September 23, 2001
…Noah over with new hard drive & scoring software. “Werewolves of London” came on while I was in Book Soup. I cowered in the poetry section, then slinked out hugging Horace.
September 30, 2001
…Paul Muldoon came at noon. He brought an inscribed “Collected Poems.” Lovely fellow. We hit it off right away. We talked about poetry, music, families, Sept. 11th. I asked if he’d write with me. He said he’d “give it a go.”
October 24, 2001
…Hunter came up with a lot of lines for “You’re a Whole Different Person When You’re Scared.” “It’s like headline writing!” He exclaimed of the process. Indeed.
November 11, 2001
…Ariel came over and we recorded “Laissez-moi Tranquille”—word by word in some instances. She was wonderful. She added spoken part in the tag, too.
KATY SALVIDGE, musician: They asked if I could do a session playing penny whistle. I’d never heard of Warren Zevon. But I said, “Sure, sure. I’ll show up and do that,” so I’m driving off and my friend asks where I’m going. I said, “I’m going off to some guy called Lawrence Zevon or somebody…” He says, “Not Warren Zevon?” I go, “Yeah, it could be.” He goes, “Oh, my God! Warren Zevon!” I think, oh, really?
So, I show up at this studio, and Warren had written out note-for-note exactly how I was to play on this thing. I played on “MacGillycuddy’s Reeks,” this Irish thing, and he’d written every grace note. He wanted me to double the guitar exactly. He was very specific about it. So, that went off great and he’s like, “This is fabulous. Why don’t you play on another track?” So, I did “Lord Byron’s Luggage.” He played piano and improvised on that. He wanted to play me the strings for “Genius” that they had just recorded. It was the most unbelievable arrangement I’ve ever heard. It’s probably my favorite string arrangement of all time. It was musically so advanced, and I could tell that he wasn’t just a rock and roller.
November 29, 2001
…Blond stewardess, wanted my signature for somebody. She got my phone number, too.
December 1, 2001
…Flight attendant phoned. Paul Muldoon arrived. Nice time. Song sounded great.
BRIGETTE BARR, artists’ manager: I had recently started working at Azoff’s and one morning Irving said to me, “Do you want to do a really nice thing?” I said, “Of course.” He said, “Warren Zevon and Danny Goldberg have been bugging me about managing him. We don’t have anybody that’s going to do it. What about you?” I said, “Oh, my God. Of course. I’ve known Warren for years.” He said, “He’s got a new record, but I don’t know.” Then, he said, “Don’t worry, Warren won’t be a lot of work. You can have your assistant do most of the stuff with him.” Little did he know that it was going to be my almost-all-consuming life for the next year and a half. We called Warren right then and there, and he came in and met with Irving and me.
He looked better than I had seen him look in years. He’d been working out; he was all tan; he had his shirt open. The first thing he did was grab my hand to see if I was married.
MATT CARTSONIS: I started playing with Warren when some friends and I put together an impromptu band after we had a hot tip that Warren was looking for a band. We thought if we learned a couple of his tunes, we might have a shot. We got an audition and he hired us after about fifteen seconds. This was between Life’ll Kill Ya and My Ride’s Here.
The band was Andy Kamman on drums, Sheldon Gomberg on bass, I was playing electric guitar, fiddle, banjo, and Warren was doing his Warren thing. We had a blast. It was on a bus, and it was an amazing trip. We got to meet the fans, which was probably the most memorable thing about the tour—that and bonding over Diet Mountain Dew.
