Nothing's Bad Luck

by C. M. Kushins

  “Nothing’s bad luck is it?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing’s bad luck is it?” he asked again.

  “No.”

  The following day, she was there to make him breakfast and lunch. The fourth can of Coke she found was sufficiently lucky, so he had that with his soup. He also asked if she could call his twelve-step sponsor when he was gone and offer his gratitude. Then, she massaged his hands and feet and rubbed ice on his lips.

  Later, Rayston lay in bed with him, under the covers, despite his fear that the act could be “bad luck” for them both. He asked her, as always, if anything was bad luck. She told him, “No.” Then twice more. When Warren asked her if she was scared, she knew that he felt the end was imminent.

  She held him. “Please stay,” he said, and took her hand. When he began to drift off, she quietly went and sat at one of the gray sofas, knowing he liked to fall asleep alone and it wouldn’t take him long. She checked on him only a few minutes later and sensed the energy in the room had changed. She checked his pulse and put her mouth to his lips to breath in air.

  After she’d made all the necessary calls, Jordan was the first to arrive after the paramedics.

  Warren William Zevon was fifty-six years old.

  A private memorial service was held for Warren, a small gathering of his closest friends and family.

  Jackson Browne spoke to the small crowd of familiar faces. “At some point,” he said, “every one of his friends had a falling out with Warren.” Amid the laughter, it was easy to look at the faces and remember each time one had been cut off from Warren’s life—yet had all now gathered once it had ended.

  Jordan scattered his father’s ashes over the Pacific Ocean.

  Later, Carl Hiaasen remembered something—something that Warren used to do while on tour. When fans would come out of whatever venue he’d just played, sometimes he’d be in the mood to take photos and sign autographs, and sometimes, well, he just wasn’t.

  Sometimes Warren was keen to get back on the road, or to head into a town he’d visited many, many times before—almost to the point of being an honorary citizen. Finding strange new places was the best, and usually better than some of the gigs.

  Sometimes he just wanted some fucking sleep.

  Other times, Warren just wanted to keep moving.

  For those occasions, Warren had designed a simple business card for his road manager to hand out in lieu of having to spend two hours in a parking lot signing napkins or water-damaged copies of Excitable Boy.

  For those times, the times that Warren had to leave:

  Mr. Zevon has gone with the

  Great Beaver.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A LEAF IN THE WIND

  IT HAD BEEN A CRUEL IRONY THAT WARREN’S GREATEST CRITICAL appraisements took place after his death.

  The Wind earned four nominations at the forty-sixth Grammy Awards—which was four more than Warren had earned while alive: Best Contemporary Folk Album; Best Rock Duet—for the blazing “Disorder in the House” with Bruce Springsteen, which also was nominated for Best Rock Song; and “Keep Me in Your Heart” was nominated for Song of the Year.

  As the president of Artemis, Danny Goldberg already had an idea for the show’s segment that would usually be slated for a performance by the artist themselves. Instead of getting another performer to fill in for Warren, he worked with Jorge Calderón and Jackson Browne in assembling a choir of Warren’s most treasured friends and family. During the Grammy Awards, Browne, Calderón, Ariel, and Jordan were joined by Billy Bob Thornton, musician Tim Schmidt, and Emmylou Harris in singing the harmonies of Warren’s original recording of “Keep Me in Your Heart.” Above the stage, the large screen displayed the footage of Warren in the studio throughout the recording of The Wind. The footage was cribbed from the VH1 documentary and the music video assembled from clips. Upon Warren’s passing, the network aired the video every hour, on the hour for a day of remembrance, and the footage of his final visits into the studio would remain a lasting image of his legacy by year’s end.

  In 2004, Artemis put together the memorial album Warren specifically stipulated was to be made after his death. By that time, Danny Goldberg had sold the company, but he assisted in the earliest stages of the album’s conception; Warren had been one of his first Artemis artists and now, with his passing, Goldberg’s own participation ended.

