I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

by Crystal Zevon

  DAVID LANDAU: It was a confusing night for me. My brother, Jon, was in the audience, and he was irritated because during the guitar jams he felt I had been too show-off-y in my solo. Then, there was all this chaos afterward, and in the fog of this war, I end up in a limousine with Warren and Bruce. The three of us ended up, very early in the morning, walking into some diner. We had breakfast and talked—mostly, Warren and Bruce.

  The next morning before we left New York, in the lobby of the Gram-mercy Park Hotel, Waddy blasted Warren for making him look bad. Basically he was saying, “I’ve done you this incredible favor by gracing you with my presence out here and this is what you do.” He was pissed off, and Warren was just taking it.

  JON LANDAU: I really wanted Warren and Bruce to get some kind of relationship going because they were two of the most talented people I knew, and I was happy later on when that resulted in “Jeannie Needs a Shooter.” I think that Bruce kept better track of Warren’s later records than I did. He’d call me up and say, “Hey, did you hear the new one?” He touted them all.

  BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: Over the years, we stayed in touch at different times. We got together at my house once in New Jersey. He was interested in a title, “Jeannie Needs a Shooter,” that I had. He had his own song, and so we had a small collaboration on that song.

  CRYSTAL ZEVON: Early in the tour the record company released “Werewolves” as a single. When we got to our room in some middle-of-the-road hotel in Philadelphia, the phone was ringing. It was Joe Smith. He told us a limo would be there to take us to our new hotel within the hour.

  Twenty minutes later, a driver escorted us into our new hotel suite where bottles of chilled champagne and baskets of caviar, fruit, and flowers were waiting. “Werewolves” was an overnight hit. We were living a rags-to-riches story.

  ERIC DETERDING: There were promoters who would always provide the girls. It was neat for the road crew, because Warren wouldn’t go with them. So, the roadies got them. They were paid for. Why not? Warren thought it was sleazy, which was the other side of Warren.

  The real Warren Zevon was a family man, very concerned about human beings and completely appropriate. It was like a Catch-22 for him, keeping the image of being a rock star but not being involved in anything he considered sleazy. I’m not saying that he didn’t have affairs, which I heard rumors of, but he wouldn’t take the promoter’s prostitutes.

  CRYSTAL ZEVON: Warren got a second message in Philadelphia from a disc jockey. She was one of the women Warren had slept with on his first tour when I was pregnant, and he’d warned me she was sure to be at the show. In the exhilaration over Warren’s sudden star status, he asked me to do something I could never have imagined I would agree to. He thought we should take Quaaludes and invite her back to our hotel suite after the show. I made some meaningless gesture of resistance, but I was trapped by the lure of fortune and fame, and knowing Warren’s temperament, this wasn’t the night to deny him anything.

  His plan was that we would invite the D.J. back after the show, take the drugs, and have our own little orgy. Truth told, what I wanted was monogamy and love eternal. But, I rationalized that once this was out of Warren’s system, things would change.

  Things started off pretty much according to plan. Then, Ariel started to cry from the next room. Warren urged me to let her cry, but I couldn’t. I was horrified by the thought that she might hear, or sense, or smell what was happening with her parents. I left Warren and the D.J. and, tearfully, rocked my daughter back to sleep. I couldn’t figure out how my life had gotten so far from what I’d always thought it was supposed to be.

  Warren and Crystal backstage, Excitable Boy tour, 1978.

  DAVID LANDAU: The reality is that to have confronted Warren about anything back then would be to confront him about everything. It was not a time of half measures, and there he is in the middle of a tour of what appears to be his career-making album. So, nobody wants to mess with that. On the other hand, the guy’s out of his mind.

  ERIC DETERDING: Jerry Cohen was the new manager, and he was on the road with us. He showed up at the Listener Auditorium in Washington, D.C., with a whole big string of fireworks…hundreds of ’em. He wanted me to light ’em off and throw them into the crowd when Warren was playing “Roland, the Headless Thompson Gunner.” So, I did. They were loud. Everybody was screaming and the house lights came on and it brought the show to a stop.