NOAH SNYDER: His whole studio was up in the loft in his apartment. I would be sitting up there working and hear all the crazy things going on downstairs. One day the Letterman show calls and they want to send him coach to New York, not first class. All of a sudden, I hear Warren going off. He’s screaming, “Don’t you know that the only recycled air on an airplane is in first class? If you put me back in coach, I’ll get there, I’ll be sick, I’ll have no voice. You’ll lose a quarter of a million dollars. You think you’re going to screw the whole production by saving on the cost of a coach ticket?” He goes on and on. By the end of this, there was nothing the woman could say but “We’ll send you first class.” So, I come downstairs and I say, “Wow, Warren, is that true that the only recycled air is in first class?” He says, “No. What are you talking about? That’s insanity. They don’t recycle any of the air. You’re up at fifty zillion feet. I just said that because I had to. You can’t be rational with these people. You have to let them know that you’re not going to take it. Listen, if you give in to them one time, just one time you let them send you coach, and you’re going coach for the rest of your life.” He says, “If you’re in this business, you have to understand that. I’m so busy trying to make sense, I sabotage myself half the time. It ain’t about making sense. Those people aren’t doing it because it makes sense.”
BRIGETTE BARR: Warren had been managing his own career with his bookkeeper, Britt, for about three years. He had one record out on Artemis, which sold about thirty thousand copies. He had done several little tours by himself in a car with one other person, and the guarantees had been getting lower and lower on the tour end of things. Now Danny wanted him to go out with a band, and I said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” He had finished My Ride’s Here, all the artwork had been done. The record was coming out in less than a month but it was very difficult for me to get anything going. Other than his fans that he had retained over the years, truthfully, there wasn’t a market for Warren. It was incredibly frustrating.
Artemis wanted him to do things he wouldn’t do—his ego wouldn’t let him do—hanging out with programmers at dinners and doing local press, little radio stations. It was like the push and pull of Artemis trying to get him to do things and Warren absolutely refusing. Part of it may have been his health, and part of it is Warren and his ego.
It was a very difficult time for Warren because he was starting to have to face realities of where his career was at that point. It was hard for me because I hadn’t been there for the setup, so it was more about trying to salvage something than really going out and promoting a record.
MATT CARTSONIS: On our first tour, when we were just getting to know each other, Warren brought along his significant DVD collection. Miss Congeniality was the one he liked best on that trip. That and Best in Show. I still haven’t figured out Miss Congeniality.
RYAN RAYSTON: Warren had good luck days and bad luck days. You could say one word that reminded him of something a girlfriend said a long time ago that was bad luck…For example, if you said “Fred Segal” his day was ruined. One Christmas Eve became a bad luck day, so every present he received on Christmas Eve was thrown away. He opened them. Maxfield’s clothes, books, Prada scarves…everything. Thrown out. But, everything on a good luck day, he kept. As Warren felt control slipping away, whether it was control with the record company, control of his management, control with a relationship…his rituals became the most important thing to him. I would sometimes bring him upwards of ten Cokes before he found one that was good luck. He’d flip it open, and just by the sound, he could tell if it was good luck or not. Drinking glasses could be good luck or bad luck. He had good luck utensils. He didn’t have a lot of eating instruments because the ones he had were good luck.
BRIGETTE BARR: During this period, Rhino Records decided they were going to do another compilation using some of the old material as well as bringing in some of the Artemis tracks. Warren actually wanted to participate. One of the things that came up was that they were adamant about putting on bonus tracks that came out of the vault. Warren said, “If it didn’t come out on my records, it’s not good enough to come out on any CD. I don’t want it.” So, we had that fight…whatever.
MATT CARTSONIS: Warren and I ha
d been talking about him getting into folk festivals. I’m a folkie, and I thought he should get on that circuit. Given the way Warren had been touring, the kind of venues we were playing, the kind of crowds we were getting, I thought this was a natural. There were thousands of people who knew who he was and didn’t know that he was still out there. He was never a has-been with these people. His core crowd had become family people. They were weekend warriors and a lot of them go to these festivals. So, I kept hammering this.
BRIGETTE BARR: Finally, he took two folk festivals in Canada because the money was good, because they gave him first-class tickets, because he could fly on American—which was very important to him.
