Nothing's Bad Luck

by C. M. Kushins

  The failure of lyme and cybelle’s second single could largely be chalked up to bad publicity. Bill Gavin, a former radio personality and social commentator, had publicly denounced the song as “sexually suggestive,” leading to criticism and boycotts. At the time, such a backlash wasn’t uncommon; in 1957, The Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up Little Susie” had been banned in Boston for similar innuendos and, in 1965, the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” found widespread media opposition. But while those songs had gone on to prove their accusers wrong and become hits, White Whale was a small record label that didn’t have the resources to push the song through the controversy. Ultimately, Warren and Kenyon’s follow-up didn’t even chart. “What was so sad about the whole thing was that our first song had shot up the charts in LA,” recalled Kenyon. “This was real heartbreak for us.”

  The failure of the single posed a real problem for both White Whale and the duo—Warren in particular. While the song was a Bob Dylan composition, its B-side was a lyme and cybelle original entitled “I’ll Go On.” Without charting, the release did nothing to raise awareness about him as a songwriter.

  His days as stephen lyme were numbered.

  CHAPTER TWO

  (1966–1970)

  “WARREN WAS PROBABLY DRINKING BEFORE I MET HIM,” remembered Kenyon, not knowing just how right she was. Warren had been no stranger to alcohol since early adolescence. He had taken his first underage drink in the home of Igor Stravinsky and, later, was regularly swiping booze from his stepfather’s personal stash. By age eighteen, he viewed alcohol as old hat. As his adult years began—with a song on the radio, a television appearance under his belt, an apartment near the Sunset Strip, and a Corvette bought with his father’s gangster money—Warren was getting his first taste of the rock-and-roll lifestyle. It wasn’t long before harder substances became available to him.

  By mid-1966, he was spending more and more time with other seasoned musicians, all of whom became powerful influences in fueling both his creativity and interest in mind-expanding drugs. The closest of these friends was David Marks, a founding member of the Beach Boys. According to Laura Kenyon, Warren became completely enamored of Marks’s humor and experience, believing Marks to be “the funniest, smartest person he knew.”

  “I was driving around and heard that lyme and cybelle song—I think it was ‘Follow Me’—playing on the radio,” remembered Marks. “I found out that Warren was signed to White Whale, along with my friends in the Turtles, so I made it a point to stop down there. Warren and I became fast friends and, eventually, I started sleeping at his place on Orchid Avenue. I guess I was there so much that I even left my own mattress back behind his small kitchen near the bathroom.” Within a few weeks, he and Warren were spending all their days and nights together jamming, talking art and philosophy, and sharing the hallucinogens that Marks seemed to always have on hand.

  The Orchid Avenue apartment soon became an unofficial boy’s club, further alienating the female half of lyme and cybelle. “[Marks] had a very strong influence on Warren, a bad effect, and I didn’t think that Warren needed that,” Kenyon recalled. “But those two had a communication with each other that was unbelievable. Warren kept saying how David was ‘super brilliant’ and quoting him and laughing at all of his jokes. I guess that the influence made Warren think differently about music and his own writing.”

  Kenyon added, “It was also around that time that White Whale dropped him as a writer.”

  The label’s decision to release Warren from his writing contract may have come suddenly, but not as a surprise. Most record companies had a low tolerance for new talent that hadn’t broken out quickly, and the faltering of lyme and cybelle’s second single had shown the record executives the writing on the wall. By that point, a full-length album was already out of the question. But what most record executives had an even lower tolerance for was the excessive drug and alcohol use that, more often than not, accompanied musicians and their entourages. In the case of established stars, such behavior was strongly frowned upon, but reluctantly tolerated with the turn of a blind eye. In new artists, however, it was seen as a red flag. Warren still fell into the latter group. That combination, plus his growing insistence for more creative control, brought the hammer down on his association with Ishmael Music.

  While the failure of “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” was not necessarily the end of lyme and cybelle, it was the beginning of the end for Warren and Kenyon’s collaborative partnership. Having lost his credentials as a house songwriter, Warren’s heart was no longer in lyme and cybelle. His time was now completely divided between working on his own solo compositions and carousing with his powerful buddies around Los Angeles’s clubs and party scene. Kenyon, along with White Whale’s executives, had noticed the shift in Warren’s priorities. “He had just written a song called ‘I See the Lights,’” she remembered, “and I was at the session for the demo, but there was this energy that I wasn’t a part of. I was sitting alone in the booth and he was doing this quiet thing to me that Dylan probably did to Baez—I guess just a mood shift when you’re a composer. You fly and leave people behind you. When our second song hadn’t taken off, it was a drag, so he just started writing new material really fast. He didn’t need me and made it quite clear. I couldn’t connect with him anymore.”

  “White Whale introduced us to Warren and we treated him like a kid, even though he was really one of our contemporaries,” Turtles front man Howard Kaylan remembered. “But he was so talented and brilliant and such a nice guy, that we liked him immediately and took him under our wing. I, personally, got really close to Warren. We would hang out and drop tons of acid and go down to this seedy place called Pioneer Chicken and just get silly together. He was a kid, but his songwriting was incredible and I knew what he was writing was the sort of direction that the Turtles should have been going in.”

