Nothing's Bad Luck

by C. M. Kushins

  From the very beginning of the sessions, Bolas saw a new focus in Warren’s studio approach, although the talent had never wavered. “Warren was just good,” Bolas recalled. “He was good before and he was good after. What probably changed significantly was his personal life and his spiritual life. But in terms of his musical life, the only thing that was really different now was that he was a lot more responsible. He’d show up on time and was prepared, and maybe it didn’t take as long to get things done. But, I mean, except for work habits, sobriety doesn’t affect your muse. You’re either talented or you’re not.”

  The countless hours on the road with Duncan Aldrich truly proved their worth once Warren and company set up camp in Record One studios in January 1987. Much had changed in the way of professional recording since Warren had set foot in a studio and, thanks to the generosity of Virgin, every new toy was at Warren’s disposal. “If it was new, Warren would tinker with it,” according to Bolas. “He was the first guy to have a Steinberger guitar—one of those all–carbon fiber deals. And he was hanging around a lot with Duncan, and Duncan was always bringing in cool, weird shit.” As both a now trusted friend and unofficial modern technology tutor, Aldrich was elevated to an engineering role at Record One.

  Additionally, Slater had guaranteed that the album would carry on the Zevon tradition of hosting a “who’s who” of guest musicians in addition to a rotating core ensemble. By the time the album was completed in time for its summer release, old friends Jorge Calderón, Don Henley, David Lindley, Leland Sklar, Waddy Wachtel, and Neil Young would be joined by the next generation of rock superstars: the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea, the Stray Cats’ Brian Setzer, and R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe are listed among Warren’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink Virgin debut.

  “Slater was calling everybody in and then using stuff that I thought was kind of dismal,” Aldrich later claimed, describing the full experience as a “producer war,” with the threat of Warren being left to his own devices. In Warren’s view, Jackson Browne and Waddy Wachtel had been needed to produce his work largely due to the self-inflicted limitations brought on by years of drugs and drink. He was sober now, and focused. As had always previously been the case, Warren truly wanted complete creative control, but now made a compromise in taking on an assistant while he pushed his own creative agendas, track by track. And thus far, there was only one person who wouldn’t say “no” to him about pretty much anything. At his insistence, Slater was given a role as co-producer for the album. Only later, claimed Slater, did he realize the offer had been a ploy for a “fall guy” should the shit hit the fan. He later recalled, “I thought, I’ve never made a record, I’d been in the studios, and I was a guitar player, but gee, I’m a manager.” Warren insisted that his inexperience wouldn’t be an issue. “Hey man, it’s easy,” he’d told Slater. “You’ll book the studio time and come down and help me.”

  Niko Bolas later recalled that “most of the collaboration and artistic exchange happened between Andy and Warren. Not a lot of people know that, and certainly not enough people give Andy enough credit… And Warren was there to make a record with people. He knew what he was good at, and he let you be good at what you were good at. Somewhere between those two things overlapping, you make something brilliant.”

  In hoping to maintain control in yet another new role, Slater chose the most logical musicians he could think of to compose Warren’s core studio group—his friends from R.E.M. In the three years since Peter Buck had gotten his bandmates to back Warren in his earliest comeback shows in Athens, Georgia, their band’s following had steadily grown and were now on the brink of superstardom. But as loyal friends to Slater—and having enjoyed their brief collaboration with Warren—Buck, Bill Berry, and Mike Mills agreed to play the roles of session cats; lead singer Michael Stipe would contribute harmony vocals during the “Bad Karma” sessions, making R.E.M. the only other band besides the Eagles to have made a full appearance on one of Warren’s albums.

  “The real secret impetus behind Sentimental Hygiene, and the driving force, was Andy Slater,” said Niko Bolas. “Andy was a huge Warren fan and a brilliant manager, and those two things connected when he started managing Warren. He wanted to jump-start him creatively and jump-start a record—so he brilliantly got R.E.M. to be the backup band. They were huge fans of Warren’s, too, and they jumped at the opportunity.”