  Enjoy Every Sandwich was released on October 19, 2004. The album saw a host of Warren’s friends and famous admirers alike performing some of his most famous songs: Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt performed a blues-based duet of “Poor Poor Pitiful Me,” while Waddy Wachtel joined up blockbuster comedian Adam Sandler for a hard-rocking, appropriately goofy version of “Werewolves of London.” Warren had ultimately chosen The Wind’s title from an existing song he’d prepared with the same name. It had never made the final cut, but it had been a particular favorite of Billy Bob Thornton; on the memorial album, he recorded the official debut of Warren’s “The Wind.” Live recordings of Bob Dylan’s “Mutineer” cover, as well as Bruce Springsteen’s impassioned acoustic version of “My Ride’s Here” also demonstrated the reach of Warren’s influence on some of the music industry’s heaviest hitters.

  The most heartfelt performance on the memorial album came from Jordan Zevon, who, like Thornton, took the opportunity to debut one of his father’s unrecorded works—a bluesy tin-pan alley piano-based ballad, “Studebaker.” Now a seasoned singer-songwriter in his own right, Jordan included his father’s song on his own debut album, Insides Out, in 2008. Continuing to melt his own career while honoring his father’s legacy, Jordan continues to produce and record, while also working as a proactive advocate for the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization and mesothelioma research.

  Following his father’s death, Jordan combed through his dad’s old storage facility on the outskirts of the San Fernando Valley. He had to take time to prioritize: his mother, Marilyn “Tule” Livingston, died from breast cancer on March 3, 2004, leaving him without either parent in the brief span of six months. He tackled his father’s storage unit soon after. Among many components of antiquated music equipment and tour paraphernalia, Jordan also discovered enough quality demo tapes and outtakes to assemble a proper collection of his father’s “lost” recordings. Carefully packed in one large touring case, he found over one hundred various outtakes and snippets of long-forgotten studio work.

  In 2007, Preludes: Rare and Unreleased Recordings was distributed by New West Records. The two-disk set, lovingly produced and mastered by Jordan and Danny Goldberg, included some of Warren’s earliest solo demos—among them an acoustic version of “Tule’s Blues,” the first song written for Jordan’s mother; the original sheet music remained carefully framed under glass above Jordan’s own upright piano at home.

  The collection also included nearly every track later rerecorded in the lush, high-budgeted studio provided by Elektra/Asylum for his label release, but here in stripped-down, largely acoustic, and intimate form. As a deluxe set, Preludes’ second disk was composed of an in-depth interview Warren had given at Austin City Limits Studios for KGSR Radio in December 1999, while he had been touring for Life’ll Kill Ya—as well as excerpts and family photos from Crystal’s own then forthcoming oral history/memoir of Warren’s life, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead. Published by Ecco Books in 2008, Crystal’s work had assembled interviews with many of the musicians, friends, and lovers from Warren’s life, arranged in chronological order and maintaining the warts-and-all tone that Warren had once urged her to uphold in such a book.

  Likewise, Warren’s dear friend and former aide-de-camp, George Gruel, dug through his own trunks of mementos from years on the road, meticulously collecting them into a warm and humorous memoir/ scrapbook, Lawyers, Guns & Photos: Photographs and Tales of My Adventures with Warren Zevon through his own Big Gorilla Books in 2012. Along with musings and personal anecdotes from his time as Warren’s closest confidante, Gruel’s elabora
te coffee-table book offered faithful Zevonites scores of never-before-seen photographs that Gruel had taken as road manager, as well as behind-the-curtain glimpses into Warren’s creative process. Dedicating his book in memory of “a dear friend and brother,” Gruel explained, “We had great fun together through a myriad of adventures, including some that bordered on insanity. Through it all, I had the utmost respect for him and his art.… He could be a challenge, but then, who can’t be?”

