Throughout their crisscrossing of the United States, Warren and Aldrich would often entertain each other by calling out strange road signs and other bizarre artifacts representing the local color of the town they’d be passing through. Sometimes, their little in-jokes would lead to Warren’s more playful rock tunes. In the case of “Monkey Wash, Donkey Rinse,” Aldrich claimed the odd phrase was a riff on his “impression of an R.E.M. all-access backstage pass,” and Warren couldn’t get the strange combination of words out of his head. “One of the lines came from a mechanic in South Carolina,” Aldrich recalled. They had stopped to service “The Lipcutter” when Warren had spotted the bumper sticker on a car in the lot. “Hell is only half full,” it read, immediately giving him his opening line.
In keeping with the playful, humorous take on an apparent celebratory black-tie affair in the Netherworld, Warren invited David Lindley to add a distinct cittern to the track; he hung around to add fiddle to another song, “Poisonous Lookalike,” which had been inspired by Warren’s catching the tail end of a botanical radio program mentioning a flower with the deadly sounding name. The lyrics, however, were another of the many he’d penned for McNeal. The sessions with Lindley were the final recordings completed for Mutineer before Warren presented it to Giant for release approval, leaving Warren the time to add Bruce Hornsby’s accordion to both “Monkey Wash, Donkey Rinse” and the track that had been with Warren since 1983, “Piano Fighter.” He had performed it live throughout the 1992 tour and the song’s true debut had been the live version on Learning to Flinch. In the new studio take, Warren added numerous keyboard effects to the traditional piano, as well as subdued echo effect, making the studio “remake” more like a ballad.
Of the album’s first potential single, the guitar-driven hard rocker “Rottweiler Blues,” Warren later playfully credited Carl Hiaasen for the song’s gritty crime themes: “In the course of his research for one of his novels, I think he trafficked a little high-end para-military paranoia,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “I don’t know too much about that. But affordable and free-ranging paranoia? That’s more my style.”
Despite the influence that Warren’s recent relationships had had on almost all of Mutineer’s songs, the album’s only true love ballad was the title track itself—ironically, not penned for any particular woman at all. “I intended this [‘Mutineer’] as a gesture of appreciation and affection to my fans,” he later claimed, adding, “none of whom bought the record.”
Giant released Warren’s independently produced Mutineer on May 23, 1995. It suffered the same fate of its predecessors, with low sales and mostly good reviews. In any promotion surrounding the album—which included stops with old friend David Letterman as well as The Jon Stewart Show in mid-June—Warren focused heavily on the DIY nature of making Mutineer and had no problem in continuing to tout the creative freedom that the process allowed. “If I had tried to make this album seven or eight years ago, it would have cost a couple of million dollars,” he had told Billboard’s Melinda Newman. “Lest I make it sound that making this record was too easy, I want you to know that being responsible for my own budget was harrowing. I allowed myself a 5% breakage fee for my furniture. Maybe throwing a fax machine across the room is a little less controlled than I should be, but I said, ‘It’s in the budget.’” He later elaborated to Goldmine’s Steve Roeser, “Mutineer is the first album of mine without a demo stage. Recording at home enables one to eliminate the demo stage, and the presentation stage in the studio.”
His article ran in Billboard two days before Irving Azoff was featured in a lengthy piece outlining his plans for the future of Giant. Warren noted that his name was nowhere to be found within the article.
With all of his Giant releases, Warren had formed a parallel trilogy to three of his previous albums, all of which represented his passions and persona at the time: Where Mr. Bad Example had been created in image alone as a companion piece to Excitable Boy, so Learning to Flinch and 1980’s Stand in the Fire had both provided brilliant representations of Warren’s stage incarnations in two very different eras of his career. He claimed to have taken the convenience and budget-efficient means of home production to create the album he’d “always wanted to make,” with Mutineer, while renouncing the overproduction and technical extravagance of Transverse City. While polar opposites in regard to genre, tone, style, and production methods, both of those albums nonetheless shared a common bond: they were the only two of Warren’s albums that had garnered critical accusations of self-indulgence. To Warren, however, they’d both just been very personal projects.