  The album’s title song had been written on the road. To Warren’s amusement, there seemed to be as many questions surrounding the ambiguous meaning of the title as there were accolades for the song itself. He seemed to approve of Chauncey Mabe’s interpretation in Fort Lauderdale’s Sun-Sentinel, in which the reporter stated that the album’s title track was “the one that captures the essence of a dying decade,” while applauding the lyrics’ “cunning directness,” which found Warren “lampooning” the baby boomer generation’s loss of social freedoms in the AIDS era. “That’s one way the song could be interpreted,” Warren had acquiesced. “Everybody has an idea of what it means. I’ve felt vindicated in avoiding the question. The more you explain the lyrics of a song, the less meaning they actually have.” He did, however, later tell an interviewer in Chicago that one fan had summed up the meaning of “Sentimental Hygiene” satisfactorily enough when attempting to explain it to her four-year-old son: “It’s about keeping your feelings clean.” Pleased with the interpretation, Warren had added that he personally tried to keep his own thoughts “clean enough to eat off of.” He later admitted, “[‘Sentimental Hygiene’] is one of those titles that just come to mind unbidden; I emerge from a momentary daze of congratulating myself.” But he kept his true inspiration to himself.

  Sharing the same title as the album itself, “Sentimental Hygiene” was chosen as the flagship single, followed closely by both “Boom Boom Mancini” and “Reconsider Me,” the latter of which benefited from a major radio push, thanks to its romantic marketability and its apparent allusion to Warren as a comeback kid.

  While R.E.M.’s Bill Berry, Peter Buck, and Mike Mills were the true core of all the Sentimental Hygiene sessions, both Warren and co-producer Andrew Slater made ample use of their options to swap out players, hoping for the best possible “fit” track by track. Warren explained, “I write each song individually and each one calls for individual musicians… You sit around and [ask] who can we get to play a Neil Young solo, and then you realize there’s a good chance you can get Neil himself.”

  Duncan Aldrich recalled those first few sessions. “With Warren, he wrote the songs, and he knew when it would sound right,” Aldrich said. “The people that were brought in were brought in because of what they could add to a track without too much, or really any, direction—like Neil Young, who’s a genius in his own right.”

  It had been the exact case with “Sentimental Hygiene.” After running through the song “for a couple of weeks” and still not entirely satisfied with the song’s direction, old friends Jorge Calderón and Waddy Wachtel visited for a much-needed “Gentleman Boys” reunion, with the duo contributing bass and acoustic guitars, respectively. For the first time in many years, Warren was in a position to add yet another major cameo to the track. Slater later recalled, “Neil Young was working in the room across the hall from us.… Niko went down the hall to ask him to play. Warren and I were sitting in the control room, and Neil sets up his big red pedal board, and he’s got his black Les Paul, and we turn the track up in the control room.… [Neil] did three passes, and after the first pass, Warren leans over and says, ‘This is like Woodstock, man.’”

  Warren told of the experience to John Milward of the Philadelphia Inquirer, “[Neil Young] arrived with his Les Paul, which he calls ‘Old Black,’ and ran it through these foot pedals that were half high-tech and half Tinkertoys. Then, he started wailing just like he does in concert.”

  When Young was finished with his solo, he turned to both men. “I think you guys got it there,” he said. “You can cut something out of that.”

  Warr
en turned to Slater. “Yeah, Andy, you edit something,” he said.

  Following the session, Warren began collecting guitar pedals.

  Warren’s new status as Virgin’s debut artist made the push for a large-budget music video not only possible, but in the face of the MTV generation, a marketing necessity. “Sentimental Hygiene” would be his first since “Werewolves of London” in 1978—and this time, the budget allowed for more than Jorge Calderón running around in a latex wolf mask. The ambitious video to match Sentimental Hygiene’s title song was stylishly filmed in black-and-white to match Herb Ritts’s iconic album cover photograph; the three-minute short itself was characterized by Fellini-esque imagery of Warren existentially surrounded by the melancholy rolling tide of California’s waves and sand at winter’s dusk. Warren coolly wears a long black overcoat, pant legs rolled as he stands alone, shin-deep in the water, almost as if waiting for the miraculous powers of Jesus or Elvis to allow him to walk upon the water, as in his song “Jesus Mentioned.” The video, which was added to MTV’s normal rotation, also drew unintentional comparisons to Don Henley’s blockbuster music video for “Boys of Summer,” shot in almost identical gray-scale, cinema verité style, with common themes of advancing age and confusion in facing a new, unfamiliar landscape brought on by youth’s end.

