ROY MARINELL: Originally, when I played on the demo that we cut with John Rhys, the promise was that when Warren got a deal, we would be the players on it. I didn’t get to play, and I was furious about it. Then, one night around midnight, I get a call and it’s Jackson. “Listen, can you come out to the studio, and bring your bass. We need you.” I said, “Be right out.” I hung up and said, oh shit, I haven’t touched my bass in six months. I’d been playing guitar. I’d been shooting off my mouth about how those assholes wouldn’t let me play on the album…and now…I didn’t know what a bass was.
The song was “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead.” I started to play and I wasn’t cutting it. Truly, I wasn’t. Waddy said, “Give me your bass. Let me play it.” He didn’t cut it, either. But, I had gathered myself together and I said, “Move over. I’m going to play it.” I played it, and I played it good. That song, “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” was cut on different occasions. Nobody in the band ever saw each other. Nobody played together. The drummer came in and overdubbed on it. I came in and overdubbed on it. But, every time the subject of that song comes up, people say, “Man, you guys were cooking. That groove is so cool. It’s got so much synergy.” The fact is nobody even saw each other.
JACKSON BROWNE: “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” came up in the studio like “Oh yeah, let’s do that.” At the time it came up, Warren leapt up on the console and said, “I was born to play the drums…I’m playing drums on this.” He proceeded to go out there and play the most berserk but spirited drums.
Then we got Gary Mallaber to emulate his drum pattern. Those things were the pulse, the life, of what Warren did. It was an of-the-moment panache. There was nothing preplanned. He was capable of planning things, but he was also really given to creating moments, giving himself to the moment.
JON LANDAU: I remember when the album was finished, and what a first album it was. It is, in reality, one of the truly great first albums. I don’t know how many artists ever creatively kicked things off like Warren did…Jackson’s wife had died suddenly, and Jackson had been scheduled to play Warren’s album for Joe Smith, the head of Elektra/Asylum. Jackson, in his grief and shock, got it in his mind that he didn’t want that to change. I was friendly with Joe, so he asked me to play Warren’s album for him, which I did.
I remember Joe being very professional, very accepting of the record. I didn’t get a sense that he was overwhelmed emotionally by it, or felt the way I felt about it, and the way Jackson felt about it, and the way Warren felt about it, most importantly. But, he had a good, solid record company response.
I told Warren about it directly. That was the presentation to the chief. I felt very strange, and it was certainly an honor to be in that little slot. As the record was going by, I kept thinking to myself, once again, how masterful it was. The songwriting was just state of the art.
JACKSON BROWNE: I don’t think that Geffen really got Warren in the beginning, but when the record came out and there were all these reviews, he said, “Hey, this is pretty cool. You were right, weren’t you?” He was certainly not above admitting that something he didn’t quite get was good.
WADDY WACHTEL: After the album came out, I did this interview in England when I was on the road with Linda Ronstadt.
I get home from Europe, I walk in the house, and the phone’s ringing. I pick it up. “Waddy, hey, it’s Jackson.” I go, “Hey, man, how are you?” He says, “I’m good.” And he says, “I want you to co-produce the next record with me.” I went, “Me? You don’t even know me.” He says, “I need you to do this with me because Warren has something up his ass about me. He treats me like the enemy, and I need you to be there.” He says, “If you’re there, you can talk to him and we can get it done, but I don’t think he’ll listen to me.” So, I go, “Okay, sure. I’ll try.” And that was the start of all that.
Party at the Zevons’ after the album was finished. Among the guests, Anne Marshall, a very pregnant Crystal, Jon Landau, Jackson Browne (with cigarette), Mark Hammerman, Bonnie Raitt, and Garry George.
Warren had assumed that his old buddy, Richard Edlund, would do the cover art. However, at the same time Warren got his Asylum contract, Richard was hired by George Lucas to work on special effects for Star Wars.