In the case of Mutineer, the personal touch of its authorship reached further than the lyrics and arrangements; as the recordings had all taken place in Warren’s own home, it was primarily very close friends who were welcomed to visit and contribute. Two recent friends who made their debut appearances on one of Warren’s albums were jazz pianist Michael Wolff and bestselling mystery author Carl Hiaasen.
Wolff had been the music director for The Arsenio Hall Show when Warren appeared as the night’s musical guest on February 4, 1992. Through the rehearsals, the two discovered a shared love of Norman Mailer and Ross Macdonald. Over time, Wolff gave Warren jazz composition lessons, although Warren admitted that he was not a huge fan of the genre. “I missed jazz, kind of,” he later told Goldmine. “Michael has shown me a lot of things… a wonderful pianist, remarkable.” On Mutineer, Wolff provided the atmospheric keyboards to “Similar to Rain,” but it would be the first of numerous collaborations. Aside from multiple cameos on each other’s albums, the two teamed up for an all-star Jack Kerouac memorial album in 1997: Kicks Joy Darkness found Warren in company with Eddie Vedder, Johnny Depp, Hunter S. Thompson, Jim Carroll, Joe Strummer, Patti Smith, and Jeff Buckley in performing the late beat poet’s works. Warren recited Kerouac’s “Running Through—Chinese Poem Song” over Wolff’s tinkling keys.
Warren’s friendship with Carl Hiaasen was another story—literally. As a voracious reader whose personal book collection tipped the three thousand mark, Warren’s love of pulp and crime fiction had never stopped. Hiaasen was a favorite of his long before 1991’s Native Tongue featured a lead character with a love of Warren Zevon music. For a mutual fan like Warren, the literary shout-out was as good as canonization. “[R.E.M. guitarist] Peter Buck told me to read [Hiaasen],” Warren later told Marc Weingarten of The Los Angeles Times. “By the time I got to Native Tongue, I was such a fan I bribed the guy at the bookstore to sell me an advance copy. Then I looked in it and I saw my name on the copyright page.”
Just as he had done when major leaguer Bill Lee had publicly mentioned his own love of Excitable Boy, Warren opted to formally introduce himself to his high-profile fan, choosing a moment to surprise the author at a signing in Los Angeles. Hiaasen later recalled the shock of looking up to see one of his favorite rock stars waiting for his autograph. “At that time, [Warren] had that huge ponytail down the middle of his back, and I almost fell off my chair,” Hiaasen said. “I didn’t know whether he was there to punch me, or whether he read something he didn’t like.” Stammering, the author simply said, “I can’t believe you actually came.”
“I only came for one reason,” Warren had said, “and that’s to thank you for mentioning my music in your books.”
Following the book signing, Warren took Hiaasen to Noura Café for Turkish coffee—which the author skipped—and a ride in his Stingray. It was only weeks after completing Mr. Bad Example and Warren popped a demo cassette into the stereo. With their friendship quickly solidified, the two stayed in contact well after Hiaasen returned home to Florida, with Warren bouncing lyrics and song ideas off of him. Within the year, they were full-on collaborators, writing “Seminole Bingo” and “Rottweiler Blues” together.
It had even been during one of their now periodic fishing trips together that Warren had conceived of the title “Mutineer,” viewing the project in its earliest stages as his music equivalent to a Hemingway
-esque volume of sea stories and nautical adventures. Hiaasen later recalled, “Warren liked to take pictures of himself. He’d hold the camera out and take pictures. We were out on the boat fishing, and one of those shots became the cover of Mutineer.”
While he was admittedly “cautiously optimistic” each time a new album of his hit the market, Warren had particularly high hopes for Mutineer. It had included songs he himself regarded as among his very best—at least in years—and the meticulous approach he’d taken to his first DIY album had yielded high-quality results. To Warren, Mutineer had been the “personal statement” he’d always wanted to make as a singer- songwriter—his John Wesley Harding or Nebraska. If one were to solely take the advice of critics, the material he’d written and recorded during his Giant tenure was perhaps his greatest; if one were to go by numbers, they had been the lowest-selling of his entire thirty-year career.