  Beginning with “Boom Boom Mancini,” the final grouping of Sentimental Hygiene’s track listing deliberately ran with five consecutive songs that Warren and company had already run through years earlier in their demos. With “Boom Boom Mancini,” Warren knowingly entered the proverbial ring with literary luminaries Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer—not to mention pragmatic musical heroes Bob Dylan and Miles Davis—in using boxing as the ultimate existential analogy. As their literary descendant, he had every right to rise to the challenge; an avid boxing fan, his own father, William “Stumpy” Zevon, had earned his nickname throughout a rough-and-tumble adolescence in the ring himself. And the true story of Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini not only fascinated the ardent pulp fiction connoisseur within Warren but had symbolic parallels with Warren’s own life during his “lost weekend” in Philadelphia. Mancini, as the song accurately portrayed, was a tough kid from Youngstown, Ohio, who had pursued a career as a lightweight contender. On November 13, 1982, twenty-one-year-old Mancini had been pitted against South Korean challenger Duk Koo Kim; the fight ended in Mancini’s favor after a TKO in the fourteenth round, but Kim lapsed into a coma from which he would never awaken. The international fight’s widely publicized death in the ring led to massive changes in the boxing industry and had lasting emotional effects on many of the figures involved: Kim’s mother, racked with grief, committed suicide in February of that year; the bout’s referee, Richard Green, likewise took his own life in July. For Ray Mancini, being the reigning champion hadn’t been worth the guilt of killing a man in front of the entire world. He disappeared from public eye for nearly half a year before quietly working his way back up through the ranks; in January 1984, he was set for a major comeback fight against former champion Bobby “The Schoolboy” Chacon.

  Bottomed out in Philadelphia, Warren was watching the fight with bated breath. He was rooting for Mancini, someone he viewed as a similarly conflicted figure—another “man’s man” whose personal demons and self-doubt had been given the full treatment of publicly enacted microscopic scrutiny. Mancini’s overtly human portrayal in the media had worked to shape the public’s perception of him into one of an iconoclastic, atypical sports figure: a blend of the savage and the philosophical—Warren’s bread and butter. In effect, the Bill Lee of boxing.

  Warren had written the song while watching the fight on HBO in real time. Anita Gevinson remembered, “I was working a telethon that night and I called home to remind Warren to tape the fight for us to watch together, since we both were excited to see the outcome. He kept saying to me, ‘Well, hurry on home, hurry on home.’ I told him I’d be as fast as I could… When I got home hours later, he was sitting on the couch with his guitar. The song was already completely done by the time I walked in.” Overjoyed to see Warren finally writing again, Gevinson let it go that he’d watched the fight without her. Even before meeting Slater and embarking on the small, tight Georgia gigs that resulted in his major comeback, Warren was performing “Boom Boom Mancini” as early as the first few months of 1985. He playfully fibbed to his audience that Mancini had retired after it had taken him “two years to write it.”

  For the definitive, final studio cut, “Boom Boom Mancini” became, arguably, the album’s hardest rock track—benefiting tremendously from the stripped-down nature of the production itself. Of the ten tracks making up Sentimental Hygiene, it is the only session that included no outside guests or cameos; Warren alone with R.E.M., particularly the added reverb to Bill Berry’s already thunderous drums, brought out the needed primal tone not present in Warren’s style since 1980’s “Jungle Work.”

  A point of contention to Warren during the recordings of nearly every one of his albums was his teams’ reluctance to allow him lead guitar duties. While he was largely associated with the piano, throughout his career Warren proudly reminded many interviewers that he’d been playing guitar for nearly the same number of years—and had made his first major breaks in the music industry as a guitar player. Even his respective producers had always urged him to showcase the same virtuosic keyboard skills that had impressed Igor Stravinsky so long ago. Most of the time, even Warren couldn’t be persuaded. Andrew Slater vividly remembered Warren’s insistence that he get “tipped” accordingly if he was going to be expected to play the piano by request.

