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  I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead

  The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon

  Crystal Zevon

  Foreword by Carl Hiaasen

  For our grandsons

  Max and Gus

  …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 PAUL MULDOON

  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

  —WARREN ZEVON

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Carl Hiaasen

  My Ride’s Here

  PART 1 PIANO FIGHTER

  ONE Wild Age

  TWO Poor Poor Pitiful Me

  THREE The French Inhaler

  FOUR Frank and Jesse James

  FIVE Werewolves of London

  SIX Backs Turned Looking Down the Path

  SEVEN When Johnny Strikes Up the Band

  EIGHT Mohammed’s Radio

  PART 2 LAWYERS, GUNS AND MONEY

  ONE Tenderness on the Block

  TWO I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead

  THREE Empty-Handed Heart

  FOUR Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School

  FIVE Play It All Night Long

  SIX Detox Mansion

  SEVEN Bed of Coals

  EIGHT Splendid Isolation

  NINE Down in the Mall

  PART 3 MUTINEER

  ONE Searching for a Heart

  TWO Fistful of Rain

  THREE Mr. Bad Example

  FOUR Worrier King

  FIVE Monkey Wash, Donkey Rinse

  SIX The Indifference of Heaven

  SEVEN Mutineer

  EIGHT For My Next Trick I’ll Need a Volunteer

  NINE Life’ll Kill Ya

  TEN Hit Somebody (The Hockey Song)

  PART 4 DON’T LET US GET SICK

  ONE My Shit’s Fucked Up

  TWO My Dirty Life and Times

  THREE Ourselves to Know

  FOUR Don’t Let Us Get Sick

  FIVE Keep Me in Your Heart for a While

  Who’s Who

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Credits and Permissions

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  FOREWORD

  by Carl Hiaasen

  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 “gentleman’s 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 Warren’s spell shouldn’t 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 grin—that dazzling, satanic grin—and 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 she’d offered to clear our drink glasses and perform a table dance, I’d blurted: “You have to go now. You’re 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, I’d 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 it’s ugly and un-flattering to Warren, but he wanted it all told after he was gone.

  “I got to be Jim Morrison,” he’d say, “a lot longer than he did.”

  Warren had been clean and sober for years when we first met in 1991. He’d 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 lyrics—cunning, 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 apart—he in California, me in Florida—we didn’t 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 guide’s 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 Warren’s 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 Warren’s fans, and was a source of bitter frustration for him. His most widely played song, “Werewolves of London,” is a darkly droll ditty that he’d 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. I’d never seen a word of his private journals until Crystal, Warren’s ex-wife, sent me the manuscript of this book. It was eye-opening, to put it mildly. Obviously Warren wasn’t 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. It’s 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. Warren’s 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.

  On that August afternoon in 2002 when he’d received the awful news about his illness, Warren phoned from the doctor’s office. Instantly I knew something was wrong, because Warren avoided all doctors; if he got sick, he’d go see his dentist, Stan Golden.

  This time Stan had sent him straight to a pulmonary specialist. The tests took all day. Diagnosis: a deadly form of lung cancer called mesothelioma.

  “They gave me a glass of water and told me to sit down,” Warren said in a whisper. “I knew it was bad.”

  Shocked, I tried to choke out the question. “How much time—”

  “They don’t know. A few months,” he said. “I’ve gotta call the kids.”

  The next day, we spoke again. It wasn’t an interview—just two friends sadly chatting—but I found myself scribbling notes. I didn’t want to miss a word.

  Warren was keenly aware that, in rock and roll, death is often a career-boosting event. His first order of business was instructing his record label to issue a press release revealing that he was terminally ill. Then he planned to give a few select interviews.

  “This could be a real Steve McQueen fuck story,” he said with a gloomy chuckle. “I’ve been writing this part for myself for thirty years, and I guess I need to play it out.”

  And play it out he did, with glory and tears. Initially the doctors gave him only three months to live, so he hurriedly began writing songs. With the help of his closest friend, Jorge Calderon, Warren was working in the studio by October.

  I flew out on the day Ry Cooder was there, along with a documentary crew from VH1. When the session ended, I went to dinner at Musso & Frank with Warren and his good friend Susan Jaffy. Susan drove because Warren had recently totaled his beloved gray Corvette under hazy circumstances.

  “Would you mind if I had a scotch?” he asked, almost meekly.

  “Not at all,” I said.

  It was the first time in eleven years of friendship that we’d ever had a drink together. He asked for Glenlivet, and confided that the doctors had prescribed potent vials of liquid morphine, which he was saving for the final lap. “I’m not in any pain yet,” he said. “Just tired. Some days it’s hard to breathe.” We talked about the savage irony of the situation—death had starred in so many of his songs, mocking and otherwise.

  “It’s surreal,” he said. “I guess I’m going to be famous.”

  Later Susan drove us to a market that had some exotic brand of cheese Warren favored, then they took me back to the hotel. He and I hugged and said good-bye, and I promised to come back to watch some of the recording sessions. It was the last time I saw him.

  For the next two months he devoted himself to shaping the album and dodging phone calls from acquaintances that he’d long ago scratched off his list of friends. “Everybody wants closure,” he complained.

