Warren Zevon: “I went looking for trouble”

Originally from in Uncut Take 317 [October 2023], this previously unpublished interview from 1990, found the cult singer-songwriter speaking frankly about the chaotic mingling of art and life, writing rock’n’roll and the attraction of songs about mercenaries... “When people say to me, ‘Don’t you wish you were popular with more people?’, I say no.”

He drove across the Nevada desert dosed on acid

For many years, Warren Zevon’s hellraising reputation preceded him. In 1974, he drove across the Nevada desert dosed on acid to marry his sweetheart Crystal Brelsford. He later arrived in Tangier, Morocco with only Valium, vodka and F Scott Fitzgerald books for supplies.

After the failure of his 1970 debut, Wanted Dead Or Alive, Jackson Browne gave Zevon his break, producing Warren Zevon (1976) and Excitable Boy (1978), which included his sole hit, “Werewolves Of London”. The list of musicians who guested on those two albums reads like a who’s who of rock royalty: sundry members of the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, Linda Ronstadt, an Everly Brother and a Beach Boy alongside a team of crack session players.

But though socially close to the ’70s LA set, Zevon retained a scabrous, punky edge both in life and in song. Before the protagonist of “Excitable Boy” scatters the bones of his prom date in the trees, he smears his chest with a pot roast. Zevon had once drunkenly done the same thing with the dish cooked by his wife. By the end of the ’70s, he seemed likely to leave his personal Hotel California in a coffin.

“I went looking for trouble”

Which made his work in the following two decades all the more remarkable. Songs like “Roland The Headless Thomson Gunner”, “Lawyers, Guns And Money” and “Detox Mansion” were full of satire, but Zevon was equally adept at heart-piercing, battered ballads such as “Accidentally Like A Martyr” – or “Keep Me In Your Heart”, which closed his final studio album, 2003’s The Wind, released 20 years ago this month. Zevon died on September 7 that year from cancer, aged 56.

On February 18, 1990, I spent the day with Zevon in Pittsburgh, midway through a tour of the American Northeast to promote his then-latest album, Transverse City – an ambitious cyberpunk suite presciently tackling digital alienation. The interview – unpublished in full until now – saw him reflect on the abiding themes of his career. Recently sober, funny but combative and fiercely intelligent, he insisted that, aged 42, the tension between his life and art had finally been reconciled.

“I’d come away from my youthful fascination with Norman Mailer,” Zevon told me, “with the idea that the more one performed one’s work in one’s life, the more integrity the work had. So I went looking for trouble. Let’s go to [Franco’s] Spain, where they still point machine guns in your face!

Things to do in Pittsburgh when you’re dead…

“I might have a greater reluctance to pick up my guitar and go where a war is now,” he continued. “I say, ‘No, I’m old.’ Joe Conrad stopped going to sea. Do what you can do when the bruises will heal, then go home and write about it. I think that is a healthy way of doing life. Eventually, I also decided that the more you needed to perform, the less you were creating, the more you were just trying to stumble through a Salvador movie of your own experience and note it down. Which is really a far less interesting idea…”

In 1990, the morning sun was glinting off Pittsburgh’s steel-and-glass skyscrapers, evidence of the city’s regeneration after years of recession. But Warren Zevon was not in such good shape. He had discovered two weeks previously that his label, Virgin Records, had dropped him, mid-tour. That night, he was due to play the Syria Mosque Ballroom – a storied venue in its day, which had welcomed everyone from Caruso to Harry Truman, but by the ’90s unpromisingly resembled a school assembly hall. It was soon flattened to make way for a car park.

“What is this, a cafeteria?” asked Zevon’s guitarist Frank Simes, stage-left, nodding towards the incongruous rows of fold-up chairs and round tables. In a corner of the stage, Zevon was picking at “Moon River” on a keyboard, in between sips of Coke. Critically, he needed a floppy disc for the apocalyptic sound effects that feature on Transverse City, but Pittsburgh was closed on Sundays. Things to do in Pittsburgh when you’re dead…

“He was playing all these gigs, but he couldn’t get ahead”

“I think Warren liked being on the road,” Stuart Ross, his tour manager at the time, recalls today. “Where most people are saying, ‘Put Spinal Tap back on the VCR’, he came on one tour with a box of the entire catalogue of Graham Greene books! But towards the end, the crowds were not that big, which was discouraging.”

