It’s quiet, peaceful, safe, beautiful. The air is fine.
It makes me nervous…
… I have the guest house professionally soundproofed and
build a four-track ‘writing studio.’
The studio makes me nervous.
As worried as Warren’s family was over his behavior, it was nothing compared to the fear he had of himself. He later admitted to Paul Nelson a terrifying secret that he’d kept of that time. On the rare occasions when he’d gotten a few precious hours of sleep, those nights were plagued with feverish dreams: leaving his bed in the middle of the night and exiting the house, walking to the curb on Featherhill Road with a gun from his collection in hand—then using the drivers of passing cars for target practice.
He further confessed the part that scared him the most. The dreams had been especially vivid, compelling him to check the chamber of whichever gun was beside him that night to be sure no bullets were missing. He had started to double-check his reality.
It wasn’t the gun collection itself that gave Warren’s friends so much concern. More so that he had now taken to carrying them in public and waving them around in front of guests. Friends were terrified when he began firing them in the house. Only Crystal and a handful of close friends were aware that Warren’s hobby of shooting at bugs and inanimate household objects had started in Los Feliz.
Having alienated Jackson Browne and Waddy Wachtel throughout the arduous Excitable Boy sessions and the tour that followed, Warren now sought Jon Landau to possibly produce the next album. Their first meeting had been a disaster, with Warren knocking back three martinis and slowly becoming belligerent by lunch’s end. Although they had been friends for a long time, a disturbed Landau left the restaurant convinced he wouldn’t be able to work with any musician in that condition.
Toward the end of that summer, Landau was in New York managing Bruce Springsteen’s tour. At Crystal’s suggestion, Warren hopped a flight to catch Springsteen’s show at the Palladium and, hopefully, convince Landau to come aboard his next project. Joining them were Paul Nelson and film critic Jay Cocks. The old friends watched helplessly as Warren’s drinking escalated over the course of the night; he nearly injured himself backstage, causing Springsteen himself to flag a ride for Warren back to the hotel.
The following evening, Nelson received a frantic phone call from Crystal. She had just gotten off the phone with Warren and the conversation had terrified her. Warren admitted having been so blackout drunk the night before, he couldn’t remember attending the Springsteen concert or any incidents that his behavior had caused. It was one of the longest gaps in his memory brought on by drinking. Hearing this, Nelson cautiously shared with Crystal the lurid details Warren couldn’t remember: how he had become further inebriated backstage and tripped all over Springsteen’s expensive sound equipment; how The Boss had forfeited his own pre-show prep time to calm Warren down and help him find his seat; and, finally, how by an awful stroke of misfortune, Warren had been seated next to Rolling Stone publisher—and Nelson’s boss—Jann Wenner. The publisher had gotten so aggravated by Warren’s boorish behavior, he swore aloud he’d never again cover his musical career.
“I remember waking up in the hotel room feeling I was going to die,” Warren later recalled. “I couldn’t make it down the hallway. I knew I’d had it. I called Crystal in LA and told her I was ready to get help, but I wanted to see Bruce first. She said, ‘Warren, you’ve already seen him.’ The idea that I couldn’t remember seeing someone I felt that close to was the most frightening thing of all. It was an abuse of our friendship and of my self-respect.”
Crystal begged Nelson to help her get Warren into a rehabilitation clinic. She had already found a perfect facility in Santa Barbara that could take him. Warren, she knew, would fight it tooth and nail and—if the mere suggestion happened to spark his outrage—possibly become violent. His response would be unpredictable, and she desperately needed help. Nelson agreed, unsure of how to casually suggest to his dear friend that he commit himself into rehab.
Only moments after speaking with Crystal, Nelson heard a knock on his door: it was Warren. He told Nelson that he had spoken to Crystal and was ready to admit he may have a drinking problem. Like Jackson Browne before him, Nelson kept Warren company all night, distracting him with deep discussions on literature, music, and life. Warren was nervous, as always, about his next album—and the symphony that he never seemed to have enough time to complete. Nelson shared his ambition to break into writing literary detective fiction. They spoke about Ken Millar and they spoke about Clint Eastwood. For hours, they talked of everything—except alcoholism.
