Although Warren wasn’t the top dog on this tour, being Jackson Browne’s opening act had its benefits. Everywhere they went, the group played to a packed house, meaning more and more ears were finally hearing songs that Warren had spent years crafting. Additionally, there had been a substantial budget behind the tour, guaranteeing numerous great musicians always on hand—as well as top-notch accommodations and plenty of press.
Under the arrangement, Warren used Browne’s musicians during his opening set: guitarist Mark T. Jordan, bassist Bryan Garofalo, and drummer John Mauceri—all seasoned performers who could handle the material. After seven songs, Browne would take the stage and jam with Warren before going solo for the rest of the show. Browne had also taken to performing some of Warren’s songs during his own solo portion, displaying Warren’s songwriting abilities to new legions of fans.
Between late November and mid-December, the full band hit Stockholm, Manchester, Amsterdam, Oslo, and London. The seams of both performers were starting to unravel, however. As the pressures of being a headlining rock star, single father, and spiritual father figure to his ambitious musical friends all began to mount, Browne was not above lashing out at his hired hands and regretting his decision to tour so soon after his wife’s death. Warren, on the other hand, soaked up whatever limelight had finally fallen his way. He not only traveled with a makeshift minibar in his luggage, but was usually fall-down drunk between gigs, leaving most domestic responsibilities on his wife.
When the tour finally ended, Warren and Crystal decided to kick around Europe a bit, stopping in to see old friend David Lindell in Spain. One night during the visit, Warren got loaded and Crystal made the grave mistake of trying to quiet him so that their infant daughter could sleep. Warren flew into a drunken rage that resulted in more violence. He would tell Paul Nelson years later: “The first night there, I got into a fight with some drunken Spaniards over my version of ‘Jingle Bells.’ My glasses were smashed and my hands slashed by a broken beer mug. Things went downhill from here…”
Crystal frantically called the record label and begged for help and money. After emergency funds came through, Crystal returned to Los Angeles and took refuge at the home of Jackson Browne, who was already well aware of the incident. With a baby of her own to care for, Crystal was determined not to take Warren back this time.
Warren had taken all of the money he and Crystal had in their hotel in Spain and—without bothering to pay the bill—purchased a ticket to Casablanca. “I decided to go to Morocco with a bag filled with Valium, vodka, and Fitzgerald,” he later recalled. “Too much booze and not enough food. I’ve always figured that in dragging myself to Tangier and back, I squeezed the last drop of ‘glamour’ out of my rapidly worsening toxic condition.”
Within a week of blackout drunkenness, the drugs and drink were gone, and Warren was flat broke. He tearfully called Crystal and begged for help to come home, claiming he had no recollection of how he ended up in Morocco. He simply didn’t know what had happened.
But he did know that he was very much alone—and it had been of his own doing. After years of creative woodshedding and career hustling, the gods had seen fit to gift a handful of diamonds—a cache he was dangerously close to tossing away into the surrounding desert sands.
Hearing the shape he was in, Crystal acquiesced. Warren hung up the phone and waited for the money to come.
He looked east.
CHAPTER FOUR
(1977–1979)
WARREN RETURNED TO LOS ANGELES HAVING LEARNED A harsh lesson about his newfound fame and the effects it could have on his private life. Even with the recognition that Warren Zevon and its subsequent tour had brought, after Casablanca, he knew that he could lose it all—could find himself lost and alone, “figuratively and literally”—in the blink of an eye.
After the disastrous quarrel in Spain and having squandered the couple’s very last cent in Morocco, Warren had to beg Crystal for financial help in getting back to the States. Once home, he sought refuge the best way that he knew how, forcibly submersing himself in the preparation for his follow-up album. It was a task that was easier said than done. Anxiety over both the critical and commercial receptions for this next record had driven much of Warren’s erratic behavior in Amsterdam and Spain. Warren Zevon’s follow-up could assert his place as a rock-and-roll force with which to be reckoned; it could dictate staying power.