  The band had released their cover of “Outside Chance” as a lead single in early 1966 and, as a favor to Warren, repackaged it as a B-side only months later, over White Whale’s objections. Toward the end of the year, they forced White Whale to release their version of lyme and cybelle’s “Like the Seasons” twice consecutively—first as a B-side to “Can I Get to Know You Better,” and then again as the flip for their biggest hit, “Happy Together.” When that song proved an instant smash in February 1967, Warren scored his most profitable royalty check to date.

  As Kaylan had anticipated, White Whale was furious at the band’s stubbornness in recycling Warren’s song as the flip side, but he knew the move would bring their new compatriot some much-needed revenue. Kaylan was right, as “Happy Together” became the label’s greatest success, bumping the Beatles’ “Penny Lane” from the Number 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 the following month. It was an incredibly rare case of the artist securing songwriter royalties—an appropriately flipped version of what was commonly known in the music industry as the “flip-side racket.” In a flip-side racket, artists or their producers would intentionally place an “undesirable” track (such as an instrumental or a previously released track) as the B-side, therefore ensuring that the A-side would get the most attention. In this case, the members of the Turtles pushed Warren’s song to be the B-side, not so much to ensure the success of the A-side, but to guarantee that his track received royalties merely for its inclusion anywhere on the vinyl single.

  “I don’t think I have higher praise for anybody that I’ve met or encountered in this field than to say, ‘I realize this is money that could be going into my pocket,’” Kaylan remembered, “‘I’d rather it go into his.’ Believe me, we were not always that selfless. I don’t remember doing that again, even with an ex-wife. But, in Warren’s case, he was a very, very special person. We wanted him to share in our good fortune.”

  Warren celebrated by replacing his Corvette with a brand-new Jaguar.

  White Whale’s second executive decision in their attempt to keep lyme and cybelle functioning was to replace Warren outright with another musi
cian, manufacturing a doppelgänger to assume the stage name of “stephen lyme” while retaining Kenyon’s services as the female counterpart. She had no say in the matter and knew that the record label was merely grasping at straws. The act’s new incarnation, with former Monkees backup singer Wayne Erwin plugged into Warren’s place, lasted only long enough to record a third and final single. “[Erwin] composed, he had a guitar, and he had had his own group,” remembered Kenyon. “So, I inherited him—or he inherited me. Whichever it was, I didn’t care for that feeling.”

  As far as Kenyon was concerned, the new version of lyme and cybelle had strayed too far from its original vision—two best friends having fun collaborating on folk tunes. Before long, new members were integrated into the act and Kenyon was relegated to standing on stage, shaking a tambourine. It came to a screeching halt one night following a gig at the Sea Witch, a popular Sunset Boulevard venue. Erwin pulled Kenyon aside and informed her that the band was going off on its own, without her participation. “Oh, great,” she said to him. “You’re firing me from my own band.” The move left her confused and heartbroken.

  At that point, her attempts to make contact with Warren had become futile. As the folk revival began to wane, the drugs, alcohol, and company that Warren kept all began to push him further into the world of harder-edged, experimental rock music. At no time was Kenyon more crushed than when, just over a year later, she came upon Warren’s eventual solo debut. “There was a place on Hollywood Boulevard where you could take an album into a booth and listen,” she remembered. “Warren’s album had just come out and I went by myself and listened to it. It wasn’t the Warren I knew.”

  The album’s cover said it all—credited solely to “Zevon,” it made no mention of his previous participation in lyme and cybelle, and with his hair grown long and bohemian, the shy blond boy from the schoolyard was all but unrecognizable. Kenyon sadly accepted that her partner was gone for good. At a friend’s suggestion, she enrolled at the University of Southern California the following year, earning a full scholarship in the Theatre Arts department. She didn’t see Warren again until well after her move to New York in 1970, where she was making her way as a Broadway performer. By then, Warren was on the cusp of stardom and the lyme and cybelle releases had gone out of print.

  Save for a few commercial jingle gigs and a session appearance on Phil Ochs’s Pleasures of the Harbor, Warren approached the end of the decade in a state of career limbo. While he had made some powerful friends in the music industry, he was without a solid recording contract of his own. Thanks to his growing reputation for literate and thoughtful songwriting, however, he had just enough money coming in to keep chasing the ghost.

  Prior to exiting lyme and cybelle, Warren had already begun to polish material for Bones Howe and knew that if he could stick it out a little longer, a solo album would be in the cards. The personas of “stephen lyme” and “Sandy Zevon” were skins to be shed.

  Warren Zevon was coming into his own.

  That summer, his hard-partying lifestyle nearly came to a screeching halt.

  One night toward the end of August 1967, Warren and David Marks had been carousing with the Turtles at the Whisky A Go-Go, when a surprise telegram arrived for the band. To everyone’s amazement, it was a message from George Harrison. In a gesture of congratulations for having successfully bumped the Beatles at the top of the Billboard chart months before, the legendary guitarist had invited all Turtles members and their friends to his place on Blue Jay Way.