RICHARD EDLUND: I think he felt betrayed to some degree. The thing is, I couldn’t handle it, personally. Doing Star Wars was very intense, and I didn’t have what I knew it would take to do an album cover for Warren. I hated not being available to do that album cover, but working with Warren was a labor of love, with a strong emphasis on labor. With Warren you’re dealing with a powerful intellect that’s acutely tuned in to every molecule of what’s going on.
Jimmy Wachtel, Waddy’s brother, was hired to produce the cover art.
JIMMY WACHTEL: We’d been talking about what the cover should look like throughout the whole recording process. During one of the last mixing sessions they didn’t need Warren in the studio, so we got my cameras and snuck into the Grammys. We weren’t invited. It was at the Palladium and so we snuck down and took some pictures like Warren was going to win a Grammy. One of the shots became the first album cover…Warren standing outside the Palladium, uninvited, in front of the spotlight while the awards were being handed out inside.
JON LANDAU: Around the time Warren was finishing his album, there was a party at Bonnie Raitt’s that we all went to. She and Garry George were living together, and what a good time I had at that party. I wound up playing the drums, which was what I always really wanted to be doing. It was just a happy time for all of us, you know.
BONNIE RAITT: I had a great party after Joni Mitchell’s gig. We rolled up our rug and pushed the couches away. Jackson and three of his old blond girlfriends were there. Somebody burned up one of the keys on my piano—either Martin Mull or Warren. A group left to go to another party at Ringo’s house. Those were the days, and I don’t regret a minute of it.
EIGHT
MOHAMMED’S RADIO
You’ve been up all night listening for his drum
Hoping that the righteous might just might just come
I heard the General whisper to his aide-de-camp
“Be watchful for Mohammed’s lamp”
Don’t it make you want to rock and roll
All night long Mohammed’s Radio
Warren Zevon was released in June of 1976. While the album received instant critical accolades, sales were modest by industry standards.
BONNIE RAITT: I admired Warren so much. He was a breath of fresh air. It was so important to have someone with rough edges like that, and I’ve always admired Jackson for appreciating Warren. I saw something in the people who appreciated Warren—it says something about the people that he touched, the people who could relate to him. Jackson’s appreciation of Warren made me see Jackson in another way. That was another unexpected gift. We had to be truly twisted to be able to get Warren—and I mean that in a good way.
JACKSON BROWNE: Geffen was pleasantly surprised when it became the critics’ favorite record. It didn’t sell a lot, but at least he saw that he should make the next record and that there was something to develop there.
BURT STEIN, A&R man at Asylum Records, traveling companion: My introduction to Warren was from Jackson. It took place when Jackson was working on Warren’s first album. He said, “Alright, Burt, I’ve been taking care of Warren up ’til now. I’m finishing this record and I’m passing him over to you. You’re now in charge.”
I wasn’t quite sure what he meant when he said that, but that was my introduction to Warren. It was at the studio and I heard the album and I said, “Wow. This is so amazing.” Then, of course, I got to run with that record and we got the ball rolling for Warren. It was warmly received—an amazing recording, I thought.