Whereas his debut had been entirely composed of songs years in the making, Warren now approached the follow-up effort with nearly nothing in the bag. Worse still, this new album was already highly anticipated by colleagues and critics, all viewing it as a legitimization of the promise that Warren Zevon represented. Although he had already been in the music industry for half his life, mainstream listeners saw Warren as a new kid on the block—and one who hadn’t even scored a hit big enough to qualify him as a “one-hit wonder,” should the next album flop. The pressure didn’t need to mount; it was already there.
Aside from leftovers from the debut album and a few unfinished compositions that he’d started in Spain, Warren started from scratch. Creating enough new material to fill an entire LP, especially one hot on the heels of a critically acclaimed debut, quickly proved daunting and intimidating. Warren Zevon may have been imperfect, but Warren Zevon had been flawless—or at least as close to it as its eponymous creator, along with Jackson Browne, could muster.
The immediate pressure Warren felt upon his return from Morocco led to his first major bout with writer’s block—a literary artist’s greatest nemesis, which always seemed to lurk during the presaging season of urgency befalling a deadline. For his failing marriage, Warren found solace in music; for the failure of creative ability to meet the height of his own artistic standards, in drugs and alcohol.
From conception to postproduction, his first album benefited from the team of musicians and engineers who had come out of the woodwork to lend a hand. Whether or not many were there on behalf of Jackson Browne was irrelevant. The studio had been chock-full of talent and encouragement and the sonic quality of Warren Zevon was proof. Browne’s stellar band of seasoned musicians had helped guarantee both the overall professionalism of the sessions and the balance between Warren’s ego and perfectionism.
The new year, however, had brought tides of change. By this time, Waddy Wachtel was in constant demand as the “it” guitarist around Los Angeles and was frequently courted to tour with other acts. Browne, who’d had to contend with Warren’s family problems in Europe on top of his own, now had The Pretender to promote. Both men would be around for the recording sessions, but as Warren faced the preliminary stages of the project, he was—as he had felt on the payphone in Casablanca—entirely alone. For an artist like Warren, however, there was liberation in this solitude. Crystal and Ariel had left him to his own devices and he wasn’t expected to contact Browne until a collection of material was ready to be unveiled; he now had the autonomy that his creative duress required.
Warren Zevon had been full of gorgeous, poetically charged autobiographical songs of love, loss, and addiction. When crafting its final form, Browne had been very deliberate in holding back the more playful and commercial fare. In a bid to earn Warren recognition as a serious songwriter, Browne had remained steadfast in saving certain material he felt would muddle the album’s literary tone—songs that critics, had they not already heard Warren’s potential, might otherwise have regarded as minor: “Excitable Boy,” a catchy 1950s throwback that contained, among other things, R&B backup vocals, saxophone breaks, and a narrative about a serial killer; an epic murder ballad about a dead mercenary that Warren had oh-so-proudly co-written in Spain with his buddy, a genuine soldier of fortune; and that funny novelty tune about a dapper, well-dressed werewolf. Convincing Warren of anything outside of this own creative vision was a notoriously difficult process, but, for the good of the album, Browne had been able to hold his ground.
Aside from being penned years before, those songs shared another cha
racteristic—all were rare instances of Warren working with a collaborator. When Warren was writing songs of an autobiographical nature, setting his own thoughts and emotions to music came quite naturally. He was the sole author of every track that made up his first Elektra/Asylum release, rightfully deserving the album’s eponymous title. When it came to mainstream appeal, however, he would often need a push toward a more commercial direction. Words like “quirky,” “cerebral,” and “esoteric”—dubious descriptors frequently recycled by critics struggling to pin him down—were not often associated with rock music, and certainly not viewed as a selling point to the youth market. Despite having had numerous discussions with Browne regarding the need for a radio-friendly track, Warren’s writing was often accused of being over the heads of mainstream listeners. Even with “Hasten Down the Wind” and “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” as two stellar singles, neither had charted. Browne had deliberately held back on the more commercial songs, but both he and Warren had believed in the tracks selected as singles. Their failure to find a mass audience came as a bit of a shock, leading Browne to reconsider the three track’s he’d originally shelved.
