Nothing's Bad Luck

by C. M. Kushins

  Of the song’s heartbreaking lyrics—which Warren had written specifically for Crystal at the very turbulent end of their marriage—Cocks wrote: “You hear the pity and the vast anger just beneath the surface. These are weapons, not memories: the past used as a blunt instrument. The descant [provided by Linda Ronstadt] moves way past teary counterpoint and becomes a woman’s act of desperation. Even at this short distance, ‘Empty-Handed Heart’ sounds like a classic, one of Zevon’s finest numbers, and one of his most direct.”

  Crystal knew full well the song’s intimate message was directed toward her. Before the studio sessions for the album had even begun, and despite the finality of their latest separation, Warren had sent a demo of the track to her on their anniversary along with a note: “Old Girl, ain’t we had some times?” When the album was finally released, Crystal recognized among its track listing her personal letter of goodbye. When she later read Jay Cocks’s review in Rolling Stone, she disagreed with the critic’s interpretation of “Empty-Handed Heart” so vehemently, only Paul Nelson could talk her out of sending the magazine’s editor, Ben Fong-Torres, an angry letter. Even after nearly a year apart, the wounds remained fresh.

  In a more general defense, Cocks ended with his own summation of Warren’s new work, stating, “Bad Luck Streak is a hard-fought record. That’s what makes Warren Zevon hard-boiled, like Ross Macdonald, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Not the posture or the gunplay or the scars. It’s the willingness to peel the scar tissue, to stand without it and go for more, that makes these men tough. And makes them great. All of them.”

  Warren had met Kim Lankford midway through recording Bad Luck Streak. She was longtime friends with Fred Walecki, the owner of Westwood Musical Instruments, which Warren frequented regularly for new gear. The striking blonde immediately caught his eye and, although she was then dating mutual friend Doug Haywood, Warren persuaded her into having dinner with him at his Los Angeles home. She later recalled, “I didn’t accept, but I did say I’d come over and make him dinner. He was so nervous he ate all the appetizers and couldn’t touch the swordfish.” Out to impress, Warren had worn his finest ribbed cashmere sweater, à la Steve McQueen, which the younger woman found appropriately “dapper.”

  As the two later told People magazine in a joint interview, within three months of meeting, Lankford “knew it was ‘something serious.’ Warren knew ‘a little sooner. It was a slow building for her, a lot of frustration for me.’”

  It wasn’t long before they were inseparable. As the recording of Bad Luck Streak had coincided with the disintegration of Warren’s marriage, Lankford was soon the consistent studio presence that Crystal had been.

  In many ways, Warren’s relationship with Lankford benefited from the chronology of his creative process. The immeasurable pressures of writing enough new material to fill an album had long been his greatest enemy; as George Gruel observed, it was in the studio, enacting the synergy of quality musicians around him, that “the magic happened.” With a daily studio regimen providing Warren with both a creative outlet and a somewhat stable routine, he was as close to achieving a healthy mindset as a functioning alcoholic could muster. In meeting the beautiful twenty-four-year-old television starlet, Warren approached the third major romantic commitment of his life, and although he had not always been faithful within his marriage to Crystal, it was his first attempt at monogamy in half a decade.

  He was admittedly drawn to both Lankford’s youth and the health-conscious fitness and diet regimens that fueled her endless energy. She not only played guitar and was a passionate equestrian, but also studied martial arts with Chuck Norris’s brother, Aaron, and inspired Warren’s new interests in karate and ballet. In return, he gave her his own personal crash courses in books, classical music, and interpreting art.

  “When Kim and I first met,” he told Paul Nelson, “I felt almost like a virgin because I wasn’t used to being sober around women. We talk for days and days. We were both determined not to jump into a symbiotic relationship, and we don’t try to be like each other. I no longer feel that a woman is supposed to be a reflection of my attitudes, or vice versa.” He added that Kim reminded him, more than anyone else, of Clint Eastwood. Later, he playfully punctuated that observation by changing his answering-machine message to the famed “.44 Magnum” monologue from Dirty Harry.