  Warren was pissed off because he didn’t know it was going to happen. Warren always liked to know exactly what was going to happen and didn’t like to deviate from the plan. So, there was an issue of who did what and it was pointed out that I did it. I said, “Jerry Cohen told me to do it, and he’s the boss, so I just did as I was told.”

  Warren and Howard Burke.

  Warren fired him that night. There was a big uproar about it. And the next day Howard Burke was promoted from road manager to manager.

  HOWARD BURKE: Warren wanted to do a video project. This was before MTV, and we went in to talk to the executive at Asylum who handled promotion and videos. They didn’t want to pay for it, typical. But, Warren and I went into the office and I’m wearing my typical blue jeans, cowboy boots, and shades, and I introduced Warren to this fellow and told the guy we needed twenty-five thousand dollars to do this video.

  We had it lined up with camera people, a studio, and we’d do it while we were in New York doing these other shows. The guy’s very reluctant. So, I said, “Warren, why don’t you talk to him.” I sat down, took out my pocket knife, and began cleaning my nails and never said another word. Warren was wearing a three-piece suit and he walked over to the guy’s desk and gave him that look where you couldn’t tell what he was fixing to do…Is that a gun in his pocket? I don’t know…

  He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a plastic frog that had a little fish dangling out of the corner of its mouth. It was one of those toys where you pull the fish and the frog hops across the desk and eats the fish. So, he sets it on the guy’s desk and says, “I want you to meet God.” The frog leaps across the desk, eats the fish, the guy looks up at him and Warren’s still giving him that look. The guy looks over at me and I just shrugged, and he said, “How much did you say?” I said, “Twenty-five grand.” He had a check ready before we left the office.

  JIMMY WACHTEL: We made videos of “Werewolves” and “Accidentally Like a Martyr.” It was all lip sync. We went to Sutton Place and Jorge dressed up as the werewolf. It was a losing proposition financially, but it was fun. Warren’s biggest thrill was that the makeup artist told him that his skin wasn’t as bad as Richard Burton’s.

  JORGE CALDERON: Dinky Dawson was an English roadie and he’d been on the road with everybody from Fleetwood Mac to whoever. He was doing sound for us, and he was horrible at it. But, he was Dinky Dawson with a legendary past, and Zevon loved that stuff. So, we’re in Milwaukee and we had dinner in this German restaurant. We get back in the bus and we’re saying, “Where’s Dinky?” We found out that he had gotten busted for soliciting a prostitute the night before and he was in jail.

  There was nothing we could do about it. We had to go to the next town because we had a show booked. So, we’re riding away to the next town and Warren and I started writing “The Ballad of Dinky Dawson.” I still have it in Warren’s handwriting. The gag we had going was, “We’ll think of you now and then…” He never came back to the tour. We just left him be there…you know. Take care of yourself. Later.

  CRYSTAL ZEVON: San Francisco was a legendary stop on that tour. Warren’s mother and grandmother left a message that they were coming to see the show. We’d had to buy them plane tickets and send a car to pick them up to get them to come to L.A. when Ariel was born and they only stayed about two hours. But, now they were coming to San Francisco and Warren was nuts over it. He was convinced that their presence would ruin the show and cast a spell over his entire career. If he had to see them before he performed, he assured me, we would never know a day of good luck again.

 
So, I agreed to take them to dinner and entertain them before the show. He rushed out and bought me two dozen red roses. In the hotel hallway, carrying the roses, he ran into the woman who had worked at Elektra in New York when he opened there in 1976—the same woman who had had lunch with me at eight months pregnant, then the next day been in bed with my husband. When he came into the hotel room, he was beaming, telling me how when she saw the roses she said, “I guess everything is good for you.” And, he’d said, “Never better.” The bad luck spell was broken, and before I left to meet his mother and grandmother at the airport, we had champagne to celebrate.

