Nothing's Bad Luck
Page 39
Warren continued, “We did intensive research, which I found dull and distasteful. I think it is a very sad story, and not an interesting sad story, just a sad story.… [But] I wouldn’t dream of going to Graceland. It may just be that I have my own priorities, or I am a certain type of snob. But I thought very seriously about going to Glenn Gould’s grave…”
Life’ll Kill Ya was released one day before Warren’s fifty-third birthday. The reviews that quickly followed for both the album and the full-backed solo tour couldn’t have been a better gift.
“Sometimes the constricting circle of Zevon’s spotlight produces strangely stilted music, such as 1995’s Mutineer,” wrote Jon M. Gilbertson in No Depression. “About as often, it engenders brilliance along the lines of 1989’s sprawling Transverse City. With Life’ll Kill Ya, Zevon seems to acknowledge that he works best satisfying himself, and he does so by assembling 12 thoughtful, often caustically funny, always intimately felt songs.”
Many critics picked up on the album’s apparent emphasis on aging and, more so, the subject of death. Although optimistic over his newly rejuvenated recording career, Warren’s public persona was now one of a genuine world-weariness, and one of cautious skepticism. “I’m old and death is inevitable,” he told John Roos of The Los Angeles Times. “It makes people uncomfortable, but isn’t it as appropriate a subject for me as today’s kids singing about being young and angry?” He added, “I’ve said before that my career is as promising as a Civil War leg wound.”
Warren had been only slightly less morbid to Rob O’Connor at the online webzine Launch.com, claiming, “I’d say the hearse is at the curb at this point, both professionally and personally.”
The Artemis staff went full force in backing Warren’s debut, landing him in-store appearances and interviews with major “Triple A” radio stations. “It stood for ‘acoustic, adult, alternative,’” Danny Goldberg recalled. “They were the only stations playing his generation—Jackson [Browne] and Bonnie Raitt… It seemed like an ideal fit for Warren.”
The sole conflict came when Warren and Goldberg had to select the first single off the album. They had agreed on “I Was in the House When the House Burned Down,” the album’s folkish opening track. However, a radio edit would be required to eliminate the word “shit” from the song’s very first line. For the first time in his career, Warren was faced with a shade of censorship. In 1989, it had been a given that the word “cock” would be bleeped from any airings of his Letterman performance of “Finishing Touches.” But for this, they’d need his approval. Goldberg remembered, “Warren went through the motions agonizing over it, and told me he needed to discuss it with Carl Hiaasen and other ‘real’ writers to determine if he would be sacrificing his writerly integrity by sanctioning a clean radio version before he gave his permission.” In the end, Warren agreed.
Out of the gate, Life’ll Kill Ya earned Warren the best charting numbers he’d had in years. It spent only one week on the Billboard 200, peaking at Number 173 in mid-February; low, but still better than any of his releases for Giant. And in this instance, there was a secondary cause for the low charting: for the first time, downloadable internet versions were made available and ranked. For the top internet albums, he had made number 9. It was Warren’s first time back in the Top 10 in twenty-one years.
Despite putting in every effort for Warren’s “second comeback,” Goldberg remained convinced the album should have done better. “But,” he recalled, “the record did get Warren back into the market, increased his live audiences, and reconnected him to his core audiences.… It drove me crazy that I hadn’t been able to figure out how to attain the heights of Bonnie Raitt’s latter-day success for Warren.”
What success the album did enjoy had a secondary benefit: sales of Mutineer nearly doubled.
To promote the album, Warren again went out on a solo tour, only now with the proper road management and accommodations that came with perks of his contract. With stellar new material and a once again renewed vigor for performance, he had refined the one-man spectacle of his Learning to Flinch world tour, presenting a matured, folkish set on par with his own description: “grunge classical.”
“Mr. Zevon’s songs change radically depending on whether they’re for guitar or piano,” wrote Jon Pareles in The New York Times. “His guitar tunes hark back to Appalachian music, often using a dulcimerlike drone and just a handful of circling chords. In two songs, he made the chords a tape loop while he played lead guitar solos. On piano, he uses more elaborate harmonies, by way of Copland and gospel, to back what might be parlor songs for a highly unsavory parlor.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Jonathan Valania shared Pareles’s enthusiasm for both Warren’s new material and energetic solo show. “Zevon’s voice, that inimitable bleat, was as strong and sure as his guitar work,” he wrote. “His acid wit has lost none of its corrosive amusement value… Referring to temporary seating that filled the normally standing-room only orchestra pit, Zevon asked the crowd if they had brought their own chairs.
“‘Reminds me of a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Manila,’ he said, sounding like a man who would know.”
Danny Goldberg may have been disappointed in the overall reception to Life’ll Kill Ya—at least on Warren’s behalf—but the artist himself only wanted to keep the momentum going.
Soon after returning from London at the end of May 2000, he approached Goldberg with a laundry list of ideas for the follow-up, something that he described as a “spiritual album.”