  “Much later, I told [Warren] that if he wanted a divorce, he should file for it,” Crystal later admitted to Paul Nelson, “because, if it were up to me, I wanted to try to make the marriage work. I would have chosen to separate for a while and get our acts together, but I didn’t think Warren could exist without someone for that long.”

  Yet even in his new perspective on relationships, there were the inevitable self-delusions of Warren’s unconquered addictions. Warren had allowed his glamorous new love affair with a younger, vivacious woman to inspire his own feelings of renewed youth, but in the era of his recent bachelorhood, his substance consumption had evolved; if he had to cut back on the booze, then substituting harder drugs would have to suffice. For an addict, the unspoken benefit of a new relationship is that the other person is unaware how truly dire things had once been; they also can’t possibly know how bad things can still get. By the time Lankford was moved in with Warren, cocaine had been added into the mix. Soon, painkillers and, for what Warren would insist had been “a brief flirtation and not a tragic love affair,” heroin.

  At the beginning of their relationship, Lankford was largely unaware of Warren’s habits. With his dirty laundry having been thoroughly aired throughout the news media, there was no reason for her to doubt his sincerity about being clean and relatively sober. While she admitted that her own lifestyle was “much more on the tame side” when compared to the public persona, his charm and intelligence won her over. If Warren insisted that he could handle the occasional drink and joint for the sake of his writing, who was she to question the older and established artist?

  As their relationship deepened, both Warren and Lankford grew weary of the rental on Sunset Boulevard; he bitterly described it to Paul Nelson as a “stupid, pretentious, screenwriter’s idea of a screenwriter’s idea of a screenwriter’s house.” Instead, the couple found a new house further removed from downtown Hollywood that once belonged to Maureen O’Hara in Nichols Canyon. It could even accommodate Warren’s ever-growing collection of instruments and gear—which now included both a Yamaha grand piano and a Yamaha upright, a Roland synthesizer, a portable keyboard he used for composing on the road, a Martin acoustic guitar, a Gibson SG, a Les Paul, a Fender Broadcaster given to him by David Marks, a four-track cassette recorder, a microcassette recorder, mixers, amps, microphones, and hundreds of wires.

  Warren and Lankford, along with George Gruel, moved into the house on Zorada Drive just before the tour for Bad Luck Streak was about to begin. All three would be taking to the road together, and the new home promised that some form of domestic stability awaited Warren upon his return.

  Just as the production of the album had been a direct product of the drastic changes in Warren’s personal life, so the tour would include various new practices and protocols to mark his “new” era of balanced sobriety. As he had dryly said to David Landau when convincing his old friend to pick up a guitar and join him on the road, “David, I’d like you to meet Warren Zevon. You’ve never met him before, you know.”

  As far as his playful “reintroduction” to Landau, Warren would be making numerous such new introductions before the tour’s kickoff: in another major shake-up of the status quo, he had mandated an entirely new band lineup for the tour. With Jackson Browne, David Lindley, Rick Marotta, Leland Sklar, and Waddy Wachtel all booked for their own respective gigs and tours, and the members of the Eagles busy being the Eagles, a new touring band had become a necessity.

  Not since the early 1970s had Warren been obligated to hold auditions, and only then as the paid bandleader for the Everly Brothers. That experience, however, had led directly to his integral
introduction to Waddy Wachtel, so there was a hopeful prospect in actively seeking some new talent. In a surprise outcome, Warren selected a rock band from Colorado, composed of excellent, though relatively inexperienced, younger musicians.

  Despite their band name, Boulder had originally formed in Florida in 1972, beginning as a seven-member ensemble including five vocalists. The group’s lineup had evolved during its three-year odyssey of colleges and bars throughout the United States, finally taking root in the Colorado city that gave their latest incarnation its name. There, they built their own garage studio, as drummer Marty Stinger later recalled: “One of our roadies was a carpenter, and we went all out with hammer and nails and plasterboard.” Their professional-grade demos attracted the attention of Warren’s own label, Elektra/Asylum, in 1978, and their debut album even featured a ferocious rock cover of Warren’s “Join Me in LA.”