  DAVID LANDAU: We played at the Old Waldorf in San Francisco. Again, Warren was drunk during the show, and when we did “Accidentally Like a Martyr” there’s a tricky 7/4 time section and Warren fucked it up. But, he stopped the song and blamed the band. He said, “No. That was no good. We’ve got to do that again.”

  JORGE CALDERON: He was so drunk he fell off the piano bench. He’s mumbling, and it was so embarrassing. He would forget words. It was the worst show I ever played, and people were wanting to hear this brilliant songwriter. I wanted to run away.

  CRYSTAL ZEVON: I arrived with Warren’s family just before he went onstage. I didn’t go backstage to see him, so I was totally unprepared for the nightmare that was about to unfold. Warren was so drunk he had to be helped up on the stage. I remember smiling awkwardly at his grandmother through the show, trying to act like it was all part of the act until it was so far gone there was no pretending. We were all humiliated. They went backstage after the show, but he was talking about how the Rolling Stone editor he’d stayed with after the “Save the Whales” tour was there and he didn’t want me to run into her. Finally, they just left. The next day Warren didn’t remember they’d been there.

  DAVID LANDAU: One night Crystal called at three in the morning, totally panicked. She asked me to come over, which I did. Their hotel room looked as if someone had set off a couple hand grenades. Warren had completely trashed this beautiful room. Before he passed out, he had been hacking at his wrists with some broken glass, not in a serious attempt to hurt himself but sort of to dramatize his bewildered state. Ariel was a baby and he had done some weird stuff, throwing food and stuff. My coming in probably communicated to him that there was a limit to what he could do. Crystal and I had a conversation after he passed out about whether we should clean the room up, or whether we should let him wake up and see what he had done.

  (L to R) Jorge Calderon, Warren, and David Landau on tour in 1978.

  GEORGE GRUEL, aide-de-camp, photographer: I met Warren in San Francisco and he was staying at the Miako Hotel, which was a hip Japanese hotel where all the musicians were staying at the time. I’d known Howard Burke so I went over and met him, and we were on the elevator, and he says, “Do you want a job being on the crew for Warren Zevon?” I said, “Sure.” I’d heard about Warren’s drinking, and that night was probably the worst show he ever did. I’m not sure why I said I’d work for him after that, but it was the beginning of a long and mostly loving relationship.

  DAVID LANDAU: I’m not sure what the psychological classification of Warren would be. When someone who is an alcoholic plays at being a sociopath, it’s hard to know when playtime is over. The flavor of Warren was dark. He could be nice, but he was a hard guy to feel close to. We played Chicago and he fell off the stage. Warren at the time had gotten it into his head when we did “Nighttime in the Switching Yard” that he was some combination of John Travolta and Bruce Springsteen, and he was trying to be very physical. He lost his balance at the front of the stage when he tried to leap and he sprained both his ankles. I thought the tour was going to end right there—but it didn’t. What happened was George Gruel would carry Warren out to the piano for the shows that we did immediately after that. Of course, Warren continued to drink. The only thing I ever saw that came close to how Warren drank was Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas.

  JORGE CALDERON: With all the insanity, we did some great shows. Like New Orleans. We had a good time on the bus with Richard Belzer. That was the saving grace of this tour. We had such a great time with Belzer laughing about everything.

  ERIC DETERDING: We played a bar that had chicken-wire screens, and Warren came out and played “Rawhide.” Everybody started throwing beer at him, bouncing the cans off the chicken-wire screens. The thing about those clubs was that they were in dry counties and everybody would bring their own bottle, so everybody would get really drunk. It was a total madhouse, and when Warren saw the chicken wire, he was laughing. So the band all came out in sunglasses and started playing “Rawhide.” Everybody went crazy.