  As always, Marks had come prepared, his pockets loaded with LSD capsules. What he and the group hadn’t counted on, however, was the number of cars that lined the road leading up to Harrison’s house, nor the valets that he had hired. “We got as far as where they were parking the cars and one of the attendants had an attitude,” Marks recalled. “One of the guys in my car mouthed off to him and he ended up being an undercover cop. He dragged us all out of my car and lined us up.”

  As the officer slowly inched toward them, Marks suddenly realized he was still carrying copious amounts of illegal drugs throughout his clothes. With no other option, he reached into his pockets and quickly gobbled up every ounce of the hallucinogens, popping the last one just as he and the officer came face-to-face.

  Knowing full well what effects drugs of that quantity were about to hit his friend, Warren had no choice but to skip out on Harrison’s party and, instead, rush Marks to the safe haven of the Orchid Avenue apartment. For the next forty-eight hours, he stood guard as Marks suffered the worst psychotic trip he had ever experienced. “I just laid awake in a fetal position for, I don’t know, maybe twelve hours,” he recalled. “It took me several days to shake that huge shock to my system. I can remember Warren bringing people into the apartment, saying, ‘Yeah, that’s him,’ like a zoo animal. I guess he was amazed that I had consumed so much and was still alive.”

  Warren’s life following lyme and cybelle had been a whirlwind of hard living and creative energy. He had finally become the furious hybrid of Igor Stravinsky and Jim Morrison of his youthful ambitions.

  With Marks as his tour guide, Warren threw himself into everything that the Los Angeles counterculture had to offer. The two spent hours together, taking drugs and experimenting with psychedelic sound collages. Prior to their friendship, Warren had been uninitiated to the soul of traditional blues greats like John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters; Marks in turn got turned on to the classical music and advanced music theory that had enraptured Warren during his youth. “Warren was a genius when he was [a] kid,” said Marks. “He introduced me to this thing called a ‘work ethic,’ an annoying thing where he’d want to work constantly. But he definitely taught me how to be a better artist, too, as far as expressing yourself and being uninhibited in certain creative areas. We learned a lot from each other.”

  According to Marks, the two believed that intellectual exploration and drugs went hand in hand. “Drugs are always part of the creative process,” he claimed. “It’s an experience that influences the artist and they have a very profound effect on the emotions and creativity. All the ones I know, have at least dabbled in it.… We listened to a lot of music centered around free expression, like Coltrane and George Harrison’s Indian stuff, and we started to play with those sounds too. We would drop acid and create free expression sounds for hours, just going with it and losing time.”

  When Warren’s old friend Glenn Crocker relocated from Boston and moved into the Orchid Street pad, the three jammed as an experimental trio and partied together on a nightly basis. Over the next few months, they took part in Marks’s pet project, the Moon, and briefly started an ensemble of their own—a heavy-sounding psychedelic band called the Flies. Marks remembered, “The Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ had just come out and it was one of the first songs that had a distinct ‘fuzz-tone’ in it. Warren loved it and we started playing around with those sounds. He thought he sounded like flies buzzing around, so he named the band. We played a few live gigs, one at Bido Lito’s and some other hippie clubs, but never really pursued it. We were content to just keep exploring.”

  Although the Flies’ existence was short-lived, those experimental jam sessions would influence the artistic concepts behind Warren’s eventual solo album.

  Warren’s days as a carefree bachelor were soon over.

  He had recently reconnected with Marilyn Livingston, a nineteen-year-old actress and model from San Francisco. “Tule,” as she was known to friends, dressed like a flower child, yet carried herself like a femme fatale. She had first met Warren at a party in Haight-Ashbury and, according to his friends, it had been love at first sight for both. With strawberry blond hair, freckles, and a sarcastic intellect on par with his own, she was more than Warren could have asked for in a girl. The two lost touch following their star-crossed weekend together, although he hadn’t forgotten her.

  A year later, fate brought them together again. While joyriding around Laurel Canyon, he spotted her hitchhiking. After she h
appily climbed into his Jaguar, the two became inseparable. Before long, she was living with him on Orchid Avenue.

  Following his work with lyme and cybelle, producer Bones Howe had gone on to several high-profile projects, scoring hits with the Association and Johnny Rivers. After Warren returned from a short stint in New York, where he had been testing new material around Greenwich Village, the two friends reconnected.

  While Warren’s creative evolution impressed him, Howe realized that his latest compositions were harder-edged and more avant-garde than the folk material of lyme and cybelle. Still convinced of his protégé’s potential, Howe made a few phone calls and was eventually able to solidify a deal at Imperial Records. It was an opportunity Warren desperately needed, as Tule had discovered she was pregnant. The couple moved into a larger Mediterranean-style apartment on North Beachwood Drive, just beneath the Hollywood sign. The elegant building had been constructed during the 1920s, and with hardwood floors and a wood-burning fireplace, it would work as the couple’s first true home as an expectant family. Warren soon traded in his Jaguar for a more-affordable VW bug. He knew more expenses were on the way.