Halfway through the night, Warren looked at Nelson and pointedly asked for his opinion: did he think he had a drinking problem? Relieved that Warren had been the one to bring it up, Nelson appealed to his friend’s sense of pragmatism—Warren had nothing to lose by getting sober, and everything to gain. After all, if it didn’t work out, couldn’t he always just go get another drink?
The logic behind Nelson’s careful approach seemed to work. Warren returned to his room at dawn, playfully declaring he and Nelson “blood brothers.”
True to his word, Warren remained sober for the first few days back in Santa Barbara.
Hoping to bring an air of optimism into their new home, Crystal organized a housewarming party for some close family and friends. However, it was much harder for Warren to keep to the straight and narrow in a social atmosphere. Surrounded by his friends, sipping a few innocent beers quickly became a binge. By the end of the night, Warren was smashed. When the last guests left, Crystal brought up the rehabilitation hospital, inevitably sparking Warren’s fury. Adamant he didn’t need professional help, he angrily boasted that he could cure himself of drinking whenever he pleased. In tears, Crystal headed to bed as Warren stumbled out to the solace of his backyard studio.
It was two in the morning when the gunshots woke her. She had distinctly heard three of them; she bolted upright in bed, immediately knowing they had come from the backyard. Her instincts feared for the worst—that Warren had finally made good on his veiled threats, his years both mocking and courting death through his “bad boy” song lyrics. “If I start acting stupid, I’ll shoot myself,” he sang, promising to sleep when he was dead—had he just put himself to sleep?
Crystal fearfully crept outside to the studio. Warren had left the soundproofed door wide open. He stood beside the couch in the middle of the room, the .44 Magnum at his side. She walked in and watched him put down the gun. Their eyes meeting, she saw that Warren’s expression was completely blank. She looked toward the couch and found his target: there were three bullet holes through the cover of an Excitable Boy LP. Rather than the passing motorists of his nightmares, Warren had used his own face for target practice.
Crystal recognized that a terrifying part of her worst fear had still come true: Warren had killed himself—in effigy. But that was enough for her. He laughed nervously, attempting to play the stunt off as a morbid joke. But Crystal assured him that none of this behavior was funny. Not anymore.
The next morning, Warren agreed to enter the Pinecrest Rehabilitation Center for alcohol and drug treatment.
Although “intervention therapy” has since become an accepted form of rehabilitation and conflict resolution, its early development was met with clinical skepticism. The very concept of cornering an individual, forcing them to face their addictions head-on, intimidated the friends and family members expected to participate. As Paul Nelson would later describe, it was “an execution with a happy ending.”
But by that point, Crystal had tried everything else. An intervention may have been viewed as an unorthodox, unconventional method of rehabilitation—but nothing conventional had ever worked on Warren. Those closest to him had witnessed the alcoholism for years, but between his constant excuses and the numerous times he had charmed forgiveness from Crystal and others, accepting his behavior had become a way of life. Living with Warr
en was synonymous with living with his addictions.
Now that his dangerous behavior had plummeted to a dangerous new low, Pinecrest’s medical staff assured Crystal that a harsh, “no excuses” confrontation would be the wake-up call Warren desperately needed. As part of the radical new therapy, participants in the intervention would have to list all the occasions when Warren’s addictions and behavior had directly affected them. Details and brutal honesty were mandatory, as were the hospital’s instructions that Warren be approached by the full group, and as a surprise. As Crystal had been told, remaining a united front when confronting an alcoholic demonstrated to them how many people had been impacted by their addiction. It also showed how many people in their lives loved them enough to care.
But the administrators were adamant that the intervention’s true purpose remain clear: first and foremost, it was a non-negotiable ultimatum. Warren would stop drinking, or he would no longer have anyone in his life to clean up his messes.
