I got to clean out the porn,” remembers Jordan Zevon, son of singer-songwriter Warren Zevon, in the oral history I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead. “That’s what we discussed, Dad and me… If he passed away, I was supposed to go in there and get out the porn… I thought it was going to be, you know, X-rated videos that you rented or bought in one of those sex shops on Melrose Avenue. But it was porn of him. And women. He made them himself.”
I’ve become addicted to rock bios. They’re like my Stephenie Meyer/guilty pleasure/vampire chick lit fixes. They offer both the lurid and the magical, usually in one cautionary tale. I know they don’t change much from book to book, subject to subject; but I’ve become hooked on the formula.
Rock bios hardly ever offer feel-good endings. Either the subject dies young (Cobain, Buckley, Hendrix), or they live long enough to become a villain, or an embarrassment (Phil Spector in Tearing Down the Wall of Sound); sometimes they experience spiritual rebirth (Eric Clapton’s memoir) and sometimes not (Jerry Garcia in Dark Star).
Warren Zevon — writer of the catchy 1978 hit Werewolves of London but also Lawyers, Guns and Money, Excitable Boy, Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner and hundreds of other evocative brainwaves — somehow lived out all the rock bio clichés, but still remains steadfastly one of a kind in his ex-wife’s account (subtitled The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon).
Alcoholic. Sex addict. Gun nut. Wife beater. Okay, those are the lurid headlines; the tale inside is even more interesting, and real. Zevon died of cancer in 2003. His career, at that point, wasn’t exactly red-hot. From a wunderkind childhood (his father was a smalltime gangster; Warren took up piano in California and hung out with Igor Stravinsky at age 12, studying musical scores and playing tennis), Zevon struggled for success on the L.A. folk-rock scene of the mid ‘60s and early ‘70s. His songs — piano-driven, acerbic, manic and witty— were sometimes covered by famous people like Linda Ronstadt, but solo success eluded him.
Fortunately, Zevon had a lot of friends in L.A., including Jackson Browne, who helped bankroll Zevon’s self-titled 1976 album. Critics loved it, but sales were mediocre. It was 1978’s “Excitable Boy” that went gold and turned Zevon into a star, propelled by the infectious Werewolves of London (you may remember the song from Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money). Zevon would later diss that song, noting that the most stupid, repetitive thing on the album became a hit (the catchy piano riff was studio musician Roy Marinell’s). But Zevon never had such instant success again.
Instead, he became the party animal described in his lyrics — or maybe art imitated life. He prowled L.A. every night on a drunken rampage. He bought guns and fired them around the house, into furniture. He stood up on a dinner table, opened his shirt and smeared pot roast all over his chest, just like the dude in the song Excitable Boy.
Mostly, though, he became a blackout drunk. Fully embodying the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle that he thought had long been owed him, Zevon became surly, a negligent father (to two kids from different women) and an occasional wife beater. His then-wife Crystal, who remained close to Zevon until his death, was put in charge of writing the book. “You are my witness. The story’s yours.” But how will I know what the truth is, she asked. He laughed and said, “Oh, you’ll find out.”
No one ever accused Zevon of faking the intensity of his lyrics. The songwriter lived hard. As he put it after being diagnosed in 2001, “I got to be Jim Morrison a lot longer than he did.” Crystal Zevon spares no one’s feelings in detailing his progressive alcoholism and how it affected those around him. The songwriter also managed to alienate a lot of the friends and musicians who had nurtured him. A “rock bottom” moment came when Crystal heard gunshots out in the greenhouse (premonitions of Kurt Cobain?). Zevon was there, firing a .357 Magnum into album cover photos of himself, drunk and weeping. “I killed myself,” Zevon reportedly said.
Well, his career was effectively dead by 1982. Without a follow-up hit to Werewolves of London, plus a string of drunken shows and a reputation of arrogance in the music industry, there was little else to go but the skids. And that’s when Zevon eventually cleaned up. He started 12-Stepping, made amends with the long list of people he had hurt (shades of My Name Is Earl), and resumed recording, to less than universal applause. But he still had dedicated fans. David Letterman often asked Zevon to fill in for Paul Schaffer as the bandleader on his show, and Schaffer was amazed at Zevon’s ability to whip off musical charts for each band member. He started hanging around with Hunter S. Thompson, a fellow gun and alcohol enthusiast, shooting off automatic rifles at the gonzo writer’s Denver ranch. Zevon also befriended Carl Hiaasen, a Miami novelist who often took Zevon on fishing trips and kitsch expeditions down in Florida. This association led him to befriend Dave Barry, Stephen King and Mitch Albom, who all occasionally slummed in a pick-up band called The Remainders (Zevon provided the musical muscle; the lit pack provided most of the lyrics). It’s not surprising that Zevon drew fans from the writing world: his own inspiration for tales like Carmelita, Mohammed’s Radio and Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner were hard-boiled mystery writers like Ross MacDonald, whom he also befriended.
Along the way from overnight fame to marginal respect and few record sales, Zevon gained the respect of countless musicians and songwriters, including Jackson Browne, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Neil Yong, David Crosby and Bruce Springsteen. These rock icons seemed to keep Zevon’s head above water at the times in his life when he felt most forgotten.
I recall watching Zevon perform at a Boston club around ’93, He had no band — just himself, prowling the stage on guitar or behind the piano — and yet he was a dynamo performer (especially when he felt the audience “got” him). It’s only now that I learn this was one of Zevon’s interminable tours to pay the rent, and that the solo tour was an economic necessity — he couldn’t afford to pay a band.
I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead is an honest, painful account of how selfish people can be when they’re more interested in climbing inside a bottle than dealing with the real world. But when Zevon started AA, he attacked it with the same ferocity that he did writing out musical charts. The only problem is, Zevon’s eccentricities and addictive behaviors continued on in different forms, after the alcohol was shut off. Early superstitions about “bad luck” colors and numbers had bloomed into full-blown obsessive-compulsive disorders — a condition he shared with one-time neighbor (and then-unknown actor) Billy Bob Thornton. “Oh, you have that, too,” Zevon remarked when he spotted Thornton opening and closing his mailbox precisely three times before retrieving his letters. Zevon’s OCD extended to buying and wearing only gray Calvin Klein T-shirts, which he would obsessively hunt up in shopping malls at whatever city he was playing.
More striking, Zevon shifted his drug and alcohol addiction to sex addiction. His journal entries (reproduced by Crystal in the book) usually run along the lines of “Good show… Met groupie… Back to hotel… Sex…” But occasionally, his habits ran to arranged orgies (“I’ll leave that journal entry to your imaginations,” Crystal writes) and cataloguing his sexual trysts on videotape.
The final chapter in this unusual rock bio details Zevon’s cancer battle, a period that led him back to drugs (prescribed liquid morphine for the pain, but also gallons of whiskey), and worse, the bad behavior that drinking amplified in him. Still, as with the best comeback stories, Zevon rallied long enough to record “The Wind,” his final take on mortality that won a posthumous Grammy; and he did get to see his daughter give birth and got to hold his two grandchildren. Not a bad way to wrap up a life that would never be mistaken for Mother Theresa’s, but which never fell short of rock and roll. This book would have made a hell of a song — or better still, a double LP, one that could have been written only by Warren Zevon.