MATT CARTSONIS: Warren’s personality shift was apparent in the last fight we had, which was when we were rehearsing for the gigs up in Canada. He was looking for blood, I could tell. Like a shark, smelling for something. He wanted to get some reaction out of me, and I was always on guard with him. I’ve worked for a long time to deal with people like this, so he never managed to push me over the edge, I’m proud to say. That may be why he kept me around.
So, I came in with my fiddle and he said, “Vassar Boy, what do you think about this Pledge of Allegiance in schools thing?” I said, “Well, Warren, I never said the Pledge of Allegiance when I was in school and made a point of not going into class until after it was over, and I think it is not the place of government to put the word ‘God’ into the mouths of public school kids.” He’s like, “Aw, Jesus. Another one of these pointy-headed bleeding hearts. Okay, fine. Tell that to the men who died defending your right to speak.” “Okay, Warren, we can agree to disagree, which is one of the great things about America.” He went home and ranted about it to School Marm, and she said, “Well, that’s what I believe, too.” The next day at rehearsal he came over and apologized, very gently. It was almost bizarre.
RYAN RAYSTON: He started working out like a fiend. Prior to doing “The Hockey Song,” he was doing golf. He even had a golfing instructor—just his thing of the day. Then he started obsessively working out at Beverly Hills Fitness, which I call “Butts on Beverly.” His body image was…he saw something other people didn’t see. Sometimes, on tour, he starved himself. He was very, very gaunt. At this period of time, he was into health, building muscles. He was buff and strong. Yet, he was having a hard time moving. He was getting winded.
He attributed it to his age and being there with eighteen-to twenty-five-year-olds. A year prior, when he went to London, he was having trouble breathing and also with his throat. But, Warren was not one to take the advice of doctors. He did not want to have blood drawn. He had never had an AIDS test. He said, “I always wear rubbers. Always.” I said, “Even with someone you’re seeing monogamously?” Monogamy, that’s a whole other story. But, “No. I don’t like doctors. I don’t like needles. I see a dentist.”
MATT CARTSONIS: I’m a good boy from a small town, but this one kind of horrible, touching moment did tell me something about him. When we were in Calgary he wanted me to come to his room to practice. He opens up the door and says, “Come in.” He’d ordered SpectraVision, some extremely graphic triple penetration video, on the television, and I’m kind of…huh?…Warren was standing between me and the TV, and he notices me glancing over and he goes, “Oh, Jesus. Don’t look. Don’t look at that. No. No.” Every time I’d peek over, he’d say, “Oh, Christ. Don’t look.”
He wasn’t joking, but he wouldn’t turn it off. It was as if he couldn’t deny the baser parts of his own nature, but at the same time he was deeply ashamed of them. He couldn’t turn it off, but he couldn’t let me know that it was going on.
BRIGETTE BARR: He called me that weekend from Canada…His complaint was that he was having a hard time breathing. He had several excuses—it was anxiety, it was altitude—because he was on that health kick, and he was taking vitamins and working out every day…His appearance was always important to him, but at that point it had become an obsession.
He’d spend three or four hours a day at the gym. He started wearing his shirts open and getting his hair done. I felt bad because it’s like watching somebody get older and running so hard to try to make it go the opposite direction. He still had his great sense of humor, but he’d be very depressed as well.
ARIEL ZEVON: He talked to me about feeling short of breath when he was exercising, and he asked me what I thought about it because I was working out and boxing at the time. He asked if I ever felt that way, and I said, “Maybe you’re dehydrated, or overworking, working out too hard.” Because he would get obsessive about exercise and would exercise and exercise for hours at a time. So, I just figured that’s what it was.
MATT CARTSONIS: The whole Calgary/Edmonton trip was great in some ways and horrible in others. He was feeling shitty, and we didn’t know why. He told me that he was in the parking lot of Circus Liquors, where he bought his Diet Mountain Dew, and he’d gotten out of the car and almost fell down on the pavement. He said, “I don’t know what it is.” He said, “I’m breathing okay, but I get dizzy.” I said, “I think you should see a doctor.” He said, “Yeah, you’re probably right.”