“At one point, I had the impression that it was selling disastrously,” he joked to Marc D. Allan of the Indianapolis Star and News. “But then I was informed that everyone with whom I could feel the slightest kinship was also selling fractionally what they were accustomed to selling. In other words—very, very bad for Mariah Carey, quite well for a folk singer.” But even to the executives at Giant, less than forty thousand copies would have been low for a folk album. They announced their intention to drop Warren from the label before the end of the year, leaving him with no other choice than to tour indefinitely. The last time he’d been relegated to an RV for such a stretch, Warren had been able to write enough material for his next album, and with his home studio now in place, there was the option to record another album as soon as he returned. But with no other source of revenue, Warren would be forced to spend nine months out of 1996 playing gigs just to make ends meet.
He had already started writing the songs that would make up his next album—whenever that would be.
No one would hear them for five years.
On the occasions that any songs from Warren’s Giant three made it to the airwaves, he now noticed that they no longer played on the familiar FM rock stations. Even in their meager promotion of Mutineer, the label had sent a three-song sampler out for airplay; for the first time, the PR materials were largely focused on National Public Radio as a probable outlet. To his amusement, Warren found that he’d inadvertently made his way into the soft, adult-oriented world of “Adult Contemporary.” When he performed “Searching for a Heart” in Boulder, he shared with the audience his own classification for the genre.
“Easy Fucking Listening,” he hissed.
Part Three
ADULT CONTEMPORARY
CHAPTER ELEVEN
(1995–2002)
“I FIRST MET WARREN AROUND THE SAME TIME THAT I WAS starting Artemis,” remembered Danny Goldberg. “I had been a fan for many years, but I was finally introduced to him by Jackson Browne.”
Their introduction hadn’t been by accident or a social call. Jackson Browne had seen very little of Warren over the past years, but it had recently been brought to his attention that his old friend was again in a form of dire straits. In 1984, Browne had worked closely with Andrew Slater in getting Warren back home to Los Angeles safe and sound—then had set him up in his old Oakwood Garden apartment. But those had been personal favors, with no connection at all to Warren’s career troubles. Browne had fervently stuck to his “no more producing” rule; that was Slater’s business now. Even when Waddy Wachtel, LeRoy Marinell, Jorge Calderón, and all of the original “Gentleman Boys” had offered their own contributions to Warren’s ongoing work with Virgin, and then Giant, Browne had remained conspicuously absent. It wasn’t to say that any resentments were harbored; both Browne and Warren had continued along respective hectic schedules for well over a decade. These days, their paths rarely crossed.
It was at a benefit concert for Jorge Calderón’s ailing wife, Yvonne, in May 1995 that Warren and Browne were finally able to properly catch up as the close friends they’d once been. Although Browne kept his composure, he was disturbed to learn of Warren’s recent career misfortunes. They had once been driven by alcohol and addiction, but Warren had been clean and sober for a decade. His current woes were quite different than earlier ones that had been almost entirely self-inflicted. The Warren who stood before him at the benefit was stone-cold sober, quiet, focused—older, and even a bit of a charming curmudgeon. They parted ways with the mutual intention of staying in touch.
When Warren handed him a demo cassette of some new songs he’d been wrestling with at his home studio, Anatomy of a Headache, Browne, for the second time in his life, was hell-bent on getting his friend a record deal.
At only forty-nine years old, Danny Goldberg was the epitome of a true rock-and-roll industry veteran. He’d barely been out of his teens when Led Zeppelin hired him as their publicist, then as acting vice president of their Swan Song Records. But for the ambitious Goldberg, attending meditation sessions with Robert Plant wasn’t just a perk: the entire experience had led to a career trajectory as Nirvana’s manager while president of Gold Mountain Entertainment, chairman of Warner Bros. Records, and president of Atlantic Records.
