life.
The next morning, the phone woke us up at about six o’clock. It was Tule. Waddy had given her my phone number. I handed the phone to Warren and went into the bathroom. I knew I didn’t want to hear that conversation.
That was just before Christmas, 1971. The next day, I drove him to Tule’s and waited in the car while he got his things.
BARBARA BRELSFORD, Crystal Zevon’s mother: Crystal brought Warren home and we didn’t quite know what to make of him. We remembered him from the time we’d seen the Everly Brothers play, and we had never really met anyone like him before. He brought us a bottle of scotch—Glenfiddich—and then he said, “Why don’t we open it?” So, Clifford poured us each a drink, and then we put it away. We got up the next morning and the bottle was empty. Warren had stayed in the recreation room, where we had a piano to work after everybody went to bed, and he drank the whole bottle.
He was polite and respectful, but we always felt he was a little disdainful of how he perceived us to be naïve country folks. He referred to us a few times as being “from Colorado” in a way that suggested that we might not know much about city ways or cultural things.
Warren and Crystal in the beginning, when it was all Chivas and roses.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: We had to fly in and out of Denver, where my aunt and uncle and my grandparents lived. My uncle, Bob Craven, was an accomplished trumpet player, and he and Warren got into discussions about music. When Uncle Bob realized that Warren hadn’t heard everything ever recorded by Jelly Roll Morton, he sat him down with a headset and a Bloody Mary and made him listen for hours…He kept filling his glass, and Warren got drunker and drunker.
I went in at one point, and poor Warren was going nuts. He took off the headset and started banging his head into the wall. But, then he kissed me and dutifully put the earphones back on.
ROXANNE (CINDY) ASTOR, Crystal’s foster daughter: I used to go through all the Peanuts anthologies, and there was one with Schroeder, and it was a full page of Beethoven music with Schroeder very small at the bottom of the page. One day I took it to Warren and I asked, “Is this real? What does this really say?” He sat down at the piano and slammed out Beethoven.
Every hair on my body stood on end, and he played this whole crazy Beethoven piece for me. I was flabbergasted.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: After the first three or four months of bliss, things got rocky between Warren and me. I was used to being with Waddy, who slept with whomever he wanted whenever he wanted, and I had made attempts to keep up by doing the same. That was definitely not the relationship Warren and I were looking for. We really believed we were John and Yoko. The trouble started when Warren came down with the London flu.
At first, it was all very sweet. I made soup and held his cup while he sipped ginger ale. Plus, the flu changed his voice and made him sing like Rod Stewart, so in between trips to the bathroom, he recorded himself singing all his songs with the Stewart rasp. Before the flu got bad, he also finished writing “Desperadoes Under the Eaves.”
It all culminated with a late-night phone call. Warren was well enough to start drinking, and he answered the phone assuming he would be the only one receiving calls late at night. It was Keith Olsen calling for me. Keith and I dated periodically, and he was calling to ask me out. I told him I had a boyfriend and we hung up, but when Warren asked what he’d wanted, and I told him, he flew into a rage. I kept trying to reason with him that Keith had no idea we were together, but he didn’t care. He was going to kill him, and the way it looked, he might kill me in the process.
He ended up throwing all the living room furniture out on the front lawn. I remember my landlord and his wife peering out their window in horror. When it was all over, he called a taxi and went to the Tropicana. After he got there, he started calling me, and he sounded so bad I was scared he was going to kill himself—if not intentionally, which he was threatening, I was afraid he would overdose on Darvon and alcohol. I called the one person I thought he’d listen to, Dark Room Dick.
RICHARD EDLUND: Warren had this thing about the Tropicana because it fit into this image he had of what a rock star was supposed to look like and live like. He was all kind of Bukowski-esque…this was all in the “too young to die old, and too old to die young” era…But, Warren had this thing about courting death. Nothing came easily to him. He would examine every little thing myopically, and that included death.
Anyway, I got to the Tropicana, and Warren was lying on the floor, and he was blue. His body temperature must have been seventy-five degrees. He felt cold, and he was out. I thoug
ht he was in a coma. I started walking him around the room because I knew I had to wake him up somehow, get the circulation started.
Finally, he started moving his feet, but I was dragging him for quite a while trying to get him to come to. It seemed like it took me hours to do this. It was all about too many pills, too many tequilas. It scared the hell out of me. His color was gone. Another hour, he wouldn’t have been around.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: He came home the next day. It was Valentine’s Day, and he brought me a Black Hills gold locket, a pink cashmere sweater—the first cashmere I’d ever owned—and a green beret. I have no idea how he got the money to make such extravagant purchases, and when I asked it irritated him that I didn’t just accept the gifts graciously. So, I shut up.
We went out to Thrifty Drug Store and took photos in a photo booth so I could put one in the locket. He wrote me a love poem, and so, of course, all was forgiven and we never mentioned Keith Olsen’s name again.
FOUR
FRANK AND JESSE JAMES
Keep on riding, riding, riding
Frank and Jesse James
Keep on riding, riding, riding
’Til you clear your names
JACKSON BROWNE: In those days people did a lot of nothing. We had a lot of time to play. You tend to think of everyone whose work is good as having been very serious. They must have been serious to create that work, but there was also a lot of just killing time. We used to wind up in the same restaurants every night.
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