He kept bringing it up during those three weeks we were in Canada, and I kept saying he should see a doctor, but I also said, “You watch The Sopranos? It sounds like what Tony goes through. Panic attacks. When was the last time you had a vacation?” He says, “Aw, Christ. Seven or eight years ago.” I said maybe he should go down and visit Carl, go fishing, catch some.
BRIGETTE BARR: I kept saying, “Warren, go to the doctor.” “Twenty years I haven’t gone to the doctor. I don’t need to go to the doctor. It’s stress. It’s anxiety. It’s the workouts. I’ll cut back on the workouts a little bit.” He kept refusing, refusing, refusing. Then he said, “Brigette, I’m afraid if I go to the doctor I’m going to find out something I really don’t want to hear.”
MATT CARTSONIS: At Calgary we were booked to play a main-stage show, the regular set, and also to do a workshop with Nick Lowe, Robyn Hitchcock, Sleepy LaBeef—who is this sixty-year-old rockabilly, very loud cat from Louisiana—and Billy Cowsill, who lived in Calgary. Warren was freaked. He’s saying, “Oh Christ, how close to the crowd are you when you’re doing this stuff? They’ll tear us apart. They’ll go straight for the jugular. There’ll be nothing but skin and teeth left. Nothing but a couple flecks of flesh and fragments of bone. I can’t face these people.” He was really afraid. Although he put it in those colorfully histrionic terms, there was definite anxiety there—to the point that he fled the festival.
We played the main stage show, and he was out of there. I stayed and had a great time and ended up playing the workshop anyway. But, Terry Wick-ham said we can get Warren to Edmonton to headline, but it was contingent upon Warren doing the workshop. Warren really made those festivals more of an event. So, I convinced him it would be a lot of fun. They were knocking people off the main bill for him.
Warren playing Canadian folk festivals—his last gig.
The difference between Warren coming out of a rock and roll background and the folk musicians who generally play these things was that Warren was really hard on the festival staff. Granted, he was feeling poorly, and we didn’t know just how poorly, but I’d seen him in sound checks before, and I knew how hard he was on sound men and monitor mixers.
He was brutal. He felt he had carte blanche to treat these people badly. I constantly had to be telling myself this was not my shit, and try not to get involved. The festival staff was really, really nice and there was one artist liaison who actually handled him gently and effectively. She was this really nice person who handled developmentally disabled people in her real job, and she worked magic. She had him wrapped around her finger. He kissed her good-bye. He didn’t say a word to anybody else, but what an animal trainer she was.
TWO
MY DIRTY LIFE AND TIMES
Some days I feel like my shadow’s casting me
Some days the sun don’t shine
Sometimes
I wonder why I’m still running free
All up and down the line
Who’ll lay me out and ease my worried mind
While I’m winding down my dirty life and times
When Warren returned from Canada, he could no longer deny that whatever was going on went beyond stress or overexercise. His friends, his managers, and his family were urging him to break his twenty-year resolve and see a doctor. Finally, he called the only medical professional he did visit on a regular basis, his dentist and friend, Dr. Stan Golden.
Because of his mother’s history, the first thought on everyone’s mind was heart trouble. Dr. Golden accompanied Warren to see a cardiologist. What was scheduled as a routine check-up turned into a day of tests and probes.
ARIEL ZEVON: At first it was a phone call, and he said, “I’ve got to tell you some bad news.” He called me and said he’d seen a doctor and they thought he was bleeding in his lungs, or that he had blood in his lungs. That was after he’d seen the cardiologist. He was definite that it wasn’t good, but I was still optimistic, thinking it was something that could be handled, treated.
JORGE CALDERON: He called me and said, “Guess where I am?” “Where?” “Guess.” “I don’t know, where?” He kept wanting me to guess, but finally, he said, “You’ll be proud of me. I’m at the doctor’s, the cardiologist’s, like you told me to do.” It was like he was a little kid and he wanted me to be proud of him.
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