Heading to Europe provided the perfect means of getting even further away from his problems, while also paying off some of the credit card debt accumulated by the end of Live At Least. This time, however, Warren would not only be performing solo—he’d be traveling without George Gruel, or any road manager, for that matter. In his weakened condition, Gevinson was left to pull her Girl Friday duty upon their touchdown at Heathrow Airport in London, where Warren was booked for dates throughout May and June.
The tour itself met with mixed results. While Warren did maintain a small yet solid international following, over half of the gigs had been appearances within larger music festivals, giving two major disadvantages: many of his international fans wouldn’t necessarily shell out the larger admission price for a full festival, nor would the festival-goers be certain to embrace his folk-infused solo set when so many energetic, younger rock bands filled the same bill. Despondent over his career low and, with no back room in which to take solace, openly drinking and popping pills in front of Gevinson, Warren seemingly had an epiphany regarding his career and priorities. While in London, he reached out to Crystal in Paris. He explained that he would be traveling Europe with Gevinson for the summer and wanted to pick Ariel up from her summer camp in Chamonix at the tour’s conclusion, hopefully to bring her back to Philadelphia for an extended visit. He wanted to reconnect with his daughter and her upcoming birthday seemed a good time. “Warren acted as if I was aware of everything that had been going on in his life,” Crystal later wrote, “and the implication was that he had totally straightened himself out, and he lived this wholesome life, far removed from LA and rock and roll.”
Crystal continued, “He put his girlfriend on the phone, and she swore he was sober and that this would be a good experience. I wanted Ariel to know her father, so against my better instincts, I agreed.”
Admittedly, Gevinson knew Warren hadn’t given up his drinking or pills but noticed a steep decline in his demeanor once the Elektra/ Asylum news hit. But just prior to their flight to London, Warren had begun to write new songs. It was the first time since his move to Philadelphia, and with his daughter’s pending visit, Gevinson saw an opportunity for Warren to come out of his fog. “We were both really excited about Ariel coming to stay with us,” she later said. “He started writing. He even got his drinking under control again.”
Only days before their flight, Gevinson claimed “something strange happened.” In anticipation of their European excursion, she had opted to get a fashionable, short hairstyle at the salon on her building’s ground floor. Warren “went berserk” when he saw it, locking himself in his back room to brood and drink. When Gevinson saw the windows of the salon smashed the following morning, she suspected the worst, but kept it to herself.
Even with Ariel’s pending visit, Warren’s condition wavered throughout the European shows. It came to a head at what should have been the meager tour’s crowning achievement—a spur-of-the-moment slot at the Open Air Festival in Werchter, Belgium, on July 3 that saw him swooped into the festival grounds on helicopter. Most were there to see the show’s headliner: Irish rock trailblazers U2, who were on the third leg of their massively successful War tour. A few flubs and flat chords during “Lawyers, Guns and Money” didn’t help. Gevinson, waiting in the wings, had the closest view of all. “Warren won over the crowd but all he could see when he was onstage was a guy giving him the finger and a kid waving the white U2 flag, and he fell off the wagon again,” she recalled, adding that things only worsened before the tour’s end. “In Ireland, Warren tried bravely to get through his shows, but he was too fucked up from pills and drink… he ended every show in Ireland by offering a refund to anyone who didn’t like the concert. That’s about where his self-esteem was. Giving it away for free.”
Gevinson claims it was around that time that Warren, in a rage, confessed to having smashed all the windows in her salon back home. At the admission, she admits to being shocked, appalled, and “a little flattered.” The topic never came up again.
When they arrived to pick up Ariel at her camp in Chamonix, Warren did his best to put on a brave face. Hidden behind the scraggly beard and gaunt cheekbones—and after nearly three years without seeing each other—she barely recognized him anyway. To impress his little girl, he persuaded Gevinson to let him drive to the airport for their return flight home. Pulling out of the parking spot, he ran over Ariel’s suitcase.
According to Gevinson, Warren’s erratic sleeping habits kept him awake all night and sleeping throughout the day. When coupled with his drinking and pills, his condition throughout Ariel’s visit was distant at best. When Crystal telephoned from France to check in, Gevinson would answer, worried that the shakiness in Warren’s voice would give him away. When he grabbed the phone from her and threatened to keep Ariel, Crystal could hear that he’d been drinking, then cut short her own trip in the French countryside to immediately fly to Philadelphia. When she arrived at the Le Chateau apartment, Ariel answered the door, holding back tears. “When she saw me, she broke down sobbing,” Crystal later recalled. “She clung to me like I was her last lifeline.” Gevinson was at work and Warren was asleep.
Crystal took Ariel out for lunch and a much-needed sense of normalcy, then had to wake Warren to let them back inside. She couldn’t believe what had become of the man she used to know. “He was in bad shape, shaking and disoriented,” she remembered. “He wanted to know what I was doing there. I said I was taking Ariel, and that I’d talked to his girlfriend. He followed us to Ariel’s room and watched while we started stuffing her belongings into bags as quickly as we could.”
