Crystal Zevon - Ill Sleep When Im Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon

the flesh, Warren, is merely a bruise on the spirit,

a warm-up for the main event
as the hymnal ushers in the honky-tonk

from Sillyhow Stride
by P AUL M ULDOON

Time marches on

Time stands still

Time on my hands

Time to kill

Blood on my hands

And my hands in the till

Gentle rain

Falls on me

All life folds back

Into the sea

We contemplate eternity

Beneath the vast indifference of heaven

W ARREN Z EVON

In the summer of 1995, Warren Zevon asked me to come to New Orleans to see his show at the House of Blues. His touring band was four young Irishmen, and Warren constantly griped about their spotty musicianship and table manners. That night, though, he and those kids blew the roof off the joint. By the end of the last set, Warren had ripped away his shirt and was leaping and stomping around the stage, tearing it up on lead guitar. The whole place was going nuts, and I thought: the man was born for this.

Backstage, Warren introduced me to a pleasant young woman who said she was a dancer at a gentlemans club, but also composed madrigal music and worked part-time as a crime-solving psychic for the New Orleans Police Department. That a creature of such eclectic credentials would fall under Warrens spell shouldnt have surprised me, but by the time I figured out that he was setting me up, it was too late. As the woman took my hand and dragged me toward the French Quarter, Warren flashed his grinthat dazzling, satanic grinand I knew he was expecting something memorable to unfold.

The next morning he grilled me about my date, and he seemed aghast when I reported that nothing had happened. At some dreary hour, the stripper/composer/seer had commenced rambling about matters so impenetrably cosmic that I was stricken with a migraine of Zevonian proportions. When shed offered to clear our drink glasses and perform a table dance, Id blurted: You have to go now. Youre scaring me.

When he heard the story, Warren looked stunned. You really told her that?

It was the truth, I said. She took it very well.

Of course Warren would have handled the encounter quite differently (and apparently did, on a later visit to the Crescent City). He was always a magnet for unforgettable characters, but few could keep up with him.

I never knew the infamously dangerous Zevon, the pistol-waving, vodka-soaked, Darvon-addled maniac who locked himself in manacles for the cover of Rolling Stone. Being a fan since the early days, Id read all the hair-raising stories. Most turned out to be true, and many are in this book, recounted in the words of eyewitnesses, cohorts, and victims. Some of its ugly and un-flattering to Warren, but he wanted it all told after he was gone.

I got to be Jim Morrison, hed say, a lot longer than he did.

Warren had been clean and sober for years when we first met in 1991. Hed turned up at a book signing in Hollywood, and afterward we went out for Turkish coffee and talked about the private torture of writing. Warren was staggeringly gifted at his craft, a fact occasionally overshadowed in these pages by his off-duty escapades. What had drawn me and many other writers to his music were the lyricscunning, cutting, and yet often elegant. Warren was contemptuous of the term genius, but there was authentic genius in many of his songs. I quoted him whenever possible, including these marvelous lines, which I borrowed for a newspaper column that I wrote after waking up in the Beverly Hills Four Seasons during an earthquake:

And if California slides into the ocean

Like the mystics and statistics say it will,

I predict this motel will be standing

Until I pay my bill

Since we lived a continent aparthe in California, me in Floridawe didnt see each other much, though we talked frequently. After some mild nagging, Warren finally agreed to come fishing in the Keys so we could go over a couple of songs that we were writing together for an album that would be called Mutineer. He arrived wearing Prada shoes, but by the end of the trip he was in high-caliber Hemingway mode, minus the drinking.

One afternoon he hooked a large tarpon, which jumped spectacularly while dragging our guides small skiff back and forth around the Channel Three Bridge. The fish eventually broke the line, leaving Warren crestfallen but in awe. On a later outing he brought an odd flute that he was learning to play, and practiced whenever the fishing was slow. He was a compulsive picture-taker, and insisted that I snap his photograph at a local tourist trap while he posed with an enormous plaster lobster the size of a Piper Cherokee.

Warren in the Hemingway mode.

Warren and the plastic lobster.

Fishing in the Keys.

Strangers were sometimes unnerved by Warrens growl and acid wit, but to me the most intimidating thing about him was the breadth of his intellect. A prodigious reader, he could talk knowledgeably about Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, or Mickey Spillane, all in the same conversation. Likewise, a casual chat about music could carom from Radiohead to Brian Wilson to Shostakovich, at which point all I could do was nod and pretend I understood what the hell he was talking about.

That his own work was underappreciated has always been a mystery to Warrens fans, and was a source of bitter frustration for him. His most widely played song, Werewolves of London, is a darkly droll ditty that hed knocked out in a few hours after one of the Everly Brothers suggested the title. Yet, masterpieces such as Desperados Under the Eaves or The Indifference of Heaven are seldom heard on the radio.

Warren was the first to admit that, when it came to career management, he was sometimes his own worst enemy. It was no less true in his private life; he could be a saint or a son-of-a-bitch, and along the way there was heavy collateral damage to friends, lovers, and the two people about whom he cared most deeply, his son and daughter. He liked to say he had no regrets, but in truth he was sick with guilt about his serial disappearing acts while Jordan and Ariel were growing up. They might have forgiven him, but Warren never forgave himself.

As for the many, many women in his past he was as incorrigible as he was charming. Id never seen a word of his private journals until Crystal, Warrens ex-wife, sent me the manuscript of this book. It was eye-opening, to put it mildly. Obviously Warren wasnt kidding about channeling Jim Morrison. God only knows where he found the time to write songs.

Yet write he did, and he left behind a wildly intelligent and captivating body of music. Its no wonder that among his admirers are Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Bonnie Raitt, Eddie Van Halen, Keith Richards, Linda Ronstadt, David Crosby, and of course his friend and early mentor, Jackson Browne. Warrens much-acclaimed final album, The Wind, was crowded with rock icons who loved his work. Every song was written and recorded while he was dying.