At one party, Warren was pretty drunk. The women were doing cocaine in the bathroom, so we were both flying high. Warren started banging out “Excitable Boy” on the piano and Joni Mitchell made some sarcastic remark like, “How amusing.” We suddenly felt totally out of our element, and we left feeling sick and humiliated and sure we should have stayed in Spain.
November 2, 1975
…Birthday party for John David Souther at Don Henley’s house in Malibu…Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Carole and Peter Asher, Glenn Frey (offered to play on my album), Ned Doheny, Jimmy, et al…Giguera & Bill Martin, too, in some place in the (my) past or something…played “Excitable Boy” anyway to Miss Mitchell’s amusement…Henley & Souther both very nice fellows—I like them. Talked with Jackson over our work (& to Jerry Cohen earlier today—one clause cries out to be straightened). Phyllis & C. don’t hit it off or something it seems. Many weak (shall we admit it?) vodkas, 20 mg. Valium, 2 Darvons, ½ Quaalude (Jimmy’s? Whose?) Left at appropriate time. Stopped at Ben Frank’s for coffee (no onion rings), bopped down the Boulevard at 1 a.m. for onion rings & more coffee. Back, smoked and read T.S. Eliot & Dylan Thomas aloud to each other. Now 3:00 a.m.
November 6, 1975
…I’m getting drunk, I suppose. Haven’t been drinking a lot in several days. Picked up my contracts at Elektra/Asylum today. Seem fair—$6,000 to sign & renew options (1 + 4 years). Fair enough. Celebrating inside in my own weird way…
Two things Warren dreamed of doing were writing a symphony and writing a detective novel. He never finished either, but this is his first attempt at writing the Whip S. Bug detective series.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: I later realized that our daughter, Ariel, was conceived that night. Unfortunately, after our celebratory lovemaking, we had a huge fight. Maybe it was the release from financial fears, or the realization that Spain was really off the table, but probably it was just the alcohol and pills…in any case, we were cuddling and with absolutely no warning Warren lashed out because I wasn’t home the minute he got the news about the contracts. He said something like, “I don’t need anybody. You’ll never be able to keep up with me. Maybe Jackson wrote ‘For Every Man’ but I actually know what God’s will is. I could save the world, but nobody will listen.”
The stuff he was saying was so outrageous that I called him an arrogant asshole. For the first time, he hit me. Then, he hit me again. I was stunned, but when I saw him heading at me for more, I called the police. He was so drunk, he started crying, and by the time they got there he told them I’d made it all up. I didn’t have any visible signs of abuse and I wouldn’t press charges, so they said they couldn’t interfere in domestic affairs and left.
The minute they were gone, he started up again, and I escaped to Hollywood Boulevard. It was one A.M. I didn’t know where to go, so I hitchhiked to Phil and Patricia Everly’s. They welcomed me, and I moved back into our old guesthouse. I refused to answer Warren’s calls for three days, but he had a gig at the Palomino with Phil, and afterward, he came back to the house. He apologized and begged me to come home with him, which I did. The next day, Jackson showed up with the revised recording contracts and a six thousand-dollar advance in hand and everything was golden.
Warren and I found a new place to live at the Oakwood Garden Apartments. We thought we were in the lap of luxury. I remember Jackson dropping by, and I was almost apologetic over our excessive lifestyle in this one-bedroom, cookie-cutter apartment. Jackson just laughed: “Are you kidding? You better be moving up from here by the time this record comes out.” Not long after, we found out I was pregnant. We were having Jorge and his new girlfriend over for dinner that night, and we’d bought some great wine for the occasion, and I remember thinking it was going to be hard living with Warren and not being able to drink.
Warren often wrote Crystal notes and poems in the middle of the night. This is one she found one morning.
