WADDY WACHTEL: We recorded at some little dump on Cahuenga. Dipshit studio. I don’t think any of us remember much about it because we didn’t know enough not to get totally fucked up while we were working. It was like it always was when you worked with Warren in those days…everyone was totally drunk.
EDDIE PONDER: Waddy just always amazed me with how he just knew where to go with Warren’s music. He instinctively knew where to go. He was always right on target.
I believe we did a whole album’s worth of material in a week. I got paid for it. I made one hundred dollars. But, we had so much fun that I would have gladly paid them for the experience of it.
I immediately fell in love with Warren and his whole poetic being. I thought of him as one of the aliens. I think he captured the spirit of that time. His tormented soul was like a deeper expression of what was going on than anybody else was even thinking about, let alone writing about.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: During this time, we had Jordan a lot. He was five years old and, as often as not, he came with us to the studio. When he’d get bored he and I would play games or read stories. He’d fall asleep on a stack of baffle blankets in a corner. Bart seemed to be doing well in his foster home. Cindy, on the other hand, was twelve going on twenty and she started running away from home. Eventually, she disappeared for months. I was out of my mind with worry. Finally, the police and social workers told me that if I didn’t want to lose custody, she needed to be placed in a residential school for kids with problems. Warren lobbied hard for this and so, finally, I agreed. She ran from there, too, and the court assumed custody. Warren always felt responsible for breaking up the family, but the truth is that, at twenty years old, I had no business trying to raise two kids who came with ready-to-wear problems. Warren tried. We both did. We all did.
BART ASTOR: I was so young and my mother had died and my father vanished. I remember the music. A memory I still cherish is one time at Knott’s Berry Farm, Warren was with the Everly Brothers at the John Wayne Theater when they had that big rain curtain. He let me sit by the stage and watch the show and I could see all the people out in the audience, and it made me feel very special. Ultimately, I just wanted a family like everyone else, and when Warren came along I was like, oh, cool, now we’re going to have a mom and a dad…and for the first year or two it was pretty wonderful.
ROXANNE (CINDY) ASTOR: I loved our life. In the end, Warren did break up our family, but I never got the sense that that’s what he wanted to do. I think it was simply a process of what happened in his life and being that his career was about to take off, what was he going to do? Not follow his career?
While Warren was recording his demo, Don Everly was completing his second solo album, Sunset Towers. He was also putting together a touring band for Warren to lead.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: I was grieving the loss of the kids, and Warren believed going on the road was the perfect therapy. We were in dire financial straits and $450 a week sounded like a fortune. So, we left John Rhys and Andy Klein, who had been engineering, to shop for a record deal while we went on Don Everly’s club tour. We were sure that by the time we got home, we’d be back in one of the major studios recording Warren’s debut album for Clive Davis on Bell Records, which was about to become Arista.
Warren hired his friend Lindsey Buckingham to play rhythm guitar and sing harmony.
EDDIE PONDER: Warren asked me if I wanted to play. We had no place or budget to rehearse, so we used to go up to Don’s apartment at the Sunset Towers.
We’d go up in the elevator with all our instruments, and the other residents of this art deco cathedral looked askance at us, to put it mildly. So, we had a few rehearsals up there and played a few prep gigs out at Calabasas and at the Topanga Coral before we left L.A.
The tour was a dismal failure. No one was interested in one Everly Brother, and through the first few dates the Don Everly Band played to more waiters and bartenders than audience members.
In an attempt to give promotional schemes and radio airplay a chance to kick in, the agents booked the band for two weeks at the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C.
EDDIE PONDER: We took the city bus from the airport to the hotel. There we were, this ragamuffin bunch of strange-looking musicians, and we’re riding with all these straight people taking the bus to work. That’s how the tour started, with us stuffing all our equipment onto a city bus to get to our hotel.