Following his most recent series of dramatic episodes—the “lost weekend” in New York, his “blood brothers” ceremony with Nelson, and finally, the backyard gun incident—Warren entered Pinecrest willingly and quietly. He held Crystal’s hands as his information was processed. Before the orderlies showed him to his room, Warren had one final request. He asked Crystal to call Elektra/Asylum president Joe Smith and have him issue a press release; likewise, he asked that Nelson do a write-up for Rolling Stone.
In Warren’s mind, if his fans knew he was trying to get sober, quitting would only let them down.
“When an alcoholic discovers that people care for him,” Warren later said, “his whole way of thinking is threatened. Either you try to return that love by taking care of yourself, or you keep drinking and spend your life being insulated from the rest of the world.”
Crystal called Nelson right away, but not for the press coverage Warren had requested. Warren was unaware about the “intervention portion” of the facility’s rehabilitation methods, and Crystal only had two days to gather as many loved ones as were willing to travel to Santa Barbara.
“He’s dying, Paul,” she had told Nelson over the phone. “Some days, he can’t even dress himself.” It didn’t take more than those words for Nelson to hop a flight to Los Angeles. There, he and Jackson Browne drove to Pinecrest together, sharing their fears and concerns over the therapy session to come. At the hospital, they were met by Crystal and the other participants in Warren’s therapy: her parents, Jorge Calderón, LeRoy Marinell, and Jimmy Wachtel.
The full group was briefed on the confrontational nature of the session to come. During what amounted to a “rehearsal” for the real intervention, each member read their own list of Warren’s personal infractions toward them. According to Nelson, when they had all completed their turns—already apprehensive at having to share their most horrendous stories—the doctors insisted they get “a lot tougher and more explicit” for Warren’s own good. Against every impulse that years of confused silence had worked to ingrain, they each took the next few hours to revise their lists. With each draft, the picture grew grimmer, the dark nature of Warren’s addiction and his out-of-control spiral becoming clearer in the tapestry the lists formed.
They were already emotionally exhausted from the lengthy dry run by the time Warren came into the conference room.
“Oh, God,” he said, shocked to find the room full of his loved ones. “I suppose you’re all gathered to watch the execution?”
His assigned therapist brought him to his seat and explained how the intervention was going to work: how Crystal had gathered Warren’s closest circle of loved ones to share their stories of his worst behavior; how he had hurt them emotionally and physically over the years, and had now become a danger to himself and those around him.
He was warned that it was going to be brutal.
Crystal’s parents, Clifford and Barbara Brelsford, were the first in the group to share their horror stories. Paul Nelson was next in line and later admitted how sheltered he had felt in hearing the details of Warren’s profound offenses—so much that he briefly reconsidered speaking in front of the group. Admittedly a member of Warren’s life the briefest amount of time, Nelson tactfully emphasized how poisonous the alcoholism was to his friend’s talent and ambition—the very things that had made them friends. He remembered the candid moments when Warren had shared his fears and the pressures of writing. “It was very apparent then that the fear of being unable to write another album went incredibly deep,” Nelson read aloud, “far deeper than I’d imagined.” He recalled how Warren had then leapt onto the sofa and retrieved his copy of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets—a personal favorite he reread once a year—and began to read aloud from its climactic final stanza: “Into the crowned knot of fire / And the fire and the rose are one.” Of the fire and rose, Nelson told Warren, “You spoke movingly about wanting—with all your heart—both of them.”
One by one, Warren’s family and friends recounted their stories, Crystal’s being the most profound and shocking to the group. Warren silently listened to the various infractions and offenses, lies and embarrassments—all without protest. He didn’t remember some of his worst actions and was aghast to learn he’d waved a loaded gun in the studio, pointing it, on separate occasions, at friends LeRoy Marinell and J. D. Souther.