  No one could understand those sentiments better than Warren’s own daughter, Ariel. Like Jordan, she had opted to preserve her father’s legacy in her own ways. While half-brother Jordan would take the reins on the posthumous Preludes, Ariel assembled a compilation of their father’s gentler and romantic side—the often overlooked persona that was more akin to the dashing and artistic figure she’d once viewed him as during her youth. “In a sense,” she wrote in the compilation’s accompanying essay, “a father is a daughter’s true love.” Like her father, Ariel had been a musician all her life, studying flute as a child in Paris and then writing songs throughout her teen years and young adulthood. She released her own debut album, a folk-driven acoustic work laden with biting social commentary, The Detangler, in 2018. In May of that year, she truly came into her own while following very closely in her father’s footsteps—she opened for her godfather, Jackson Browne, at a gig in Boston.

  Warren’s memory and legacy left their indelible imprints on nearly every person who had known him, extending from the closest members of his inner circles to the musicians and engineers who regarded themselves as fortunate to have worked alongside him. In the months and years following his death, Warren’s literary friends all took to their media outlets to pen heartfelt and honest obits. Soon, new generations of fans also heard the voice of Warren Zevon coming to them through films, television shows, and commercials. “I wrote ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ with Warren in 1969,” Kim Fowley recalled not long before his passing in 2015, “and it wasn’t until forty years later that I put on a show called Californication and heard it being used.” Indeed, the hit Showtime cable dramedy had benefited tremendously by utilizing numerous Warren Zevon tracks and covers throughout its seven-season run. “What’s a five-letter word for ‘excitable boy?’” the show’s lead character, portrayed by real-life Zevon fan David Duchovny, asks aloud while doing the newspaper’s daily crossword puzzle in one of the series’ early episodes. “Zevon!” he exclaims, proudly putting pencil to newsprint. Filmmaker Judd Apatow likewise snuck his own form of tribute into his 2009 drama Funny People, using “Keep Me in Your Heart” during one of the film’s most emotional scenes: as the film’s jaded lead character wrestles with denial surrounding his own cancer diagnosis, it is Warren’s song that finally breaks him down into tears.

  “Serious writers, serious lovers of language, will be discovering [Warren’s music] for a long time to come,” Jackson Browne later told Rolling Stone. “His songs are like short stories—best songs always are. They tell much more about life than books; they communicate so much more than a longer volume would. But it’s funny. Here we are, talking at great lengths, to describe something that was the very opposite of that—a guy who could say something in a few words that was immediately understood.”

  Even amid their checkered working relationship, Jackson and Warren had shared a friendship lasting nearly forty years. More than one of Warren’s many significant others had noted that despite any apparent rivalry, he viewed Browne—along with Don Henley, J. D. Souther, and other musicians of the Southern California scene—as “his brothers.” As angry as he’d become upon reading a negative review of his work, Warren was often seen losing his temper just as passionately if he witnessed a dear friend becoming the target of a similarly critical poison pen. To Warren, Browne—like Jorge Calderón—was a brother, and one of the rare ones whose opinion was of the highest value. Like Danny Goldberg, Browne started his own independent record label, Inside Recordings, in 1999. Jorge Calderón was one of the first solo artists he signed.

  In 2011, Ryan Rayston published her critically acclaimed first novel, The Quiet Sound of Disappearing. A thinly veiled memoir of her own painful—and often suspenseful—path to sobriety, the work not only prominently mentioned Warren in its acknowledgments but, as a true testament to their artistic influence toward each other, her book’s first-person narration is peppered with small references and turns-of-phrases easily recognized by those familiar with Warren’s songbook.

  Andrew Slater hit bottom following his days producing Warren at Virgin but had since come a very long way in reestablishing himself within the music industry, with a vengeance. After being fired by Don Henley on June 17, 1991—Slater’s thirty-fourth birthday—he began his own path to sobriety and career focus. Having remained friends with Bob Dylan’s son, Jakob, ever since their very early encounter during the Sentimental Hygiene sessions, he was cautiously hired as the manager of young Dylan’s band, the Wallflowers. With a drive and determination unfelt since his days at Front Line, Slater helped bring Dylan’s band to superstardom; soon, singer-songwriter Fiona Apple would also be his client, a career trajectory that made him head of Capitol Records only a few years later. He would have a successful future managing the hottest rock and pop acts for decades.