  ERIC DETERDING: At the Calavaras Mountain Air Festival, we linked up with Jackson and Jimmy Buffett. That was a big whoop-de-do show with frog-jumping contests. Warren gave Crystal a brand-new Cadillac.

  HOWARD BURKE: We did this big show outside at Calavaras County. It had Jackson and Jimmy Buffett, and it was a festival. During the midst of all this, Warren got into an argument with Jackson over a remark Warren had made, a racial epithet, which he was prone to use from time to time. Jackson took offense, and they got into a fight, and Warren stormed out of the dressing room, got in the Cadillac, and said, “Fuck you, I’m not playing.”

  I was standing in the parking lot and I said, “Warren, you drive away and you can just keep going. I’m done with you.” He drove a couple miles away and then came back, of course. But, those things kept happening.

  Cake Elektra/Asylum had delivered for Warren’s birthday.

  CRYSTAL ZEVON: One of the worst nights for me was in Vancouver. Springsteen’s tour had caught up with us in Portland.

  The next night, in Vancouver, Bruce was going to sing a couple songs with Warren, and he was really excited. We ordered champagne and caviar, and we watched the movie Oh, God! on TV. We were laughing and having a great time. Then, I went in the bathroom to get ready for the show. I’d put one contact lens in and Warren started complaining about the fact that I hadn’t put his vodka in the ice bucket.

  Still caught up in the mood of a pleasant afternoon, I joked about it and he went wild. He started breaking the furniture, kicking the glass coffee table until it cracked. I tried to get out of the room, but he slapped me. Then, he put his hands around my neck and started squeezing. I was screaming, “I need help!”

  I could hear people in the hallway, but no one came. I actually thought he was going to kill me, but all of a sudden, he let go. He looked at me, lying there, gasping and crying, and said, “Get cleaned up. You’re not ruining my night with Bruce.”

  BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: He was always working on his thing. I remember I turned around and he’d become a guitar player, which was quite an accomplishment. He was a great keyboardist. He had the ability and gift of beautiful voicings that he orchestrated his records with—a lot of it was almost Copelandesque in different parts.

  He had a beautiful head for arrangements, and the types of arrangements he used were always very creative. What can you say? He continued to write terrific songs. I would rarely see Warren that he hadn’t written something that I wished in another lifetime I’d written. It’s very telling—right down to the last record, that beautiful stuff Warren came up with.

  HOWARD BURKE: We were flying to Toronto, and Warren got upset because he’d left his room with his Nakamichi sound system in a gold Haliburton case. He got on the elevator, set it down, got off the elevator and left. When we got to Toronto, he couldn’t find it. He began drunkenly accusing every Canadian of stealing his stereo.

  Warren’s photo from a 1978 Time magazine review.

  While he was having this fit at the airport, there were three guys from Warner Bros. Canada with photographers there to present him with his Canadian gold record. Warren told them to stick the thing up their ass. I had to talk him into being civil, take some photos, and in the meantime, the stereo was located in Vancouver. He turned on a dime when he heard that. He could change direction like a cutting horse…once he k
new the stereo was on its way, he was completely charming. It was astounding.

  JORDAN ZEVON: When I was seven or eight years old, the albums took off, and my grandmother bought tickets to the Universal Amphitheater back when it was still an open-air theater. We saw the show, and afterward, she tried to get me backstage. They wanted nothing to do with us, and they said, no, no, no. Then, Crystal saw us trying to talk our way in and said, “This is Warren’s son, let him back.”

  They put me in a room, and my memory at this point sees it as like a confessional. I’m sure it wasn’t, but the memory I have is of a very small room, and we were sitting opposite each other, and my memory is that the room was all black. He could barely even sit up. He was real shaky. He didn’t really look at me, and it wasn’t much of a conversation or a connection. And then, it was, “Okay, well, take care of yourself.” And then hop into the limo, and then that was it.

  THREE

  EMPTY-HANDED HEART

  Remember when we used to watch the sun set in the sea

  You said you’d always be in love with me