Over the phone, Gevinson had invited Crystal to stay with them as their guest for as long as she wished, but now, having seen Warren, she couldn’t get far enough away. If Gevinson had mentioned her pending visit, Warren either didn’t know or more likely couldn’t remember. But he had been thinking of Crystal, and of Ariel, throughout the loneliest period of his life. When they were almost done packing, Crystal turned around to find that Warren had done his best to wash up and change out of his bathrobe. “He said we needed to talk, and he insisted that we leave Ariel there and take a walk in the park,” she recalled. Trusting that this was a rare moment of clarity for Warren, she humored him and went along to Rittenhouse Square. Once seated together on the park bench, however, she claimed his demeanor instantly changed. Angrily accusing her of “blindsiding” with a visit he wasn’t prepared for, Warren did not believe that Gevinson had extended the invitation. According to Crystal, when he attempted to get physical, “in front of mothers with strollers and the park police,” she rushed to get Ariel and didn’t look back.
She later said that the experience provided her own moment of clarity. “I realized how, with all I had been through with this man,” she later said, “I had actually sent my child into harm’s way.”
Gevinson remembered that during Ariel’s visit, she had her own concerns for the girl’s safety alone in the apartment, given Warren’s condition. He had already called her while she was live on the air, frantically asking for directions to the toaster. She’d had to play “Jukebox Hero” for thousands of Philadelphians in order to explain how the appliance worked to him over the phone, mainly because she didn’t want her apartment burned to the ground. With that in mind, she had brought Ariel to work with her at WYSP’s studios a few times, knowing it was a safer environment.
She recalled that the seven-year-old would sit and draw while Gevinson took to the airwaves, and one doodle in particular had given her pause, reminding her of the old adage that animals can instinctively sense a coming storm. “One day Ariel drew me a picture in crayon,” she said. “It was of Le Chateau, a tall building with a big waving tree and a little girl inside. And it was raining. What makes a little girl draw pictures of the sky raining on our home?”
In anticipation of Ariel’s visit, Warren had made his first play for some form of sobriety in over two years. It hadn’t taken, but he was writing again—and h
ad even started a sketch inspired by a visit from friend J. D. Souther; the news in Rolling Stone had prompted the lyrics and title, “Trouble Waiting to Happen.” As Gevinson remembered, “Warren had a little keyboard, a little eight-track machine, and a few acoustic guitars… I remember he would write and rewrite and rewrite. He would sit with headphones on at the electronic keyboard and pore over each song. He had started a song called ‘Piano Fighter’ and worked on it endlessly.”
Music wasn’t the only thing on Warren’s mind. There was also the “quiet, normal life” that he had dreamed of for so long. He’d attained it more than once throughout his life and lost its solace and stability each time. After Crystal’s visit, he didn’t contact anyone for a long time. Like both his daughter and his son, Crystal had been in Warren’s mind during his frequent strolls in Rittenhouse Square, but her disastrous trip to Philadelphia negated any chance, however small, of a reconciliation. And when would she ever allow Ariel to visit again?
What he hadn’t told either his ex-wife or his young daughter was that he had already asked Gevinson to be his wife. She’d been on the road with him prior to the European tour and, while at a stop in Denver, he’d proposed mid-coitus following a gig. She’d responded with, as she recalled, “a breathless ‘yes,’” but was already having second thoughts by the time a bunch of groupies came knocking on their hotel door. “Honey,” Warren had said, turning back to her lying in bed, “these girls came up here to tell me how great the show was… I don’t know how they found me.” Only a few hours after their engagement, the couple was arguing. “It’s the job, it’s what I do,” he had told her. “You should be glad they find me so attractive.”
“What fucking ever, Warren,” she had said. The honeymoon was already over.
After their return from Europe, and Warren’s abortive attempts to reconnect with Ariel and Crystal, engagement presents started to arrive in the mail. Realizing she needed to “put the brakes” on their pending nuptials, yet somehow do it without shattering Warren’s already fragile state, Gevinson’s initial apprehension turned into full-on paranoia. “I’d said ‘yes’ to him for all the wrong reasons,” she later claimed, “for my parents, my girlfriends, and for revenge—to prove wrong every guy who didn’t consider me marriage material.” Desperately seeking advice, she began meeting with her parents in WYSP’s parking lot—one of her only places of respite from Warren. She recalled, “It was sort of like meeting Deep Throat in All the President’s Men. I told them I couldn’t go through with it.”
Finally, Gevinson reached her breaking point. Following another argument, she threw on her fur coat and stormed across the square in the rain to the Warwick Hotel. When she returned in the morning, Warren’s things were already packed. “He was sitting on his suitcases with his overcoat on,” she later recalled. “He was going into rehab, he said, and they would be calling me in a few days.”
“Don’t tell ’em anything they want to know,” he said, winking, then walked out the door.
During his time in Philadelphia, Warren got to know many of Gevinson’s friends and fellow radio personalities. Kevin Dunn, a longtime producer at WMMR who worked there during her tenure with the station, remembered something very distinct about the Warren Zevon he met in 1983. “Every year, we would do the Morning Zoo in Atlantic City for a week, and Warren came with us twice,” he recalled. “He couldn’t go near a casino because his father was a heavy gambler. He had to stay away from bars. He would basically sit in his room and smoke.