Goldberg recalled, “Instead of writing with Jorge Calderón or working with a producer again, Warren wanted to set up a home studio and do everything himself. I figured that since we weren’t paying very much for his albums, and since Warren was essentially an auteur, it would be inappropriate to argue.” He added, “In retrospect, I probably should have questioned him more seriously about this approach.”
The quality of songs on Life’ll Kill Ya had benefited tremendously from the forced hiatus that Warren had struggled through; ironically, it was during the longest stretches of time, often with the direst of financial and personal woes, that the songs he wrote were the most personal and cerebral. As had been the case with his self-titled Elektra/Asylum debut and then later, with Sentimental Hygiene, years of refinement had resulted in the best work. But now in his fifties, Warren didn’t have another half decade to let a new cache of material percolate in his mind. While it was true enough that Warren wanted complete control of his next album, it was apparent that help would be needed to write the songs fast enough for turnaround recording and release.
When he explained his conceptual intention for the album to Danny Goldberg, however, Warren played up his creative vision over the pragmatic need for collaboration. As Goldberg recalled, he “had decided to use the literary ‘angle’ for all it was worth.” This entailed inviting nearly every writer friend he had made in the last few years to try their hands at writing some rock songs. He later explained to Marc Weingarten of The Los Angeles Times, “A lot of the time it’s an awful, unnatural struggle for me to write lyrics. I think of it as a necessary evil. If it gets business-like, I’m unhappy with the results. I have to wait for some kind of inspiration, and that means a lot of extreme frustration, because I’m not being useful.”
The writers that Warren had in mind were no strangers to rock and roll. Through his close friendship with Carl Hiaasen, Warren had made the acquaintance of a veritable who’s who of bestselling authors, all of whom were also hobbyist musicians. Under the clever banner the Rock Bottom Remainders, Tuesdays with Morrie author and columnist Mitch Albom, horror master Stephen King, Pulitzer Prize–winning humorist Dave Barry, and National Book Award finalist Amy Tan periodically got together to form a loose rock band to play charitable events and book fairs. Although the group didn’t take themselves all that seriously as professional rockers, the sheer novelty of stellar literary figures jamming to “Satisfaction” for a worthy cause was always a big draw.
Barry admitted that he had been an admirer of Warren’s music, particularly his lyrics, since the 1970s. “I was a fan going back to his early stuff,” he said, “and I just always thought that it was really intelligent, but they were all just really quirky songs that just killed me. I was surprised when he agreed to play with us—and I was even more surprised when he stuck with us.”
During rehearsals for the Miami Book Fair, Warren had connected with the literary types he had so long admired—very much coy to the notion that they were equally excited to have him on board. Barry recalled, “Warren would get lost any time we invited him over, or to rehearsal. He would call multiple times from a phone to double-check the directions. Well, he was over for dinner and my wife and I had a CD player that held, like, a hundred CDs. As we’re talking, in the background, Warren heard that his own album had come up. He leapt up while I was talking and changed it. He couldn’t stand to have his music on while we were all there.”
Mitch Albom met Warren for the first time at a Rock Bottom Remainders rehearsal. He recalled, “[Warren] was already at rehearsal when I got there, and he was playing guitar… and he had a little box that had effects on it at his feet, and he kept stepping on these different buttons. It was like looking at a guy stepping on land mines to see if they blew up or not.”
At first, Warren and Albom were largely unfamiliar with each other’s work, but they connected on a shared love of sports and literature. “I think he was intrigued by the idea of being around a lot of literary types after a lifetime of being around rock-and-roll types,” Albom recalled. When the time came for Warren to begin writing material for his second Artemis album, Albom was one of the first writer buddies he had contacted. “We ended up with ‘Hit Somebody!’ because Warren had said no one really ever wrote a song about hockey. I agreed, and he said, ‘Well, let’s collaborate.’ So, I wrote this song about a hockey goon who hates that it’s his job to beat people up and then it’s the last game of his life and he has a chance to score his first goal.” In the song’s lyrics, it is left ambiguous if Buddy, the aforementioned “goon,” survives his apparent suicide and gets a shot at personal redemption. Albom recalled, “I think that was the big difference with me and Warren. We talked about the song later, and I hoped, you know, Buddy lived—that he’d scored his one goal. I asked Warren what he thought.”
“Well, he dies, of course,’” he said.
Warren was particularly proud of the recording session, as he had been able to get not only Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra to appear on the track, but David Letterman himself came down to add the seminal, “Hit Somebody!” battle cry heard throughout the action-packed anthem. Before entering the studio with the track, however, Warren had chased Albom down to his vacation spot in the islands to notify him that their collaboration would be ready for listening upon his return.
“Wait, you’re actually recording that?” Albom had asked, laughing over the hotel room phone.
“Well, of course,” Warren said over the line. “What did you think we wrote it for?”
When the Rock Bottom Remainders finally played the Miami Book Fair that year, Dave Barry recalled that Warren was not only willing to play his own songs with the rag-tag group, but was amused at their own nervousness to perform them in front of him. Stephen King was particularly anxious to be singing “Werewolves of London” with the original werewolf himself standing right beside him. According to Barry, it was Warren’s own idea. “He said, ‘I’ll only do it if Stephen King sings it,’” Barry recalled. “He said, ‘I’ll do the keyboards, but it’ll be much funnier if he’s the one singing it.’ I thought he was also being kinda shy about it.”