YVONNE CALDERON, Jorge’s wife: The first time I met Warren was also the first time I went out with Jorge on a formal date. We went to Crystal and Warren’s apartment. Jorge hadn’t told me where he was taking me. He just said come with me, and I said okay. We went into this small one-bedroom apartment and I met Warren. I’d already met Crystal when she came to a birthday party of mine as Keith Olsen’s date. But, when I met Crystal and Warren together I thought, “What a lovely couple. What a great surprise.”
I remember thinking it was so unusual to meet thinking people. They were alive with ideas and things to say and it was exciting—no Hollywood pretension—just about warm, genuine friendship. We had the kind of instant friendship where you can talk about everything from the heart from the moment you first meet.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: We got invited to Irving Azoff’s Frontline [a management company] Christmas party. We bought new clothes for the occasion…At the party, I was sitting next to Don Henley and at our table was Glenn Frey, Jackson, and Phyllis—everyone was either famous or dating someone famous.
I kept wanting to pinch myself. How was it possible that we were sitting around eating and talking with these people like we were old buddies? I remember having a conversation with Henley about ulcers. Warren announced that we were having a baby, and there were toasts and cheers. But, what stood out for me was that I was sitting next to the biggest rock star in America talking about ulcers. I couldn’t help wondering if the conversation was somehow prophetic.
Days before the recording of Warren Zevon was scheduled to begin, it occurred to Jackson that Warren didn’t have a manager. Jackson recommended his own, Mark Hammerman.
MARK HAMMERMAN: I met Warren through Jackson. He was raving about this guy and he needed representation and would I like to meet him? There was nothing monumental other than, yeah, let’s try to do this together. I had started a little management company, One On One Management, with Garry George, and Warren made his great chili for our open house party when we opened our offices on Wilshire. We were handling Bonnie Raitt in partnership with Dick Waterman. Garry was taking care of Maria Muldaur, and he and I split the stuff with Bonnie. Of course, he was also sleeping with Bonnie and we didn’t split that. And, we had Jackson and Warren. That was our group.
The first few sessions at the Elektra/Asylum studio set a precedent for the remainder of the album. With Jackson producing, Warren’s name floating around town for years, and Waddy playing with some of the most successful people in rock and roll, they had easy access to just about any players who happened to be in town at the time. It seemed there was no one who wasn’t flattered and delighted to take part in the recording of Warren’s debut album.
Each night when the core group congregated at the studio, they would consider the tracks to be laid, then create a top-down list of who would be best suited to a particular song, sentiment, or sound. In most cases, those at the top of the list responded to the call…the Beach Boys, the Eagles, Bonnie Raitt, Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, Phil Everly, David Lindley, Ned Doheny, Bobby Keyes…Often it was two or three A.M. when someone picked up the phone, but the musicians who got the call showed up like good soldiers.
WADDY WACHTEL: I’d never met Jackson, and I remember Warren brought me to some TV show that Jackson was doing. Graham Nash had his TV show, I think. So, we went there and I met Jackson, and things just kept going from there. We started writing. He [Warren] did his first album and Jackson hired me to play on it.
JACKSON BROWNE: The Wachtel brothers, Jimmy and Waddy, are very funny. Stylistically, for aesthetic reasons, as well as for reasons of honor and truth, those guys are incapable of pretending about anything. Largely because of that they made good companions for Warren. Those guys, Waddy primarily, were real contributors to Warren’s work. What he was able to achieve, he was able to achieve in part because of the communication that he had with the Wachtels.
A frequent visitor to the Warren Zevon sessions was an early supporter of Warren’s music—Jon Landau. He had been Bruce Springsteen’s producer for some time and was in the process of becoming his
manager. He was also considering producing Jackson’s next album at the time, and Warren’s sessions gave them the opportunity to get to know one another in the recording studio.
JACKSON BROWNE: I played Landau some roughs from Warren’s record. He thought some stuff should be recut. He said, “What’s the problem with that?” I said, “Well, we have a low budget.” He thought somebody should tell the record company we needed more money, and I said, “It was hard to get them to record this record in the first place.” He said, “What you’ve got here is something really great. You should not be given the short shrift here.” I was happy to hear him say that this could be a major album, that Warren was somebody of tremendous interest who deserved to be developed. He was trying to communicate to me that this record was important.