  “I know you love playing lead guitar, but you’re a piano player,” Slater had said to him during production. “I know you wrote the song on guitar, but it needs a piano part for rhythmic and musical foundation for the chord structure.”

  “Well, I’m not playing piano,” Warren said.

  “What do I have to do to get you to just try it on the piano?” Slater asked.

  “You got cash?”

  “Yes.”

  “You got two hundred dollars?”

  Slater checked his wallet and nodded.

  Warren said, “You put two hundred dollars in cash on the piano, I’ll go play it.”

  Even during future solo performances, Warren never let “Boom Boom Mancini” slip from his repertoire. “My father was a boxer, so I’ve always liked the fights,” he later claimed. “Ray [Mancini] got in touch with me after the album was released to tell me [he] liked the tune, and we became friends.” The track was released as the album’s second single. Critics cited Warren’s piano coda at the song’s end as a highlight of the album. In later years, he would look back on that famous solo, but remain adamant that his guitar parts were just as crucial to the song’s final sound. “For some curious reason, Duncan and I spent all night doubling that piano part with guitar,” Warren later recalled. “And I don’t know why but I think it’s worth noting. So, I have, in fact, never played a piano solo, but it was also a guitar solo.”

  He had also been performing “The Factory” for close to two years, his live solo arrangement taking on a truly Bob Dylan–influenced folk feel with the newly established use of harmonica. While the song’s narrative voice as that of American blue-collar workingman earned instant comparisons to the usual themes within the music of Bruce Springsteen, critics often overlooked the influence that Warren’s 1984 solo tours had on the shifts within his own thematic content. His Elektra/Asylum work had always been described as representative of “California rock and roll,” largely due to both the Los Angeles musicians appearing on the tracks, and the overwhelming sense of Southern California’s sun-kissed presence in even the most seemingly unrelated and macabre of Warren’s songs. Songs like “The Factory” proved that the peripheral vision of his writer’s eyes hadn’t overlooked the steel mills, rundown farms, and dilapidated industries that crossed his path throughout his bare-bones tour along the East Coast. Unlike the fevered Los Angeles crowd
s at the Roxy who had howled along with Warren, and just as loudly, the men and women who inspired the frustrations depicted in “The Factory” were the ones who directly related to them. It was only fitting that for his first social commentary song in years, the maestro of the form made his one and only guest appearance on one of Warren’s albums. Three days after his fortieth birthday, Warren arrived at the studio late to discover the ultimate belated present. “I came in one day,” he later recalled, “and the receptionist said, ‘Mr. Dylan is waiting.’ I thought it was a joke, but there he was, and he came up and said, ‘I like your songs.’ What could I say but, ‘I like your songs, too.’”

  It was a tremendous understatement on Warren’s behalf. While a number of writers, composers, and fellow musicians had found their way into Warren’s seemingly endless cache of influences and reference points for his own work, Bob Dylan was the only figure with which he spoke of with near reverence: to David Letterman, Warren had once credited Dylan for “inventing” his own profession of singer-songwriter. Former wife Crystal later confirmed Dylan truly was the greatest inspiration for Warren’s own self-image as a singular performer; his surprise visit to Record One held all the personal and emotional weight of Ken Millar’s mercy visit in 1978.

  “I went in the control room, and we started playing [Dylan] the songs we were doing,” Slater remembered, noting that this was also his first encounter with Dylan’s young son, Jakob. As their acting manager a decade later, Slater would help bring Jakob’s band, the Wallflowers, to international superstardom. Now however, he immediately began strategizing a possible Bob Dylan cameo for Warren’s album. He knew some of Dylan’s representation and considered that the legendary songwriter would be more likely to agree if his vocals weren’t necessarily required. He recalled, “I said, ‘Can you get Bob to come down and play harmonica on this one song?’… Some days later, Dylan came down and played on ‘The Factory,’ did three passes. He was Warren’s hero.”