  But Slater’s career truly began in 1985 when he innocently raised his hand to merely defend the art and legacy of his favorite musical hero.

  It is a sentiment to which this author closely relates.

  CODA

  AS MY FIRST ENDEAVOR INTO BIOGRAPHY, I WAS PERSONALLY divided in regard to career assessment and any form of inadvertent psychoanalysis; I’ve never found much use for it in the chronicles of other lives I’ve read. To me, the work—in this case the music and writing—of a given subject should speak for itself. With Warren Zevon, I had to check my own admiration at the door in order to remain both objective and strictly factual: I already knew why I was a fan, but it seemed the best method of appeal for new fans and new critical assessments was if I just stuck to the fascinating tales and circumstances behind Warren’s songs. But in the course of seven years of research and interviews, the revelations of patterns and psychological “cause and effect” logistics understood only to Warren began to emerge. It was soon apparent that Warren’s life and music were too entwined to be assessed separately: his art was too autobiographical.

  One of Warren’s own literary heroes, Norman Mailer, once advised fellow writers to avoid crafting a lead character that was smarter than oneself; it would only lead to confusion and mental gymnastics when facing the creative task of deciding their actions. Although a work of nonfiction, writing the life of Warren Zevon presented its own challenge: he was the smartest man in any room he entered, and although the chronology of his life is already documented, he was, nonetheless, the very meaning of unpredictability.

  With his life and work now documented to the best of my ability, I feel comfortable enough to offer a few humble thoughts on the man and the artist that has provided me with both an inspired soundtrack and needed personal strength during the better part of the last decade.

  To put it succinctly, Warren was a conflicted man and artist due to the fact that he was always three separate entities of self-expression: while born a musical prodigy, his most internal passion was directed toward his writing. His musical virtuosity, like the gifts of all geniuses, was ancillary to his lifelong literary ambitions. Only confusing matters further, he was drawn toward the adrenaline of rock and roll, which provided both a logical means of fusing words and composition (he had survived for many years as a jingle-writer and studio session “cat”), and fueled a substance addiction that was, more than likely, hereditary.

  During the course of research, my appreciation for Warren’s work and admiration for his personal strength only deepened. While it may have deprived the world of some of the most intelligent and thought-provoking rock music of the twentieth century, I can’t help but believe that he may have been a significantly happier man—a
nd perhaps finally attained the “quiet, normal life” that forever eluded him—had he remained on the career path that Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft had attempted to lead him to in his youth: a career in professional classical composition and performance.

  Once Warren became sober in March 1986, he’d shaken the most violent of monkeys off his back—but his unfinished symphony remained perched there until his dying day. In combing through as many published interviews as attainable, the pattern of Warren’s fluctuating willingness to speak on the subject of his symphony throughout the years seemed to indicate a form of sadness, or guilt—most likely at the ambitious work’s lack of completion. When the subject came up in his final interview with The New York Times, Warren told Jon Pareles that following his youthful exchanges with Stravinsky, he’d decided that classical music “wasn’t for him,” explaining, “I felt that it was music of another time… I couldn’t add anything, and it wasn’t necessarily so relevant anymore.”

  Nothing could have been further from the truth. Warren worked on his symphony for the better part of two decades, only later choosing to downplay its importance in his life and overall musical legacy. More than likely, however, he was saving face as he’d never completed it. While on the PR junket for Life’ll Kill Ya, Warren gave perhaps the final honest update on the project’s status to David Bowman of Salon.com. “Didn’t you go to Juilliard?” the journalist had mistakenly asked.

  “No,” Warren had answered “softly.” “I didn’t finish high school.”

  Difficult words for a reputed former classical prodigy to have to utter. When Bowman asked what had come of the orchestral piece that Warren had completed in 1996 with the intention of taking it “on tour” by way of regional city symphonies, he had tersely responded, “Nothing,” then quickly segued the conversation back to the album he was there promote.