  It had taken one perfect stab at Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” for Warren to hire them on the spot. Their full lineup now included David Landau on lead guitars, Bob Harris on synthesizer, Roberto Pinon on bass, Marty Stinger, Zeke Zirngiebel on various guitars—and Warren himself. With four backup vocalists behind him, two lead guitarists, and—for the first time—an additional keyboard player, Warren was geared to become completely liberated and electrified before his audience. Like his tours before it—and much to the amusement of his traveling cohorts—he concocted this album’s promotional bookings with two alternate, but equally apropos aliases: the All Hell Is Breaking Loose Jungle Tour, and The Dog Ate the Part We Didn’t Like Tour, the latter lovingly cribbed from friend Thomas McGuane’s bestselling novel Panama. Aside from a few warm-up shows during the first few weeks of April, and a triumphant grand finale back in Los Angeles, the band was slated to travel the country for just over three months. As had been the case with Excitable Boy, the tour’s official launch was set on the East Coast: New York City’s famed 3,400-seat Palladium.

  Through both the turmoil and the successes that had defined the last decade of his life, Warren hadn’t had many opportunities to keep in contact with much of his extended family. When his mother and grandmother had come to one of his shows during the Excitable Boy tour, it had been years since he’d last seen them; in his condition on that particular night, he didn’t remember their attendance anyway. Many of his father’s brothers, the original band of Zivotovsky boys, had remained in New York. By 1980, his cousin Sandford had moved back to New York with his own family and looked at Warren’s Palladium performance as a great way to introduce his two young sons to their famous rock-star cousin.

  For the sold-out April 12 kickoff show, Warren and company pulled out all the stops, as his younger cousin, Lawrence Zevon, fondly remembers: “[Warren] was really popular at the time and the show was well attended by celebrities… I remember walking up some stairs backstage, when I came face-to-face with Gilda Radner, who might have been a little tipsy! She explained and demonstrated out-of-the-blue how the backstage passes, cloth decals, were damaging the finish on her leather coat. The concert was amazing and backstage, everyone was dancing—even my father and Gilda danced together.”

  Lawrence added, “After the show, Warren was carried offstage and whisked away—a sweaty rock star being ushered somewhere other than with his family. I mention that because every show I went to after this, especially when I was in college in the late eighties, I would spend hours with Warren backstage. He seemed to crave family and asked a lot of questions about everyone in the family… Maybe he enjoyed the distraction of being with family while on the road.”

  Despite the overwhelming success that the Palladium show had seemingly been for all in attendance, fans and critics were two different crowds to be pleased. Although tickets were selling, and Warren’s new brand of over-the-top physicality got the crowd to its feet, his earliest critical admirers were growing confused by the artist’s evolving persona. Not everyone was accepting of a rendition of “Jungle Work” that required pyrotechnics, a light show, and a state-of-the-art special effects device that simulated sounds of gunfire throughout the concert hall. Nor did all warm to Warren’s numerous other gimmicks, such as road manager and aide-de-camp George Gruel bringing Warren out on stage in handcuffs, or the camouflage attire that accompanied his physical gymnastics during his “Jungle Work” circus.

  As critic for The New York Times Robert Palmer admitted only after the tour’s conclusion, he was not alone in shaking his head, wondering to where the pulpish troubadour of “song noir” had vanished. “He spent half his Palladium show running around the stage as though he was practicing for the marathon,” Palmer wrote. “He crouched and jumped and shouted and raised a clenched fist and finally ripped off his shirt. Frankly, he made an embarrassing spectacle of himself… Several critics gathered in a neighborhood bar after the show. ‘I sure am glad I didn’t have to review that,’ said one of them as he sighed after downing a stiff drink. ‘Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad,’ another suggested, ‘if we’d just listened to it and hadn’t had to watch it, too.’”

  Ever the defender, Paul Nelson proudly offered his own take, writing, “Onstage at the Palladium, he’s in fantastic form and gives such a kinetic, physical performance that some critics take him to task for exhibitionism. To me, these charges are small-minded and ridiculous. This is the first tour on which he’s been in shape and sober enough to move. There’s a celebration going on up there, and Zevon is trying hard to make up for all those drunken debacles in the past. Once you understand that, it’s very touching.”