JON LANDAU, producer, manager: The first time I met Warren, Jackson and I had started a dialogue about me working on the album that came to be The Pretender. Jackson was working on Warren’s record. The plan was that when he finished Warren’s record, he was going to start on his own. So, he invited me to hang out with him in L.A., to talk more and hear the things he had in progress.
I flew in from New York and I went over to Elektra Studios, where Jackson and Warren were working…I was around the studio for a while, and we made a pretty strong connection early on. Warren’s creativity was immediately in evidence, and his arch view of things. Just his speaking style separated him from most musicians right off…his fancy references to authors like Graham Greene…
Warren and Jon Landau, 1976. Crystal made Jon a birthday dinner on a night off from the studio.
JACKSON BROWNE: Warren had taste, but he much preferred stuff like…he and Waddy would quote Mickey Spillane, for Christ’s sake. For a Ross MacDonald fan, you shouldn’t like Mickey Spillane. But in the middle of working, Warren would look at Waddy and say, “I rips her kimono. I buys her another.” And they’d crack up. They loved stuff that was just pure pop trash.
JON LANDAU: His intellect and sophistication were so much higher than the typical musician’s. Warren was deep into Ross MacDonald, whose books are this combination of the psychological and the gritty details of the dark side. Some people have that ability to understand and deal with things from a psychological perspective, but they’re not great at description, or not great at construction. Warren, in his writing, could do both things. Sometimes he came on like a cynic, but he wasn’t. That’s an important thing for people to understand. In his work, he was ultimately, especially in the later work, he was essentially very spiritual. Unabashedly so.
DOUG HAYWOOD, bass player, singer: I’d done “For Everyman” with Jackson, and he showed me Warren’s songs and I liked them. So, Jackson set up a meeting because Warren was cutting his album. I went to the studio and Warren played me “Frank and Jesse James.”
I’m a huge Aaron Copeland fan, and a lot of Warren’s voicings are Copelandesqe, in my opinion. So, I said, “Wow, man, that’s great. You obviously like Aaron Copeland.” Which I meant as a compliment, but Warren got up and walked out of the room and didn’t come back. I was a candidate to play bass on Warren’s album, and that one comment probably precluded me from being involved in his album. Later, I was hired to go on his first tour, but I knew to keep my mouth shut about Copeland.
BILLY HINSCHE, musician: My sister and Carl Wilson were living in Malibu, and Carl comes down to my place, it’s at night, and says, “Hey, do you want to do a session for Jackson Browne?” I said, “Of course I do.”
So, we walk into the studio, and there’s Jackson and the engineer and this guy Carl and I didn’t know. He was just a guy in the control room. They played the track to “Desperadoes Under the Eaves” over and over so we could familiarize ourselves with it, and Carl’s getting ideas. I’m listening and Jackson’s at the board producing the date. We go into the studio and we put on our headsets.
I’m saying to myself, boy, Jackson sounds different. Maybe he’s changing his voice like Dylan did. I think Carl was of the same mind. We were under the impression that this was a Jackson song, produced by Jackson, sung by Jackson. We’d been in there an hour or more, working on parts, and we had even recorded some parts already. Then, Jackson turns to this guy standing there listening and observing, and he says, “Why don’t you go over there and play the part?”
This guy, Warren as it turns out, goes over to the piano and plays this part and starts singing it. All of a sudden, it occurs to me, it’s this guy singing over here. He’s the artist. So, we did our thing and it was fun. It has been one of the thrills of my lifetime to have been a part of that song.
JON LANDAU: Warren was the first drunk at this level I ever met. It wasn’t immediately apparent to me. It came into focus the night Crystal and Warren and Phil Everly and I were going to go out to eat, and when I got to the house Warren was standing on the top of the stairs with a gun. He had a big, idiotic grin on his face and he was waving the gun around. It was something new, and he was laughing. I said, “Warren, if you don’t put that away this instant, I have to leave. I’m not ready for whatever it is that comes next.” And, he did. That night I realized he was as troubled as he was. It was shocking. I was innocent, glad that I was, but I was completely shocked.