The band was slated to stay at a Holiday Inn in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Since it was in the suburbs, far from the venue, the quasi–road managers got to work.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: Karen and I started calling motels close to Georgetown. We came up with a place called the Knight’s Arms in Arlington, Virginia. The record company was okay with the move because this place was cheaper than the Holiday Inn, and the band was ecstatic because you could actually walk into Georgetown. But it turned out to be one of the stranger experiences of all our lives.
EDDIE PONDER: We were booked into the Cellar Door for two weeks. The first day we had a sound check, and Lindsey and I decided to walk a few blocks down the street to get something to eat. We were just going to hang out in the dressing room until showtime, drinking those big cans of Foster’s. While we’re walking down the street, Lindsey says, “I just got a call from Fleetwood Mac, and they want me to join their band.” I said, “Lindsey, are you out of your mind? You’re making four hundred and fifty dollars a week, you’ve got all your expenses paid, you’re working with stars. Why would you want to do that?”
CRYSTAL ZEVON: The owner of the Knight’s Arms was an Everly Brothers fan, and he’d never met a celebrity before. On our first day there, he literally created an altar in the lobby with Don’s album cover as the centerpiece surrounded by candles and incense, with publicity photos and newspaper ads for Don’s appearance.
EDDIE PONDER: We all looked at this altar the owner was so proud of, then we looked at each other like, is this normal, or is this as weird as I think it is? But, that was only the beginning of one of the weirdest experiences of my life.
For whatever reason, we bombed at the gig. So, we got back to the hotel and it’s locked. It’s probably two-thirty in the morning, and we’re ringing and ringing for somebody to let us in. Finally, the guy from the front desk shows up all in black with a white collar, looking just like a priest. Around his neck is this huge gold chain with a cross made out of railroad spikes.
We were pretty shit-faced, and here we are standing at the door, and it’s opened up by a fucking priest. It was pretty startling, but in our condition and with our lifestyles, we just kind of shrugged it off at first.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: He took us down some hidden staircase to his secret lair in the basement. The décor was pretty weird, and none of us were sure what this was all about, but there was a pool table, a soundproofed room, and a well-stocked bar. A few drinks and a game or two of pool might take some of the sting out of the reality that the night had been spent playing to an audience of five.
EDDIE PONDER: We go in, and he tells us he’s got this special game room where we can play our instruments as loud as we want. We’ve just finished a bad night, and there’s nothing we’d like better than to just play to work it out of our systems. We go into this dungeon-like room, and on the walls are all these medieval weapons and torture devices. It wasn’t a friendly looking place.
We walked in thinking “Holy shit, what’re we doing here?” But there’s another shrine to Don, and later, after he heard Warren, he became a “Carmelita” fan, too. A friend of his was there, too. Some bald guy who was equally strange, and Warren immediately named him the Cukaboo. It’s not like anything you could describe because nothing overt happened, but there was just an overall weird, uncomfortable vibe in this torture chamber with the Pope and the Cukaboo.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: The next couple nights, he insists we go down there again. As these guys started drinking and getting more comfortable with us, their conversation got boldly racist and anti-Semitic.
We also learned th
at the American Nazi Party had their headquarters just across the street, and they gave us a phone number so we could listen to the “daily inspiration” on the recorded message.
EDDIE PONDER: It turns out that this hotel is right across the street from the American Nazi Party headquarters. I remember we hung out watching them coming in and out, doing their various brown-shirt things.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: At first we treated it all like some kind of a detective game. We called the phone number, and sure enough, there are daily readings from Mein Kampf.
EDDIE PONDER: We started trying to avoid running into the Pope, but we had to go past the front desk to get in and out. I was rooming with Paul Yurig, the bass player, and we wake up one morning, and I walk over toward the bathroom and just inside the door to our room is a pile of human shit.