David Geffen had been very adamant regarding Browne’s active participation in the production of Warren Zevon, and for good reason. Browne’s own self-produced releases had all been bona-fide hits and demonstrated his clear understanding of commercial appeal. He had shown that he was an artist of great integrity and his lyrics were uncompromised, yet they were catchy and accessible enough to enter frequent radio rotation. Browne had spent the last half decade writing songs that resonated with an entire generation—former flower children, now settling down and having families, nostalgic and disenfranchised by the failed ideals of the 1960s. His songs had meaning, but more important to the label, they charted well.
For Geffen, Browne was a shining example of the standards envisioned for Elektra/Asylum. This, and some haggling, had earned the green light to record Warren Zevon in the first place. But it had also come with Browne’s dubious responsibility of having to produce it. Based on the enthusiasm and certainty with which Browne talked of Warren’s talent, Geffen had expected not only a great record, but a great product. Besides, he had vouched for Warren, nearly pleading on his behalf. Let him put his money where his mouth was.
Warren, on the other hand, viewed his chief responsibility to be in the quality of his songwriting. The perfectionism with which he approached his writing was always a bid to meet his own self-imposed standards. This responsibility was the one he had to himself, the one for which he had always shirked other responsibilities throughout his life. Although he claimed to hold a genius-level IQ, he’d dropped out of high school to prove his worth as a musician. How many jingles had he pumped out in order to spend just a few precious hours in a professional studio? He had even been in the studio during his son’s birth. How many friends’ couches had he slept on, how many odd jobs had he worked to keep his instruments for as long as possible before the heat was turned off or the baby got sick? All his life, Warren had been told of his potential by key figures who continued to cast long shadows over his own musical standards. If this new work didn’t deliver upon that potential, there had been no point to all the effort and sacrifice.
In later years, Warren would remark that his favorite albums were the ones that “were really the person,” citing Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding and Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska as examples. Here were instances where the final collection of songs formed a perfect, personal statement by a single artist. In that vein, Warren Zevon had truly been Warren Zevon. It was an ideal for which he reached: the musician-as-author. He may have chosen rock and roll as his primary medium of creative expression, but he revered writers and often related to the competitive temperaments of his literary heroes. Just as the psychedelic nights with David Marks on the Sunset Strip had been an attempt to capture the hedonistic enlightenment of Arthur Rimbaud and Jack Kerouac, Warren viewed presenting new material to the likes of Jackson Browne and J. D. Souther as a challenge not unlike the rivalries between Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and their fellow expatriates. For Warren, creating an honest song was as much of a battle as Hemingway’s crusade for One True Sentence. It was an existential blood sport.
Only out of necessity did Warren seek fresh blood.
Jorge Calderón had remained close to Warren ever since springing him from the San Vicente drunk tank in 1975.
Jovial and warm, Calderón carried a sharp wit and sarcastic sense of humor matched only by Warren’s own. In the two years since helping Crystal post Warren’s bail, Calderón’s good nature and sense of loyalty had made him a consistent presence in the lives of the Zevons. Having grown up on the Latin sounds of calypso that embodied his native Puerto Rico, Calderón had first discovered rock and roll through the AM airwaves. He took up guitar and percussion and formed his first band while in his teens. After an unsuccessful bid for recognition in New York, the group relocated to Los Angeles in 1969. They disbanded when the city offered few opportunities, but Calderón opted to remain in Southern California to try his hand at session work. A multi-instrumentalist, it wasn’t long before it achieved notice. Within a few years, he was touring with Lindsey Buckingham and soon made the acquaintance of Warren and Crystal.