  What was undeniable, however, was the chemistry between Warren and his touring band. Although a seemingly unlikely match, the younger members of Boulder brought out a hard edge to Warren’s rock abilities; in turn, the skilled though unseasoned tour-mates erupted with sonic enthusiasm before the largest crowds they had ever seen. In effect, everyone had brought their A game—a far cry from the disastrous spiral of the Excitable Boy tour. Now at every stop along the current tour, Warren made a very specific point of indicating his gratitude for his team, taking a back seat during “Join Me in LA” to allow the band to give the audience the hard-rock version of their debut album. At every show, he called George Gruel his “best friend” when dragging him out onstage to dance, bellowing, “Come on out here, George, or I’ll kill ya!”

  When it came to David Landau and his guitar acumen, Warren’s extensive vocabulary ran toward the Joycean, calling the seasoned pro “industrious, illustrious, well-renowned, iridescent, phosphorescent, luminescent, indescribable, ineffable, ever-mercurial, unquenchable, irresistible, irrepressible”—and, a “jaguar.” As for the critics’ harsh words regarding his onstage antics, Warren had no bones about expressing his views during the nightly self-introduction: “I’m Warren Zevon—I sing as good as I can and I dance as well as I want!”

  In due time, that anonymous critic yearning to hear Warren’s electrified performance would get his wish. Warren planned to close his fourteen-week road show by recording the live rock-and-roll album to end all rock-and-roll albums—one that Paul Nelson would later claim was, aside from Neil Young’s Live Rust, “the best live rock & roll LP” he’d ever heard.

  CHAPTER SIX

  (1980–1983)

  AFTER THREE MONTHS OF SHOWS IN OVER THIRTY CITIES, THE band and crew were given a few weeks’ respite before the tour’s grandiose official conclusion at the Roxy in downtown Los Angeles. The Roxy was booked as an exclusive five-night engagement for the middle of August, making Warren available to attend Ariel’s fourth birthday party. Even prior to the tour, Warren hadn’t seen much of his children. Over the years, he would attempt to compensate for his absence by bestowing expensive and elaborate gifts on his family, especially his children Jordan and Ariel—much as William “Stumpy” Zevon had done in giving Warren a piano, a Corvette, and wads of cash.

  Warren took over the tradition with Ariel’s birthday that year, buying her a brand-new swing set—the assembly of which employed as many cameo appearances
as one of his albums. For hours, Jackson Browne, Greg Ladanyi, and Crystal’s father assisted as a hapless Warren attempted to put it together. Ultimately, George Gruel stepped in with Crystal’s father, who was growing irritated with his still-son-in-law’s behavior. “We finally got it together and tweaked all of the nuts and bolts, and it was the hit of the party,” Gruel later remembered. “All’s well that ends well.”

  Crystal and her family, however, were not nearly as cavalier regarding how Warren had conducted himself, especially toward his young daughter. Clifford Brelsford later recounted how that day had been the closest he’d ever come to punching Warren out in front of a crowd—not discounting the Christmas when Warren had brought the Brelsfords a bottle of top-shelf scotch, only to single-handedly down it alone by the end of the night. Although accidental, Warren had knocked Ariel down as she raced to hug him during the swing set debacle. With the birthday girl in tears, Crystal told Warren it would be best if he’d explain to Ariel that he wouldn’t be living there anymore. Afterward, he gathered all his leftover items from the Montecito house and threw them into paper bags. He told Crystal that he and Kim would take Ariel out the following day for a birthday lunch. She agreed, but, recognizing that he was drinking again, was not surprised when he arrived three hours late.

  Had Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School met sales and critical expectations, the decision to release a live album might not have occurred so early within Warren’s Elektra/Asylum tenure. But by the first week of April—after seven weeks of release—it only had peaked at Number 20 on the Billboard chart. While that was a vast improvement over his 1976 debut’s placement at 189, the new album’s final tally was a noticeable twelve-spot drop from Excitable Boy. And out of its three singles, only the non-Warren-written “A Certain Girl” had charted at all, placing on Billboard’s 200 at a mediocre Number 57. Amid the consistently conflicted critical reception—and without a breakout hit like “Werewolves of London”—further evidence would be needed to prove Warren’s popularity and, more importantly, his staying power.