“It’s like Warren lived his life in a house of mirrors of things he had to avoid in the second half of his life.”
Years later, Warren was asked what had kept him in Philadelphia for so long. “I bet J. D. [Souther] that if the 76ers beat the Lakers in ’83, I’d stay for another year,” he’d said. “I’ve never been a good gambler.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
(1984–1987)
WARREN WAS NEVER ONE TO STAY IN CONTACT WITH HIS FAMILY, at least not until his final decision to get clean and sober, once and for all. It had been hard enough for his own children to reach him during his self-imposed Philadelphia exile; for the extended members of the Zevon clan, their relationship to Warren had been little more than brief exchanges following one his shows.
Warren’s youngest cousin, Lawrence, hadn’t seen his superstar big cousin since their backstage adventures at the Palladium in 1976. Now thirteen years old, Lawrence barely recognized the bearded, exhausted figure beside his father. He watched as Dr. Sandford Zevon assisted his own younger cousin into the living room. “Warren had shown up unannounced at my parents’ house,” Lawrence remembered. “He had a Nike bag in one hand and a guitar case in the other. The Nike bag, he said, was given to him by Aaron Norris, Chuck’s brother, with whom he practiced karate. The guitar was from one of the Beach Boys, I believe, and I think Warren marred it with a key when he was drinking and regretted it.”
Warren had called Sandford’s New York office days earlier. Not only was it the first time they’d spoken since 1976, but it was the first time Warren had ever actually asked anyone for help. “He said that he was a mess, that he thought he was dying,” Sandford remembered. “I told him to take the train to Rye and I’d pick him up at the station. He was one of the last people off the train and I couldn’t believe my eyes.… He was unshaven and shaky, and looked terrible.”
Sandford’s sons, Lawrence and his older brother Paul, were excited at their famous cousin’s surprise visit. As Lawrence remembered, however, the boys recognized right away that he was visiting for serious personal reasons. “Before he went to speak with my folks, he gave [Paul] and I a studio cut of Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A.,” he recalled. “Warren talked with my parents in their family room for hours, and there were a lot of emotions shared… we heard it through the walls.”
At that time, Sandford’s wife, Madeline, was a social worker for the National Council on Alcoholism—leaving Sandford puzzled as to why his cousin hadn’t reached out to them before. After making a few calls, they were able to get Warren accepted into a substance abuse program at St. Mary’s Hospital in Minnesota. Far from the serene landscapes and warm sunshine of Santa Barbara, this facility’s mandates entailed a harsher, more intense detoxification—which in turn required a massive amount of dedication and painful perseverance. Warren swore he was ready. “My father and brother dropped Warren at the airport,” Lawrence recalled. “It was apparently an emotional departure and a linty of narcotics made their way from his pockets to a paper bag my dad used to collect them, and then deposited them into the trash at the airport.”
As Sandford remembered, “We took him to LaGuardia. He handed me his Darvon and other stuff he was using. That was the beginning of his path to sobriety.”
In just over two years, Warren had lost everything dear to him. After the catastrophic visit with Crystal and Ariel, he knew he wasn’t ready to face that closest of inner circles—his children and their mothers. But Sandford and his family had provided what he needed the most, even at its briefest: the quiet, normal life.
Warren’s family, so far removed by distance and time, had given him a semblance of normalcy, understanding, and unconditional assistance. In the end, that sense of family had won out. He wasn’t kicking and screaming when he entered St. Mary’s—not the way he had at Pinecrest, clutching Crystal’s hand.
He instead began 1984 motivated by two incentives, both of which would have seemed unimaginable less than a year ago. With Gevinson, he hoped to at last settle down with a woman perfectly suited for him: a woman who had seen him at his worst yet hadn’t judged—or found herself broken in its destructive wake. Another rock-and-roll animal like himself. He had brought along a photo of her to help keep him strong.
Warren was also slowly recognizing the sincerity and ambition in the new manager apparently assigned to him at Front Line Management. The young man claimed to want nothing more than to provide Warren with a much-deserved comeback. And so far, Andrew Slater hadn’t
let him down. Over the last few weeks, demos had already been professionally recorded and ready to be shopped, and a few small gigs around Athens, Georgia, had gone incredibly well. The few new songs Warren unveiled seemed to resonate with the college crowd—and even the band that Slater had put together was better than he’d expected.
In fact, Slater wasn’t nearly the novice Warren had assumed. By the time the energetic twenty-five-year-old executive called Anita Gevinson’s place at the end of 1983, he already had a number of major projects under his belt. Having befriended future co-founder of R.E.M. Peter Buck while classmates at Emory University in Georgia, Slater became active in the local music scene, beginning a career path writing rock reviews for the school newspaper and culminating with his new role as senior publicist for Irving Azoff. As one of his very first assignments with Front Line, Slater was coordinating videos and acted as a liaison between the agency and Warren’s old pal Don Henley, with whom Slater had spent hours in the studio during production of Building the Perfect Beast. He later told The Los Angeles Times, “I went into the studio every night and I was fascinated by everything. I saw how Don worked, what he did with the drums and the overdubs. He was the consummate record maker.”
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