When it was over, the doctors instructed the group to stand and put their arms around Warren. Fearful he would never speak to any of them again for the secrets they had revealed, all cried as he stood to accept their embrace.
“If I meant that much to people whom I respected,” he later recalled, “I felt I no longer had the right to pronounce and act a death sentence on myself.”
CHAPTER FIVE
(1979–1980)
THE GROUP’S TEARFUL EMBRACE MAY HAVE MARKED THE END of Warren’s intervention, but it also stood as the mere starting point toward his sobriety.
In the two weeks prior to the intervention session, Warren had been tossed into the regimen required of Pinecrest’s substance-abuse patients from day one, and the zero-tolerance standards by which they held their developing practices came as a shock to his already vulnerable system. Coming off a regular diet that began with vodka and orange juice for breakfast, the loss of independence and a forced hospital atmosphere made him prisoner to his own thoughts and fears.
“When I went in, I was still protesting fiercely,” Warren would later recall. “For a couple of days, I paced constantly. Sometimes, I’d listen for traffic—a boulevard or highway nearby. I’d plan escapes. Of course, I could have walked out the front door anytime, but, sobered up, I was too scared to stick my nose out of the door.”
Following the intervention, Warren’s stay in Pinecrest’s Chemical Dependency Unit lasted a month. It was the longest that he had stayed sober since the births of each of his children, only this time, the sobriety had been enforced. Nightly withdrawal symptoms and fevered dreams continued while in the hospital, along with the emotionally charged therapy sessions that brought him face-to-face with the demons he drank to silence. Slowly, they seemed to quiet.
Despite the emotional and physical anguishes of rehabilitation, the intervention itself had provided enough motivation for Warren to stick it out and earn his discharge. Rather than immediately return to the temptations and pressures that the new home in Montecito had come to represent, he and Crystal opted for an extended family vacation to Hawaii. Far from the stress and drugs that Warren believed fueled his creativity, the serenity of the islands allowed him to begin writing songs for the next album.
Viewing this seemingly blissful period as a “new beginning” for them both, upon returning from the trip, Warren and Crystal began attending regular counseling sessions and couples’ retreats. For a few weeks, Warren was able to keep to the straight and narrow, focusing on completing the writing for newly titled Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School. Having proven to Crystal that he could buckle down and keep to his work, remaining sober and willfully contin
uing their marriage counseling, they celebrated the apparent stability with more trips to Hawaii. It had remained a favorite destination of Warren’s; he credited its idyllic change of scenery with curing frequent bouts of writer’s block. Two years earlier, it was there that he’d found the inspiration needed to pen “Lawyers, Guns and Money” on a wet cocktail napkin in his hotel bar. With another deadline looming in the background, Warren hoped the tropical surroundings would again spark his creativity.
The inspiration only went so far. Throughout the winter of 1979, Warren suffered numerous relapses, sneaking booze during the hours when he thought Crystal wouldn’t notice. As the dependency came back, his behavior became more brazen. Soon, Crystal was once again bearing witness to him at his worst.
As the decade drew to a close, the optimism behind its most promising possible ending—Warren’s acknowledgment of his alcoholism and the declaration that he would beat it—soon waned. With the contention mounting, she notified Warren’s therapists at Pinecrest, who suggested that the couple try a separate vacation. Apprehensive about Warren’s stability while away, she had nonetheless grown exhausted from the round-the-clock monitoring that he required, especially as the duration between his relapses became shorter and shorter. It had slowly reached the familiar point where he was unabashedly drunk during the day. After some deliberation, she agreed, planning a trip to Ireland for the end of January.
Feeling the familiar pressures of writing a full album’s worth of new material, Warren opted not to take a traditional vacation. Rather, upon hearing that favorite actors Robert DeNiro and Robert Duvall were staying at the famed Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood, he checked himself in there, as well. Planning to use the notorious hotel as a dubious form of writing retreat, along with his instruments and audio playback equipment, he packed multiple bottles of vodka, various narcotics, and his .44 Magnum.
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