  When Springsteen flew in from New Jersey to do his now-famous guitar solo for “Disorder in the House,” Warren was blown away. “It was a wonder,” he told me afterward. Another time, he called after being up all night at Billy Bob Thornton’s house, where he’d spontaneously recorded “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” with Billy Bob’s band. The experience had overwhelmed Warren, and he was still high from the session. “Unbelievably intense,” he said.

  We talked often until shortly before Christmas, when he basically taped his windows and holed up inside his apartment. This not-so-splendid isolation went on for weeks. The record was unfinished, but Warren wouldn’t return Jorge’s phone calls, his manager’s, or mine. Even his family was having trouble reaching him.

  All the time he was ordering tankards of scotch from a liquor store that made house calls, while a neighborhood drug store delivered high-octane painkillers that Warren mixed with the booze. Jorge and Brigette Barr, Warren’s manager, came to fear that he was trying to outrace the cancer by drinking himself to death.

  I kept thinking of a remark that Warren had made soon after being told he was going to die: “With my vast knowledge of pharmacopoeia, I can carve out a nice little comfort zone for myself.” And that’s what he had done.

  Finally, in February, he started calling people back. When I heard from him, he said he was very weak. “Could be the medicine. Could be the scotch.” He apologized for the hermit routine. “It’s been hard to talk. I’ve been not so good.”

  There were two songs left to record for the album, and he hoped to rally and finish them. More importantly, he wanted to stay alive through the summer to see the birth of his grandchildren; Ariel was pregnant with twins.

  It was Jordan who eventually talked his way into Warren’s apartment. The scene was heartbreakingly squalid—an obstacle course of scotch bottles and filth. Friends cleaned up the place (and Warren, as well), and that’s where he finished recording The Wind, with Jorge heroically holding him steady.

  Afterward came another period of ominous silence and what Warren later described as a Herculean intake of Percocets and scotch, because “that’s what the Rat Pack drank.” During that stretch he often lost track of time, including the date on which Ariel was scheduled to deliver her babies.

  Then, as the big day drew near, Warren suddenly snapped out of what he called his “low-budget Elvis twilight.” He quit drinking and started reading again. He asked me to send him the manuscript pages of a novel that I was finishing, and he raced through it.

  In June, Max and Gus were born, and Warren got himself to the maternity ward. After holding the twins in his arms, he called me excitedly and said, “They’re perfect!”

  The album was finished, the VH1 documentary had wrapped, and he sounded at peace. He was immensely pleased to have outlasted the doctors’ dire predictions, and insisted that he still was in no pain—at least “nothing to get out the fondue forks about.”

  From then until the end, we stayed in touch. In one of our last conversations, he asked for a fishing report from the Keys. “I find myself thinking more and more of that tarpon breaking the water by that bridge,” he said wistfully. “It’s getting bigger every time.”

  Nothing good or bad that might be said of Warren after this book is published would surprise him; he’d heard it all, because he’d done it all. He was one of the most complex and compelling personalities I’ve ever encountered, a genuine force of nature. His presence was so large and irresistible that his death left a cold crater in the lives of those who loved him. Fortunately, we still have his extraordinary music to whiplash us into laughter, and make us howl on certain blustery nights.

  Any one of a dozen of Warren’s song titles would serve as a fitting epitaph, but I’m partial to the simple farewell printed in stately script on a wallet card that his road manager handed to the fans who’d gathered outside his tour bus on that hot summer night in New Orlea
ns:

  Mr. Zevon has gone with the Great Beaver.

  MY RIDE’S HERE

  Warren Zevon died in his home on September 7, 2003.

  Warren’s close friend and confidante Ryan Rayston was with him at the end. She tells it best:

  I had talked to him the night before, and he was having some trouble breathing but still had an order for Chalet Soup and maybe tapioca pudding. He called me back with the OCD signoff “Nothing’s bad luck, is it?” Asked and answered twice.

  The next morning I stopped at Warren’s about 10:30. When I walked into the kitchen, I could see him in the mirrored closet doors and thought he was dead. He was terribly swollen, and the way his body was placed, well, I had come to see Warren, but Death was already there. I knew he had little time. I sat on his bed and watched his chest. He was breathing. I waited until he woke up. He was confused, didn’t know where he was at first. I snuggled on top of the covers next to him, and I felt time running out.

  I told him I’d be right back. I had to go home for a moment. When I reentered the apartment the TV was blaring and Warren was sitting on the edge of his bed, sweating and shaking. He told me he couldn’t hear.

  “What happened to your head?” I screamed as I looked at a small bump.

  “I think I fell. I can’t hear. I can’t hear, Ry.”

  “Warren?” I asked louder. “Warren?” I took the remote and turned the TV to mute. I got a damp towel for his face and head. I spoke loudly, and he didn’t respond. Then I screamed something at him and he said, “Why are you yelling at me?”

  “Do you want something to eat, honey?”

  “Some soup, maybe, and a Coke.”

  Three Cokes later we found one that was good luck, and I heated up chicken broth. I fed him, as he was very unsteady. His hands were cold. I got under the covers with him, something that he usually didn’t allow. It was one of those things that could be bad luck. But that day, he surrendered to it. He allowed me to rub his hands with lotion and even his feet, and we joked that his toenails were looking like Howard Hughes’. I told him he was having a superb hair day. We talked about his kids, his grandkids. I told him I loved him and that we should have gotten that house together ten years ago. We talked in code, in silence, in a language of OCD that we understood.