WARREN ZEVON: LIFE IN THE MENTAL COMBAT ZONE

“This is a .44 magnum revolver...do I have five or six bullets left...Are you feelin’ lucky tonight, PUNK?” And then the hapless caller to Warren Zevon’s residence is supposed to leave his name, number and a brief message. Well, it’s certainly an effective deterrent to encyclopedia salesmen, I gamely smile at Zevon’s first lieutenant, hulking George Gruel, who has described the Dirty Harry dialogue on Warren’s phone machine. It will be only the first of many reminders that Warren Zevon, dark-humored singer-songwriter-showman, lives his music in technicolor, like some Travis Bickle of rock ’n’ roll.

His arrival backstage at New York’s Palladium Theatre is more appropriate to a Hollywood premiere than the bargain basement sleaze of 14th Street. Zevon, dressed in a designer suit, glides out of a limousine arm in arm with girlfriend, blonde actress Kim Langford (Ginger, on Knot’s Landing.”) Their hair is perfect.

But his show is noti It’s been two years since Zevon toured, and his 90-minute set comes across as a textbook case of smoothtalking pianoman, sweating gonzo gymnast, plaintive balladeer, and even a shock-rock actor who must’ve taken a few tricks from Alice Cooper’s school of excess. His adaptability and eagerrfess to entertain almost, but not quite, compensates for the show’s poor pacing. Guitarist David Landau’s lengthy, convoluted leads are appreciated by some but sniggered at as passe by others. When Zevon sings “Jennie Needs a Shooter,” which he co-wrote with Springsteen, the audience solidly chants, Broooce, Broooce, like a wandering herd of cows. I wonder if he thinks they’re booing.

Several days later, ensconced in a radio studio, Zevon explains, rather than defends his performance. “Well of course it doesn’t strike me as a divided personality. No good schizo would be aware of their other/selves. But essentially, what I’m trying to do is give the audience the feeling that unexpected things are gonna happen, unusual things, that there are going to be a lot of surprises—-and then try and make good on the promise.

“This role playing doesn’t strike me as ideal. I had misgivings about doing ‘Jungle Work’ in costume. Actually, the word ‘camp’ came to 'mind. I was rehearsing it and I thought, this is far too stupid to be categorized as camp. This is just outright silliness, and I’m always in favor of that.

“I feel that an audience deserves to be entertained as much as possible as intently as possible and on as many levels as possible. There are a lot of multi-media things I’d like to do if I was able to. In the meantime, I do feel it’s giving them a little something more than a singer-songwriter sitting at the piano—don’tcha love these lyrics...It’s pretty strenuous, it’s a little taxing, but it strikes me as being very funny . It’s intended to be. The New York Times didn’t think so—oh, never mind. ”

If WarreniZevon ever gave up on music, he’d be a natural news anchorman. Off the record, his voice loses its deceptively innocent boyishness and drops at least an octave. He considers every question with care and thinks through his response. No word is wasted, no thought is idle. And most convincingly, he brings across an in-depth understanding of how to survive demented life in the modern world, born out of his well-documented battle with the bottle.

When he’s gently asked if he knows that his alcoholism is mentioned in his most recent Elektra bio, Zevon states, “I wrote it. You think I’d let the record company do that? It’s my life! My drinking had been publicized a lot. It wasn’t a question of my championing liquor—in fact I was offered an endorsement and lifetime supply of a particular brand of vodka which is not made by our allies, which got me alarmed. Of course I declined.

“At the same time they were calling me F. Scott Fitzevon and I was getting a lot'of glamorous press and I was naive enough to be impressed with that and the persona they were creating out of my behavior. And so I felt committed, since I’d treated that kind of high profile in terms of my personal life, to continue to do so. They ought to know if I was able tp get well. And that it is possible to stop drinking when you’re a chronic alcoholic and be healthy, and be quite happy. In fact, be delighted to have learned that you had a terrible disease and that you don’t have to die from it. So without preaching or getting on a soapbox I think it’s important that people know. You know, some people are just naive enough not to know better than to ^ell the truth, and some people are egomaniacal enough, like Norman Mailer, to feel that their every personal habit is of international significance, and I suppose I fall somewhere in between.”

One immediate result of Zevon’s newlyfound clarity Was his production credit, shared with engineer Greg Ladanyi, on Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School. After assigning production of his first two albums to his best friend and mentor, Jackson Browne, whose prodding had led to Zevon’s being signed, Warren felt confident enough to direct himself. Besides, he deadpans, “when you can walk across a room, it’s easier to consider the idea of larger and more ambitious endeavors. Greg works on the board, I just look at the colored lights and nod, shake my head, gesture, jump up and down.”