Reviews of Warren Zevon:
Rolling Stone, number 217, by Stephen Holden: “…Despite its imperfections, Warren Zevon is a very auspicious accomplishment. If it does not have the obvious commercial appeal of an Eagles
album, on its own artistic terms it is almost a complete success. Who could have imagined a concept album about Los Angeles that is funny, enlightening, musical, at moments terrifying and above all funny?…”
Newsweek, August 2, 1976, “Salty Margaritas” by Janet Maslin: “…it sounds as though Zevon is out to demolish every cliché in the Asylum bin…Zevon is that refreshing rarity—a pop singer with comic detachment…”
Time, August 2, 1976: “…In the dark hours before dawn, while his pregnant wife Crystal lies asleep, Warren Zevon struggles to compose a symphony in his back yard studio in North Hollywood. It is an ambitious undertaking for a man who by day is a successful rock songwriter…Those who come to hear Zevon perform are not purists. They are beguiled by his lyrics, which typically are about Chicano hustlers, Sunset Strip women and hotel-bar bums…”
The Village Voice, June 21, 1976, by Paul Nelson: “…upcoming major artists belong to a species so rare that many of us may go for years without ever being sure we’ve actually seen one…I’ll come right out and say it: Warren Zevon is a major artist…”
New Times, July 23, 1976, by Kit Rachlis: “…Part of Zevon’s appeal is the knowledge that he will only improve. He is already like a good boxer: he comes at you from all directions; he jabs with his romanticism, sits back on the ropes and challenges with his humor; his combinations are straight rock ’n’ roll. He’s a championship contender who’s only completed his first round…”
The New York Times, June 25, 1976, by John Rockwell: “…a virile imagination and a gift for infectious music-making quite out of the ordinary…”
JACKSON BROWNE: It was a triumph. Right away you had people referring to Warren as “the Dorothy Parker of rock and roll.”
MARK HAMMERMAN: I put a tour together with Elektra, and we went on the road. We played little clubs. We played The Main Point in Philadelphia, the Bottom Line in New York. All those places.
ERIC DETERDING, roadie: My first memory of Warren was getting ready for the tour in 1976. I had been working for Jackson Browne, and I went to work for Warren Zevon. Howard Burke was our road manager on that tour and Mark Hammerman was managing Warren and Jackson and Bonnie Raitt. Doug Haywood was in the band. We rehearsed at the Alley for that tour.
DOUG HAYWOOD: Mickey McGee was playing drums and Jerry Donahue was playing guitar and Warren always called him Lord Bullington. It was just the three of us.
HOWARD BURKE, road manager: Jackson plugged me in because he thought I could take care of Warren on the road. Warren was a cocky person, but he admired the fact that I was a veteran of a foreign war, and I liked him because he was such a master at coming up with that last dark line, where you couldn’t come up with anything better so you’d just leave it there and die laughing.
DOUG HAYWOOD: Warren’s father flew to New York with us for the opening. He was a small guy. Not a big talker.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: The Warren Zevon tour kicked off at the Bottom Line on my twenty-seventh birthday, June 11th, 1976. I was almost eight months pregnant, but Warren insisted that I come to the opening. On the plane from L.A., the band and I played poker. Warren wouldn’t come near the game, but I was the big winner and even though both Warren and his dad kept their poker faces, it was obvious they saw my winning as a sign of good fortune in our future.
John Hammond was the opening act. Bruce Springsteen was in the audience, and John Belushi had been recruited to introduce Warren’s set. The record company execs were spouting platitudes, and life was good. The only problem was that Belushi had dropped too much acid to do a coherent introduction. The other problem, for me at least, was that the female A&R rep was coming on to my husband right in front of me.
Reviews of the Tour:
The Village Voice, June 21, 1976, by Paul Nelson: “…[Warren] dominated everything in sight like a hungry rock & roll werewolf who had just been uncaged and told the moon was full…”
Newsweek, August 2, 1976, “Salty Margaritas” by Janet Maslin “…Zevon is seldom at a loss for wisecracks. ‘If you want to be the first to know,’ he says, ‘my next album’s going to be a musical comedy based on the life of Mark Rothko…’”
New Times, July 23, 1976, by Kit Rachlis: “Gesturing with his fist and pounding the piano, he grabbed every song and shook it down for all it was worth…”
MARK HAMMERMAN: We were at the Main Point in Philadelphia. Warren had done one set and was hanging in there, but he was very drunk. Billy Joel came to see us, and he was complaining to me about how he couldn’t get anybody to pay for him to go on tour and how did I manage that. It was a strange conversation. Billy Joel became this giant, but that evening he was whining about not getting record company attention. And, here he was seeing Warren, who nobody had ever heard of—up on the stage, playing piano, and everybody from the record company and the radio stations was there, and he was getting all kinds of attention.