My first thought was, oh, my God, was I so drunk that I shit on the floor. In those days, it might not have been so far out of character, but I was pretty sure I would have had some recollection, or some other indication of doing something like that. Paul and I were freaked out.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: Warren was kind of thrilled by all this, and he’s acting like he’s a character in a Dashiell Hammet novel. He wants to uncover the mystery. We start sneaking around the hotel hallways, searching for clues. We found out where the front desk guy’s living quarters were and actually let ourselves in when we knew he was at the desk. All we discovered was that the guy didn’t do his dishes very often.
EDDIE PONDER: The shit thing happened three nights in a row. We tried to stay awake to catch someone at it, but no one made it through the whole night. So, we’re all trying to figure out what to do. We still didn’t have an audience at the Cellar Door, so finally we cancelled the rest of the Washington dates and went to Aspen. But, before we left the Knight’s Arms, Warren and Lindsey wrote a little tune called, “The Pope of Rome, the Cukaboo and the One Who Shat in Their Faces.”
The Don Everly entourage arrived in Aspen without fanfare. As it turned out, the Brelsfords were out of town. Don and Karen and Eddie and Paul got a room at the Aspen Inn, but the rest of the group moved into the Brelsford residence to save on expenses. Stevie Nicks came to be with Lindsey.
WARREN ZEVON: I used to be the coroner of Pitkin County, Colorado. You know, Hunter Thompson ran for sheriff in Pitkin County, that’s Aspen, and the joke was that he almost won. It was on this Don Everly Tour…’74…the successors to that political ménage in Aspen were running and this one character, Michael Kinsley, looked like Robert Redford, and he was running for county commissioner. And, I wrote this campaign song that’s sort of like a John Denver song with Kinsley’s name in it, and it’s me and Stevie [Nicks] and Lindsey [Buckingham].
We were sitting in the Jerome Hotel bar late one night and I said, “Michael, if you’re elected can I be coroner?” This guy, he’s got a sense of humor sort of like John Denver, and he says, “Well, Warren, it is an appointment and so and so will be stepping down, so I guess I can appoint you coroner.” And he became county commissioner so I figured that gave me free run of the stiffs.
EDDIE PONDER: It was a local election and it was all local people, yet here we are doing the benefit. We ended up at a party at Jill Ireland and Leon Uris’ house. Also, in Aspen, we went to some ghost town and we were playing like bank robbers and cowboys, shooting our way in and out of this ghost town. Later, we went looking for Hunter Thompson. We didn’t find him, but we hung out for hours at the Jerome waiting for him. We were convinced he belonged with us. He needed to join our party. Also, in Aspen, Halloween occurred. There we are, seven whackos from Los Angeles, and it was like being on acid. We were sitting in the bars watching the Halloween costumes parading by the windows and it was just surreal. “Mohammed’s Radio” was born that night, too. Warren saw this local guy who was developmentally disabled dressed up like a sheik with a radio to his ear. I remember exactly the look on Warren’s face watching that—something changed in his face, and what it was is he was making mental notes and writing “Mohammed’s Radio” in his head.
You know the sheriff’s got his problems, too
He will surely take them out on you,
In walks the village idiot
His face is all a-glow
He’s been up all night listening
To Mohammed’s radio
EDDIE PONDER: The next stop was in Nashville at the Exit Inn. This was a big gig for Don because a lot of people who had known him over the years were coming—Roy Acuff and Wesley Rose, Boodle O’Bryant, Roy Orbison, Chet Atkins…The Everly Brothers were a part of his history and Don had to prove he could do it on his own.
Before the show, in walks the union rep. “Which one of you boys is Don Everly?” Don says, “That’s me.” He looks at his sheet of paper and says, “It seems you haven’t paid your traveling dues for quite some while. I can’t let you play tonight unless you can pay it off.”