As it transpired, the 1990 tour had a fiscal as well as artistic imperative. “Warren was paying off unpaid tax for a very long time, which weighed heavily on him,” says Ross. “He was playing all these gigs, but he couldn’t get ahead.”

“Warren reacted to disappointments like that with devastation,” says Jimmy Wachtel, who designed most of Zevon’s sleeves up to Transverse City and whose brother Waddy was his long-serving guitarist.

“Bob Dylan invented my job”

“He wanted to be Dylan on the one hand and Beethoven on the other. He knew he was a fine songwriter and serious artist, but he was like Rodney Dangerfield – Warren wanted to be respected. When every rock star played on The Wind, and he had that David Letterman Show to himself just before he died – that’s what Warren wanted. The cover of the first [self-titled] Asylum album, blue and backlit, was from when he was really annoyed he hadn’t been invited to the Grammys, so we went over and crashed it.”

“I never got the sense that stardom was a real goal for Warren,” says Andrew Slater, who became Zevon’s manager in 1983 and co-produced 1987’s comeback album Sentimental Hygiene and Transverse City. “He said on Letterman, ‘Bob Dylan invented my job’ – the job is the teller of the tale, going from town to town. I know this is true, because back in 1983, that’s what he was doing.”

“I was in Philadelphia for a year, because I was in love with a disc jockey, and I did solo gigs,” Zevon told me, filling in the gaps in his fallow ’80s years, between his contracts for Asylum and Virgin. “Sometimes my manager would send me out to open for somebody…”

“I had perhaps the most amazing experience of my life last night”

In Pittsburgh, though, he had a clear idea of his direction of travel. “I think that whatever experiences I may have had in my life, at the time I was very young – under 10, as early as I can remember – I had this sense that I would be an artist – a fine artist, as opposed to a pop artist. As such, I assumed that I would survive and be content in that, which I did and which I am.”

The compensations were anyway a blast. On February 11, 1990, the journeyman boxer Buster Douglas had beaten the seemingly invincible champ Mike Tyson, still one of sport’s most staggering upsets. Playing Douglas’s hometown of Columbus, Ohio on February 17 – hours before we met in Pittsburgh – Zevon found himself inspired.

“I had perhaps the most amazing experience of my life last night,” he revealed. “I wrote about this guy Buster Douglas. It was incredibly easy to write and I went on stage by myself and sang it. The response was like nothing I’ve ever heard. Because Buster Douglas is the American Dream. There is one, you know,” he insisted with unexpectedly touching faith.

“I started out as a folk singer”

“There’s always the cheer when the ball goes over the fence. The Dream has an underside, of course – there’s a whole verse about Don King. But I immediately thought that if I can do a lifetime in show business, I’d like to keep that in the show.”

The experience took Zevon back to his troubadour roots, setting out from California to Greenwich Village in 1964. “Sitting down and writing a topical theme is what I do best,” he said. “I started out as a folk singer. I started out wanting to be Dylan. So I really went out and gave the best part of myself. The crowd understood that perfectly. That was probably the most glorious experience I’ve ever had on stage.”

That night reaffirmed his view that, whatever turns his career took, he was on the right path. “When people say to me, ‘Don’t you wish you were popular with more people?’, I say no. My comparison is with real people doing real jobs as best they can, they don’t worry how many people like it.

“You become a screw in the machine”

“I’m very pleased to have this job. I think it’s immensely fortunate to be in a line of work that provides you with one or two opportunities like that in a lifetime. How often can I say I’ve given the best part of myself? Certainly in the process of making records, that sometimes gets very lost. You become a screw in the machine.”

IN 1981, Zevon came clean about his alcoholism – and sobriety – in a Rolling Stone cover story. But as Andrew Slater recalls, when they first met, staying sober was an ongoing battle for Zevon.

“My life with Warren in the beginning was like My Favorite Year,” he says, referencing the 1982 film in which Peter O’Toole’s hellraiser is chaperoned by a hapless young writer.

“He was grounded and very present”

“Warren was the O’Toole character. I learned so much from him about literature, film, music and the world, but he was at the tail-end of another round of aggressive drinking. This was when he really embraced it as life or death.