Calderón had already worked in the studio with Warren a little, having added background vocals to numerous tracks on the debut album—most memorably yelling out Spanish phrases during the raucous “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead.” As both a guitarist and percussionist, he also had a natural ear for melody, integrating a beautiful Spanish flair and lyricism to every song he touched. Most importantly, he had been introduced into the Zevons’ lives as a friend first and musical colleague second, granting him rare immunity from Warren’s sense of professional competition. Jorge was a man who could be trusted. And now, with so many of Warren’s usual studio-mates out of the picture, he became the most logical partner for penning new material.
The first of what would be many collaborations between the two artists was “Veracruz.” Written as one of Warren’s favorite genres, the historical “story song,” the ballad combined his love of research and natural literary abilities. For subject matter, the two chose an event that had, for all intents and purposes, been relegated to the footnotes of history: the 1914 US occupation of the eponymous Mexican city. Having caught a television documentary about Emiliano Zapata, Warren dug through biographies on the Mexican revolutionary at the Hollywood Library. When the seeds of the song were firmly in place, Warren had presented his findings to Jorge Calderón, who was already very familiar with the events and their historical and cultural significance.
Sung from the perspective of a Veracruz native struggling to keep his family intact amid the growing chaos, it was a profound and serious ballad for which the songwriters had brainstormed for accuracy and emotion. During the process, Calderón quickly demonstrated his value as a partner, not only writing the Spanish verses in their entirety, but infusing the song with the needed cultural perspective and emotion.
Additionally, working with Calderón had presented Warren with a healthy literary exercise. To that point, writing his other two story songs, “Frank and Jesse James” and “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” had yielded their own life lessons; the former had been Warren’s first major foray into journalistic research, leading him to the library in search of Old West history and lingo, while the latter had proven he could collaborate with a writing partner—as long as that partner brought something special to the table. Through Calderón, Warren had been able to add another literary device to his songwriters’ arsenal: using first-person perspective to re-create another culture. Like good historical novels, his previous tales had been safely written from the third-person perspective, allowing research to saturate the narratives with detail and atmosphere. Thanks to Calderón’s own background and cultural knowledge, “Veracruz” rang with the honesty and emotion of a memoir. Whether the subject matter could be fit into a
song that cracked the Top 40 was another matter.
For good measure, Warren and Calderón balanced this by making their second collaboration a disco tune.
Working together in close quarters, Calderón saw the full spectrum of Warren’s personality. On some days, he saw the virtuosic bursts of energy and creativity that resulted in Warren’s best work; on others, the intense episodes of drunkenness and mayhem that represented his worst behavior. During their collaboration, Calderón began to understand the complexities that drove Warren’s creative process—and the dangerous game it was becoming.
On one memorable occasion, the two decided to catch Browne in concert at the Universal Amphitheatre. Warren had been drinking throughout their writing session that day, leaving Calderón to drive. It wasn’t until they reached the arena parking lot that he realized Warren was packing a loaded .357 Magnum. He watched in disbelief as Warren leapt from the car and, waving the gun in the air, began shouting taunting rhymes about Browne at the top of his lungs. The spectacle quickly drew a sea of onlookers. After he belligerently attempted his way backstage, security forced him to leave.
As he turned thirty, not even the critical success of his first mainstream release or the birth of his daughter could properly curb the growing addictions. He and Crystal had finally reconciled, yet the few weeks of creative autonomy and unchaperoned bachelorhood she’d granted him hadn’t merely focused his energies—it had left his substance consumption largely unmonitored. For Warren, the alcohol and drugs offered cures to too many of his maladies to quit cold turkey; booze provided him with the right level of arrogance and inhibition to sit and compose, while the drugs worked to spark his creativity and quiet the inner demons that made him second-guess his work. Introverted and shy throughout his youth, Warren had been using alcohol and drugs to struggle through social situations since high school. The only differences now were that the drugs were harder, the booze was top shelf, and he didn’t need to sneak out of the house in order to enjoy it. Once reconciled, Crystal returned to a version of Warren no less out-of-control than the one she’d left in Spain. But at least he was working.
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