Barry added, “Warren really fit right in with us, I guess because he was a writer himself, but also because we regarded the [Rock Bottom Remainders] as a joke—and it seemed like nobody really got the joke more than Warren did.”
In total, Warren played over a dozen gigs with the Remainders, even accompanying the group on a handful of “mini tours” aimed at raising money for various charities.
“We certainly considered him a member of the band,” said Barry. “We invited him to every gig, and he did come to quite a few.… I mean, he fit right in—hanging out with us on the [tour] bus—and was just the funniest guy.”
Barry added, “Warren didn’t come to all of the rehearsals, thank God! It was like, cruel, to have to play in front of him! He certainly didn’t need the rehearsal time, especially while we were learning to play his songs.
“I think the biggest problem was that Warren could never find where we were. Like, he would rent a car to meet us wherever, but he would need to run out to buy T-shirts or things like that—his habits—and then he would head to my house, say, and I would put him on the phone with my wife, Michelle, since she was so good at giving directions. But then that would lead to a series of phone calls,” Barry laughed. “It would be starting with Warren getting lost on the road, and I would just hear Michelle say, ‘Okay, wait—where are you? Well, what does the road sign say? Okay, now what does the next sign say? Okay, Warren, so you’re going the wrong way! Call us back when you’ve turned around.’ Five minutes later, I’d hear her again, ‘Okay, now what does that sign say?’ These were pre-GPS days, and Warren wasn’t really a ‘direction guy,’ so he’d miss a lot of rehearsals. But he was the only one who didn’t need them, anyway,” he laughed.
Barry added, “Warren was just such a good singer, such a good guitarist—and just so good at, basically, fitting in—plugging in—to whatever had to be done. And I remember that he would simply disappear when the rest of the band could relax later and head to the bar. But he was really the funniest in a group of really funny people—and he got every joke, every reference. He just fit right in.”
As Warren continued to assemble a roster of poetic champions to help him with his most literary of concept albums, he not only drew from his friends within the Rock Bottom Remainders, but other authors with whom he had grown close over the past few years.
Warren had already befriended one of his own literary influences years earlier, spending occasional long weekends with Hunter S. Thompson at the writer’s “fortified compound” in Aspen, Colorado. In 1996, he and Duncan Aldrich had broken up some of the monotony of the road by visiting Thompson and helping him weed through his thousands upon thousands of personal correspondence, all to be compiled into a future three-volume published collection. Since then, Warren frequently continued to visit his gonzo journalist pal, sometimes for target practice, or to spend an evening of impassioned televised hockey viewing.
Their usual camaraderie was halted in 2001 when Thompson asked for a slightly larger favor. The iconoclastic writer had been on a personal crusade to earn convicted cop-killer Lisl Auman a new trial, in what he deemed “a travesty of justice.” Uncharacteristically, Warren had agreed to perform alongside Thompson, actor Benicio del Toro, and Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis at a rally on the foot of the state capitol in Denver. Like Warren’s unceremonious public endorsements of Congressman Steve Cohen in 1996 and former professional wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura for governor of Minnesota in 1999, it was a rare instance when passionate friends around him provided enough peer pressure to briefly enter the political ring. It didn’t happen often and it didn’t happen again—although Auman’s case was finally tossed out in 2005.
During their brainstorming sessions on Auman’s behalf, Warren approached Thompson about working together on a song for his upcoming “literary” concept album. Thompson later wrote of their tea-fueled session, “Warren is a profoundly mysterious man, and I have learned not to argue wi
th him, about hockey or anything else. He is a dangerous drinker, and a whole different person when he’s afraid.”
And after years of mutually appreciating each other’s bodies of work, the two finally collaborated on the moody and appropriately gonzo-driven “You’re a Whole Different Person When You’re Scared”—not that the collaborative process didn’t come with its own set of challenges. As Warren later told The Los Angeles Times, “[Thompson] will be utterly responsible if you need him to be.… If you show up at his place in Aspen at 2 a.m. with a guitar, ready to write the lyrics, that might not be the night you’ll write the song. But by golly, he’ll call you on the phone at 9 in the morning six weeks later and start reciting lyrics.”
While Warren had to personally ask one of his own idols-turned-friends for a turn at co-writing, he had recently received an enticing letter from an unlikely—and particularly prestigious—fan. Renowned Irish poet Paul Muldoon was already the recipient of both a Guggenheim Fellowship and the T.S. Eliot Prize for his poetic works when he wrote to Warren out of sheer admiration for his rock-and-roll music; Muldoon was a secret rock fanatic and had recently taken up the electric guitar. “Dear Mr. Zevon,” the poet had written, “I hope you won’t mind my writing to you out of the blue, but I’ve been an unabashed fan of your work for twenty-five years and thought I’d simply put that on paper.” Muldoon had sent along two autographed books of his poetry—unaware that such a gift was an instant way to Warren’s heart—and offered them as “tokens of my regard for your achievement.”