Looking across a table at Zevon, springcoiled underneath his expertly-groomed exterior, I wonder why he fits in with that loose-limbed cadre of easy living California heavies. On the other hand, everybody from Ronstadt and the Eagles to Buckingham/Nicks has made guest shots on Zevon’s albums. On the other, Excitable Boy and Dancing School are prominently illustrated with firearms, and Zevon’s lyrics portray a paranoid wit who connects with the cities of grinding gears. Zevon has assuredly heard these questions before and prefers to consider any L. A. “scene” a press invention.

“It gives them a plot line, which is, there’s this group of people who are in each other’s company constantly, so they all make the same kind of records, and that makes a good 25 words or less summation of American popular music. It perpetuates the segregation between East Coast and West Coast music, which is a real defeatist kind of thing in my mind.”

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IU I'm very wary of people who don't say `I must be out of my mind.'

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Zevon feels similarly unapologetic in admiring the way Linda Rortstadt covers his songs, particularly “Poor Poor Pitiful Me.” Unfortunately, 1 have always viewed the lady’s interpretation of said tune and “Carmelita,” among others, as light1 weights, so much froth in the wind when compared to the sardonic tragedy weighing Zevon’s own versions. He remains firm. “I know I stand in deference to Mr. Costello, who, I have every faith and confidence, has donated and is donating all his royalties from her performances to the National Health. I’m sure of it.

“But as for myself, I enjoy them tremendously, because for one thing, she’s criticized for changing some of my lyrics and arrangements. The case with all these songs is that she heard them from Jackson Browne or Glenn Frey or someone before I recorded them. So her versions are much closer to the originals before I started tampering with my own work or improvis-' ing different verses.” Zevon refuses to mention any covers he particularly dislikes, which may be wise since, gun or no gun, he’s a fairly small guy.

Whatever one may think of Zevon’s musical compadres, they did give him a leg up when it was needed, at least until the top 10 single of “Werewolves of London” had every other person Wha-ooing in the streets. For a while, you could get a guaranteed laugh in this town by staring a friend in the face and stating, “his hair was perfect.” Maybe he could consider the line hisv equivaleht classic commeht to “You talkin’ to me?”, which hasn’t done his favorite director, Martin Scbrsese, any harm. || ,

“I don’t know how healthy it is for me to consider the idea of being a culture mover, shaper of common language. It always struck me—and I don’t mean that rock should be literate in a self-conscious way—but the degree of intellectual limitation imposed on it is an insult to the audience. I never understood why popular music was so far behind any other art form in terms of what it could say, what it should say, what it was expected to say, and what it was most emphatically expected not to say. And nobody’s ever attempted to censor my work or suggest that I tone it down.

“We did a lot of soul searching about whether or not to use the imagery of the gun on the plate in the Excitable Boy album, and what, as an artist, I ultimately found myself faced with, was the inevitability that I have to carry out my own ideas. They’re my ideas, they come to me, they entertain me, they scare me, but they’re the ones I know are vplid.

“Guns are just symbolically, to me, a reductio ad absurdum of coping, minute by minute, with the unfortunate fact that my existence is not going to be perpetuated. Like everyone else, I do what I can to live with the information that I, too, pass along. And I think people deal with it in different ways.

“I’ve said that, for instance, a movie like Annie Hall is very much about death, pervaded by-Woody Allen’s gloom and brilliance, of course. Apart from the poignant aspects of the relationship, I find it very pessimistic. I think everyone, in the world gets the lobster joke. And I think he has a bleaker way of dealing than some of the detective novels I enjoy—not to the extent that it’s been blown out of proportion—but who use violence as a device to deal with everything.

“A movie like The Wild Bunch, which makes death look painful, which makes pain look painful, is more compassionate to me, is a warmer picture than Annie Hall. It’s fulla guns and fulla blood and fulla violence, but it’s also about loyalty and friendship and what kind of terms one comes to with oneself in order to face death, mortality, the inevitable.”

Warren Zevon begins his concerts with a spng on Dancing School called “Play It All Night Long.” A real cheery number, it documents death, senility,, physical and mental illness and war, with a chorus that reads, “‘Sweet Home Alabama,’ play that dead band’s song/Turn those speakers up full blast/Play it all night long.” Zevon is quite aware that he’s forcing the audience to immediately confront the apocalypse and maybe, smile about it. “You’re right, it is like saying, let’s face it gang, here we are. I’m very wary of people who don’t say, I can’t get nuthin’together today, I can’t do nuthin’ right, I can’t get organized today, I must be out of my mind. This person is at least in tough-with the realities of the world.”

Zevop’s own plans for at least the next few months are all too realistic—weeks on end touring, little sleep, bad food, and occasional moments, eagerly awaited, when his girlfriend gets a break in her schedule. We leave the studio, he agreesto pose for pictures, gets a little nervous when he, a nice Jewish boy, is tucked in front of a doorway to St. Patrick’s Cathedral-, but then smiles. Inevitability is everywhere. ^