“Afterwards, he was completely different. His spirit was the same. It’s just that his job was no longer getting as far away from himself as he could with drugs and alcohol. He was grounded and very present. If Sentimental Hygiene has any character, it’s of the sober Warren. I’m sure he explored all its themes in his 12-step programme…”

In that Rolling Stone piece, Zevon said, “You’re not a fucking boy, you’re not a fucking werewolf, you’re a fucking man – and it’s about time you acted like one.”

“If I regret that, I have to regret a whole catalogue of things”

In Pittsburgh, he was more sanguine about that period.

“Well, a lot of that article was about my regret for being seen creating that Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, acting-out-worst-possible-behaviour thing,” he said, “which becomes like a Time magazine profile of a real person. I’m not a novel. I saw that happening and I guess at the time the regret was a big one, so if I regret that, I have to regret a whole catalogue of things.

“But I don’t need to protest so much now. I don’t look in the mirror with big unresolved questions about whether I’m a boy or a werewolf. So it really doesn’t involve any spiritual risk for me to sing those songs. For a while, I didn’t go on stage and sing about drinking ‘heartbreak motor oil’ [from “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead”]. And then it becomes that these are just songs. These are anything but codes for behaviour, for anyone.”

He was the ex-mercenary owner of a bar in Sitges, Spain

When I met Zevon, the Berlin Wall had come down. In December 1989, America invaded Panama, rolling tanks across the border in the climax to two decades of dabbling in Latin American dictatorships and dirty wars.

Zevon was uniquely comfortable in this terrain, the stuff of songs such as “Roland The Headless Thomson Gunner”, with its remorseless mercenary stalking the Congo, and the deadly global troubleshooter in “The Envoy” – “Things got hot in El Salvador/ CIA couldn’t do no more/ …Send for the Envoy/Send for me!” The latter’s cool control appealed to Zevon as he battled alcohol. “Roland” was co-written with his friend David Lindell – the ex-mercenary owner of the bar in Sitges, Spain that the Zevons frequented in 1975.

“I ran into David a couple of months ago,” Zevon revealed. “I hadn’t seen him for 10 years. In fact he has a new set of lyrics which, like mine, start off novel-length and work down…”

Gun-toting antiheroes

Zevon had been known to read Soldier Of Fortune magazine, as well as Graham Greene and Robert Stone’s Latin American sagas. When he hung out with Lindell and wrote his songs about gun-toting antiheroes, did he ignore the consequences of their actions much like America’s foreign adventures?

“Perhaps,” Zevon said, “but I’ve never said that I knew what the results of their actions were and nor do they.”

The same, Zevon believed, went for art – whether his own sometimes defiantly disreputable songs, or recent prestigious Oscar-winners. “Most war movies profess to be anti-war statements – like Platoon,” he said.

“Ever watch a teenager grow up?”

“To me, if it’s a war movie and it’s entertaining, it’s pro-war – done deal! ‘Cos if they’re not having a good time up there, nobody’s in the theatre. Even in Full Metal Jacket, which in some ways is the grimmest of all, the quality of the light is so amazing and hallucinatory that it makes you think, ‘Gee, things must look great in Vietnam!’ Consequences. I don’t think we know a lot about consequences.”

From his currently sober perspective, Zevon was similarly indulgent about rock’s self-destructive sacred monsters, the Jim Morrisons and Lou Reeds – and Zevon, ’til recently.

“If they’re acting as surrogates, then that’s sort of OK, if it’s appropriate to the music,” he reflected. “Maybe you choose to say, ‘Guy broke his leg when he fell off stage [as Zevon did during 1978’s Excitable Boy tour] – probably not ideal behaviour.’ But it’s just stretching a page or trying to continue the entertainment. Remember being a teenager? Ever watch a teenager grow up? It’s about acting out hormonal troughs and crests, a favourite of my own phrases. It’s not about politically conscious acts.”

“I thought it was so obvious!”

Zevon affected to believe that day that his artistic ambitions were equally modest. “Every song I write, I try to make sound like the songs I like,” he said. “The main purpose of ‘Boom Boom Mancini’ [Sentimental Hygiene’s brutal biography of the lightweight boxer who killed a man in the ring] was to sound like ‘Start Me Up’. The lyrics may range from something close to my heart to something totally incidental – something morally adequate to sing for three minutes, when I feel like it. ‘Boom Boom Mancini’ is a song about saying the guy’s name.”