I don’t think collectively we could have put together five hundred dollars at the time, but Chet Atkins says, “How much does he owe?” Then he pulls out a wad of cash and pays the guy off right there and says, “Now you get out and we’ll get on with it.” Chet Atkins, gentleman and great fan of Don’s that he is, was the only reason we went on that night.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: Roy Orbison came backstage, and he made a beeline to Warren to tell him how much he loved “Frank and Jesse James” in the show. He told Warren he reminded him of Buddy Holly and asked him when he was coming out with his own record. Warren told Orbison that Linda Ronstadt was thinking about recording “Hasten Down the Wind,” hoping Orbison would want to do “Frank and Jesse James,” but he thought Warren should be recording his own songs, which made him even happier.
EDDIE PONDER: We went to Ike and Margaret Everly’s home that trip. Don’s mom made us gravy and biscuits. Ike was, of course, a major contributor to guitar picking and beloved by guitar players everywhere, and there we were with Warren and Lindsey sitting around playing with him. It was like being a part of history. Just being in the same place with all that magic was a high point of my life.
SIX
BACKS TURNED LOOKING DOWN THE PATH
We’ll go walking hand in hand
Laughing fit to beat the band
With our backs turned, looking down the path
CRYSTAL ZEVON: Just before Christmas of 1974, Tule asked if we would take Jordan while she went to New York to try acting there. We were ecstatic and agreed immediately. Christmas Eve, Tule took a plane east, and Jordan moved in with us.
Excerpts from Warren’s Diary
Jan. 1, 1975
New Year began w/ a kiss, Remy Martin & Piper, Guy Lombardo & a hit of coke. Tule called from N.Y., 4 a.m. stoned on acid—grim, in a word…USC won its bowl dramatically…Crystal quit smoking.
Jan. 9 (returning from trip to record in Canada with Phil Everly), 1975
6:45 a.m. 17 below zero…Phillip made a present of the beautiful black wool Inverness Cape he’d loaned me for the trip. He felt that it suited my Franz Liszt image…conversation about impending depression and Arabs taking over the world…Arrived back at the apt. at the same time as Crystal. Started hassling right off (tense after our first separation, I suppose)…Cindy’s run off again…John Rhys and Andy came by (late, of course). Reached some sort of bullshit reconciliation with them.
Jan. 10, 1975
…New hassles with Rhys who claims we assured him he’d receive 4% of the album last night. Owen [Sloan—attorney] flatly refused. Andy says his contact at Bell called since Clive Davis took it over…everything in motion. C & I split a Quaalude and spent a pleasant eve. at home.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: Warren felt John Rhys had misrepresented how he was going to use the demo tapes, and it became a point of honor. To John, I’m sure he felt like he’d financed the project and produced some great sessions, so why not use them as masters if that’s what would cinch a deal. But, with Warren, once he felt betrayed, there was no going back.
JOHN RHYS: It was my impression that J
ackson took Warren to his attorney, Owen Sloan, and they convinced Warren to ditch me.
Jan. 11, 1975
…Dropped by T-Bone Burnett’s sessions at Paramount (“Humans from Earth”). Werewolf-elegant in my overcoat.
Jan. 12, 1975
…Took Jordan, visited Father at the steam baths. He gave me a handsome Seiko watch and $135…quarreling with Crystal…T-Bone came over for spaghetti and I quaffed vodka martinis all night. T-Bone trounced me soundly at chess which surprised and aggravated me, but pleased me, too, by mellowing my lonely-giant-of-the-intellect trip…Made love.
Jan. 15, 1975
…Snorted coke which kept Crystal awake all night…she’s thinking of pregnancy and worried about chemicals in her body…
Jan. 16, 1975
…Deposited $150 from Crystal’s parents…Andy dropped by, just a visit in his Kissingeresque capacity…
Jan. 20, 1975
…Mary [Jordan’s grandmother] spirited a reluctant Jordan off to a commercial interview—he did so poorly, apparently, Mary was dismayed—Crystal and I gleefully believed he blew it on purpose…Cindy called, Crystal handled it fine…I started writing a simple love song, 2 Hearts (“Two hearts, two minds, two lives entwined!!!”)
Jan. 21, 1975
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead Page 9