Following the show—front: Stumpy Zevon; back (L to R): Burt Stein, Mel Posner, Warren, Steve Wax, (unknown), Sammy Alfano, Howard Burke.
DOUG HAYWOOD: We played Ebbets Field in Denver, and Mickey McGee and I were in our room drinking beer and there was a knock on the door and a voice saying, “It’s Snake Man.” When Mickey opened the door, there was nobody there, but he looked down and he saw Snake Man, which was Warren lying on the floor on his back. Mickey thought it would be funny to pour his beer on Warren’s face, which he did. So, Warren fired him. But, we had a gig that night, so he had to hire him back. After all, you’ve got to have a drummer.
ERIC DETERDING: In Denver, J. D. Souther came and played. We stayed up all night and partied. They were talking about the walking dead in Denver, and J. D. was working on that song “Party Til the Barn Burns Down.” It was an all-night get-together, and I’m pretty sure Tom Waits was hanging out. Everybody stayed pretty drunk all the time.
J. D. SOUTHER: Warren and I just accepted each other as a fact of nature. I don’t think we ever had a real falling out. We probably both would have been better served to have stayed in better touch with each other. I certainly wish I had, but those who are left behind always wish that. But, we had some sort of quiet acknowledgment of each other that we were separate but like brothers from different nations.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: When Warren returned from the tour, my father and I picked him up at the airport, and he was dead drunk. That night, I began to get a clue to what the future held. I was a week away from my due date and doing my best to just be glad he was home and ignore what bad shape he was in.
As soon as we got home, Warren started in on me and my parents. My mother had made a pot roast dinner, his favorite, to welcome him home, but instead of sitting down to dinner, he started breaking the lamps my parents had bought us and trying to destroy anything that had come from my family.
BARBARA BRELSFORD: When Warren got home, I don’t think he was at all happy to have his in-laws there, and so things got very tense for a while, but Crystal wanted us to stay and so we did. We went out and visited friends or played golf as much as we could to give Crystal and Warren time on their own, but it was an awkward time for us.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: That night Warren confessed that he had left New York and been in bed with the record company woman the next night. He’d slept with a D.J. in Philly and a waitress in Denver. He was feeling so guilty over it that he just got blasted at the airport waiting for his flight.
He assured me over and over again that he had told each woman, before he slept with her, that he was in love with his wife and would never leave his marriage. I wanted so desperately to believe that we could make it, but deep down I knew this was the beginning of the end.
JACKSON BROWNE: I used to have this great drawing Warren did. A picture of him being rowed across the River Styx by a person with a man’s body and the head of a dog. He was just sitting there…he was like being rowed across the page but just sort of turning his head, looking at the person viewing the scene. It was unmistakably him, and it was unmistakably him going across the River Styx…and the c
aption was:
“It’s only when I close my eyes I see…the bad things.”
Ross MacDonald, Paul Nelson, and Warren in Santa Barbara, August 2, 1976.
CRYSTAL ZEVON: After his rocky return, we moved into a honeymoon phase and had one of our most memorable moments. During those last days while we were still a family of two, when Rolling Stone writer Paul Nelson took us to Santa Barbara to spend the day with the writer we idolized, Ross MacDonald.
We met him in his cabaña at his beach club in Montecito and spent the day talking nonstop. Warren and I had read all MacDonald’s books and he patiently responded to our questions and elaborated on how he conceived his stories, what his writing patterns were, and so on, until eventually we segued into talk about art, music, and other writers…He told us he read The Great Gatsby once a year, and Warren told him how he read T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets annually. We were both struck by how this gentle giant of a man would stop all conversation every half hour or so to ask if I needed something to drink, or if I needed to stretch my legs. He was very conscious that the date of our visit was my actual due date, but fortunately our lovely daughter waited for two more days to make her appearance.
CLIFFORD BRELSFORD: The morning Crystal went into labor, we followed them to the doctor’s office. Warren was so nervous we weren’t sure he could drive.
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