Zevon neglected to mention that his father, William “Stumpy” Zevon, was a professional gambler and boxer, then near death in a hospital which Zevon was visiting when he could during this tour, and a template for all the fighters, outlaws and desperados who so vividly fill his songs. He confessed as much, years later, to Uncut’s Andy Gill. “I thought it was so obvious!” he said sheepishly, having never divulged it before.

Where Sentimental Hygiene bristled with the confidence of an artist back in the game, the follow-up Transverse City (1989) went further out, dealing not just with cyberpunk, but a very real version of America much like the one I glimpsed en route to Pittsburgh – increasingly depersonalised and factionalised, with its bare fields studded with isolated service towns, strip malls and ominously factory-like strip clubs. “Let’s go shopping, honey”, Zevon manically offered on “Down In The Mall”, describing one of his own favourite pastimes. “It’s something we can stand…”

“You could never be bored around Warren”

“Warren was very conservative,” says Jimmy Wachtel. “That conservatism also manifested in his dress sense. Everything had to be grey, and he had a grey car. None of us really talked about politics in those days, but Warren probably leaned more towards the conservative politically, too. Not Trump, though…”

“You could never be bored around Warren,” says Stuart Ross. “Almost every time I walked into Hugo’s on Santa Monica Boulevard, he would be sitting with a famous author. He called me once and said, ‘Guess who I just had breakfast with? Norman Mailer.’

“Warren’s songs were three-minute mystery novels and I think the literary community looked at that and said, ‘I want to meet this guy.’ Guys like Carl Hiaasen, James Crumley, Ross Macdonald and Clint Eastwood were friends.”

“There were two sides to him”

“He was very funny, and highly intelligent,” says Wachtel. “He was the sort of person you’d want to be your friend. But he did not wear his heart on his sleeve and he could be an asshole. There were two sides to him – ‘Roland The Headless Thomson Gunner’, and ‘Accidentally Like A Martyr.’”

The sensitivity and romance of “… Martyr” is also evident in songs such as “Reconsider Me”, where Warren’s seemingly repentant lover pleads for a second chance. Were such qualities present in his daily life?

“That’s a tough question,” says Andrew Slater. “Sometimes writers create characters in songs that they aspire to be. I think in ‘Reconsider Me’, that’s what’s happening there.”

“I’m not writing an autobiography”

It’s tempting to see Zevon’s less sympathetic side – which kept even his friends at bay – in “Splendid Isolation” from Transverse City, where Zevon sings of “lying down in the dark” in his apartment, “nobody coming by without calling first”.

“I’m not writing an autobiography,” Zevon argued. “I’m not necessarily making choices, least of all to be a drunken writer. That may be the only choice – not to be a drunk. Otherwise, I had this impulse to write the third line after the second, which led me to pick up the guitar. Which led me to figure there was maybe some kind of employment in New York in ’66, or LA in ’68, or Spain in ’75.”

In Pittsburgh in 1990, anyway, Warren Zevon declared himself content with the hard-won emotional place he’d arrived at. “The conditions in which you live life are: are you bad to people, are you honest or are you not? I guess you can be drunk and tend not to be dishonest, not be unkind – just be drunk. When I stopped behaving that way, I liked it like this. Be most unfortunate if I had to tell you that I didn’t.”

“This is the material world, where there are no resolutions”

A little later, a local teenager presented Zevon with a floppy disc and the night’s show could go on. “These are unusual seating arrangements, aren’t they?” Zevon noted from the stage, peering at the plastic rows. “Kinda like some sort of hellish picnic. Feels like the dean or, in some of our own experiences, the warden is on the way…”

He looked tired, but his white face was eerily alert, sparks glinting on the lenses of his glasses. “I feel so… sensitive,” he mugged after “Reconsider Me”. “I think we should play ballads all evening!”

A teasing, mock-classical intro followed, then suddenly he veered into his howling hit: “I’ve seen the best minds of my generation, starving, hysterical, naked – Werewolves of London!” He left Pittsburgh with an encore, “Play It All Night Long”, typically concerning ardent Southern fans of Lynyrd Skynyrd.

“It’s not very conscious,” Zevon told me earlier, looking back at his whole career. “None of it’s conscious, and there are no resolutions. It’s all Maya,” he said, referencing the Hindu philosophy of illusion veiling deeper truths. “This is the material world, where there are no resolutions.”