JACKSON BROWNE: For our first string date, Warren had these wrung-out, jaded string musicians who had been on every Lassie date since 1957 cracking up, laughing. Afterward, I said, “That was really funny.” He said, “Oh yeah, I wrote some jokes for the date.” I said, “You WROTE some jokes for the date?” He said, “Yeah, well, that’s what you have to do to get them to play well.”
Warren would also write stuff if he was going to have an interview, which is smart. If you just yammer on and trust them to pick a quote, they’re likely to miss your funny stuff. So, he would simply figure out what he wanted in print and drop it in the conversation, say very little else, and then that’s what they’d have.
Warren and Jorge in the studio.
JORGE CALDERON: I was involved in the first album singing backgrounds and just being there. In those days, everyone was just hanging out. At the end of a session, everybody would look around and say, “You coming tomorrow?” You’d say, “I wasn’t planning on it…,” but they’d go, “Oh, you got to be here…” Sometimes you’d sing or play on things, and sometimes you’d just hang. Be Warren’s buddy. We used to go out of the studio, just walking around being crazy and funny…just being ourselves. We couldn’t take life too seriously. We just had fun.
JACKSON BROWNE: “Werewolves of London” and “Excitable Boy” were both written during the time we were working on the first album. They didn’t go on that album for a couple reasons. I felt that there were songs that shouldn’t get nudged off—like “The French Inhaler” or “Desperadoes Under the Eaves.” There was a literary quality to those songs and I felt that it was better to get them established and out there first, and then come out with the record that had “Werewolves” and “Excitable Boy” on it. As a stage director, I just thought it was better to have that happen later…On the other hand, his first album might have been a much bigger hit had it had those songs on it.
JON LANDAU: One of the interesting and unusual things with Warren was, with all of his issues, how productive he stayed. In many ways he got better creatively; he continued to grow. That is really the exception. Most of the people I met hanging out with Jackson, then Warren, in 1976, ’77, ’78, many of whom were very talented, weren’t able to continue to be at their best, creatively speaking, twenty-five to thirty years later, which to me is a sign of greatness.
For most genuinely great artists, it’s a lifetime endeavor. They’re at it forever. With Bruce [Springsteen] it’s a lifetime endeavor. Bruce is still in there today trying to write the best song he ever wrote. Maybe he will, maybe he won’t, but that’s what he’s interested in doing. He’s as interested in it today as he was the day I met him. Warren was like that, too, but with him what was unusual was his level of perseverance mixed with the level of adversity
he created for himself. It is a fascinating combination.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: Midway through recording the album, we bought a two-bedroom, one-bath tract house in the far reaches of North Hollywood. Warren and I had consciously planned to have a child. For Warren, it became a project. The same way he studied a subject for a song, he bought magazines and books to study—what positions produced a girl, what I should eat to help brain development (I ate oatmeal every day I was pregnant). He bought all of Beethoven and the Beatles’ music because he’d read that the embryo actually responded to the music and listening enhanced the mental capacity of the fetus. He wanted her to have ten fingers and ten toes, but that wasn’t as important as intelligence. On his days off, Warren was painting the baby’s room while I sewed curtains. We were leading this odd juxtaposition of parallel lifestyles. We’d go from our totally domesticated life at home, with paint-spattered hands and name-the-baby conversations, into the studio with famous people, ounces of cocaine, and visions of footlights and fortunes. Late in my pregnancy, we went to see Taxi Driver and Warren was writhing in guilt for months, thinking seeing that violence would have a negative effect on our unborn child. Supportive as Warren was, once his album got under way, there was no question about his priorities. When I was about two months pregnant, he started to question the wisdom of having a baby. We’d been together for five years, doing fine. Now we were both bearing our children at the same time and he wanted center stage.
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