When Jackson Browne called him up in 1998, Goldberg had just started Artemis Records, his own independent music label. Ironically, his vision of the small, vanguard label mirrored those of David Geffen’s toward Elektra/Asylum upon its founding—one of the primary reasons Browne trusted him with Warren’s new demos. “I had intended it to be a small indie label from the beginning,” Goldberg recalled. “I had really enjoyed working for the major companies and all the fun and the perks that went with it, but I had always preferred working with individual artists, singer-songwriters… I was curious about Warren’s music when Jackson first called.”
Unaware of Browne’s favor, Warren was shocked when Goldberg called him up asking for his own copy of the demos. Warren had replied, “I’ll have a mime in a top hat deliver it by hand.”
Goldberg remembered, “A cassette arrived and it was ‘Life’ll Kill Ya’ and some others that ended up on the album. It seemed like an entire album already, and the songs really, really were great. He’d lost none of his power or mastery of language.”
It was true that even after another frustrating five years of apparent anonymity, Warren hadn’t lost a step as either an artist or performer. He had even used the time to refine his already competent production and engineering skills.
However, with the third loss of a record company benefactor, achieving another proved even more difficult than before. He’d largely been relegated to the life of endless touring that, in his youth, he had both glorified and feared. As the next few years passed, and the venues became smaller and lower class, his career status had made him bitter.
Musician Phil Cody witnessed one of Warren’s most dramatic outbursts during a show they had been booked to play together at a small brewery. He later recalled Warren’s initial disgust upon walking in: “Warren comes in, and he has his leather satchel over his shoulder and it was like a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball. He rips it off his shoulder and hurls it right down the center of the room—three chairs fly, a table goes flying, and he says, ‘So this is what my career has come to?’”
Duncan Aldrich had been the sole consistent witness to Warren’s growing dissatisfaction with his solo career. The tension and bickering finally came to an abrupt end in December 1996—the finish line of the longest tour Warren had ever undertaken. “Driving around, no matter what he’d look at or what would be happening, he’d just spew discomfort and hate,” Aldrich later recalled, “and it was driving me crazy to the point where at the end of the tour, I said, ‘This is not a criticism of you at all, but maybe this will help you.’ And I gave him The Book of the Tao and I said, ‘Goodbye’… But that was the end. I was with him for twelve years, and I know for a fact that was the longest relationship he had.”
Warren had buried his father in Hillside Cemetery in July 1990. William “Stumpy” Zevon had outlived all of
his most dangerous friends, making it to the quiet age of eighty-six. “Fuck everybody,” had been among his last words. In the spring of 1995, Warren had halted the installation of his home studio to care for his grandmother and mother in Fresno, both of whom had deteriorated rapidly. His grandmother passed in April, his mother in August. He later admitted that he had been moved by the traditional Mormon ceremony, and began to slowly embrace a form of spiritualism that had long eluded him.
But now, in Duncan, Warren had lost his closest friend: a voice of reason and road manager who easily doubled as his collaborative engineering partner. During 1997, Warren opted not to tour at all. He wasn’t about to drive himself.
Skipping a year of touring didn’t mean Warren had remained completely invisible. As financially strapped as Warren had become by the second half of the decade, his mainstream media visibility was the highest it had been since the most extravagant of his tours in years past. Oddly enough, Warren’s frequent forays in front of the camera had nothing to do with any form of album or tour promotion: in five years, he had made cameo appearances on two hit HBO sitcoms, Dream On and The Larry Sanders Show, and NBC’s Brooke Shields vehicle, Suddenly Susan. Each time, he’d chewed the scenery as a biting caricature of himself—or at least of the public’s perception of him: a sarcastic, world-weary rock star, far too smart for his own good, and in a constant state of amnesia regarding full decades. “You must be the asshole who calls for ‘Werewolves of London’ at every show,” he seethed at Dream On’s leading man, Brian Benben, while then being tricked by The Larry Sanders Show’s lead, Garry Shandling, into playing the song on the spot before a live studio audience. When asked by Suddenly Susan’s Kathy Griffin if Neil Young had played on Sentimental Hygiene, his scripted response wasn’t far off from his real-life interview banter. “To be honest with you, I don’t remember,” he quipped. “I was a little medicated during the eighties. To be honest, I’m not sure if I’m on that record.”
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