WARREN ZEVON: Buy This Magazine Because Of Him!

Warren Zevon has perfected the art of squirming without perceptible movement. Crumpled on a couch in a windowless record company boxroom, the man with the best name in pop sits by my tape machine like a rich lady’s mongrel told against its better judgement to stay.

“I’ve actually been failing at being an interviewee somewhat,” he says, his voice all apology. ‘‘And I’ve been doing this for a week now.”

Hell, I don’t take it personally. No one said you had to be able to say why you do it and how you do it so long as you do it, and Zevon’s always done it pretty darn well. Anyway, it’s bucketing down outside, London smells like a tramp pissing on a gas station, and if you’ve got to be stuck in a lifeboat with someone, it might as well be someone who’s smart and fatalistic, doesn’t take up much room and who’s very, very dry.

‘‘I was doing a radio show and they kept screaming at me, ‘Dead air! Dead air! What are you doing thinking about the answer? You can’t think\ This is radioV See, I’ve sort of been away from this for a few years and I was beginning to get a kind of human perspective on my conversations. You know, it’s not necessarily polite or appropriate to monopolize them.”

When you knew you had an album coming out, didn’t you go and practice your answers in front of a mirror, Warren, stick a few witticisms in your back pocket for later?

“No,” Zevon shrugs, “I didn’t really rehearse.” He lights another cigarette.

His new album, his “star-studded comeback” (to steal Rolling Stone’s noble phrase), is called Sentimental Hygiene, and is his first in five years. It’s seething with famous people—Bob Dylan, Neil Young, George Clinton, R.E.M., Jennifer Warnes and all sorts—and words, lots and lots of lovely words, set to strident L.A. melodies and that unlikely, likeable deep Russian Boris Godunov voice.

So what is sentimental hygiene, Warren, and why do you need it? And is it just a pragmatic version of sexual healing?

“That’s probably the best explanation I’ve heard yet. I’ve been evading this question, too,” he looks even more apologetic, “because I feel I’ll have undone what little good I do as a songwriter— which is trying to think of interesting phrases and trying, whether deliberately or not, to make a lot of interpretations possible and a lot of meanings available to them, or else just trying to rhyme and finish the song! When people ask me to explain I say, honestly, that I don’t want to explain it to myself.” Bad voodoo for one thing. And for another, “I won’t have the pleasure of hearing all the weird explanations I’ve heard in the past couple of months.”

So, sidestepping to safer ground: what did you do in your five years off, Warren?

“I took some time off. In some ways it was kind of like semi-retirement.”

Why did you semi-retire, Warren?

“I can’t really go so far as to say I was semi-retired because I started performing more then. Before, I would go out and do maybe one tour after a record came out—it would be arranged for me to go out and promote the record—and I’d just come back and start recording another one. By the time I finished The Envoy, I’d sort of been in the studio for eight years.

“I would start a record more or less as soon as I’d finished the one previous to it, and they took longer, cost more and more, and actually did sort of less and less well. Particularly The Envoy. I was a little discouraged after that, so I took some time off.”

The five years were spent moving to Philadelphia, watching TV a lot and listening to classical music, playing live when he felt like it—“not because I had to promote an album, but at this point out of necessity, financial and emotional necessity”—writing songs when he felt like it, and teaming up in Athens, Georgia with R.E.M.

“Andy Slater, my manager and co-producer, introduced us and I started playing with them. I had liked them quite a bit anyway before I met them, and they knew my stuff, too. So I got along with them quite well. Our paths would cross when I was doing the solo tours and they would get up onstage with me. And much as I enjoyed playing solo for a lot of other reasons, it always made me a little wistful because it reminded me of what it was like to be in a rock band. So working with them was kind of a logical projection.”

Together they recorded a bunch of demos, currently sitting on a shelf in the studio with Monkey Wash, Donkey Rinse written on the side of the tape box. “That’s sort of the name of the band and/or the album. We consider it an album.” Will it ever be released as one? "I don’t know. If people were to insist that it wasn’t fair of us not to put them out, you know, my arm could be twisted.” There’s 11 songs in all, covers of their personal favorites: ‘‘Travelling Riverside Blues,” “Vigilante Man,” “Mannish Boy” (“We had to do that!”), “Mother-In-Law,” “Rasberry Beret” (“Quite a nice version, I’d say”) “Tennessee Stud” (“We have a fairly unique version of that!") and “a lot of blues songs."

“So in the process of getting more excited about that,” says Zevon, “I kind of got back into writing. It was less writing songs because you were making a record: you know, the guys are going to be down there to play it next Tuesday kind of thing. I just wrote songs when I felt like writing songs, when there was something interesting to write about.”

During the same time, he moved from L.A.—where he’s spent most of his life— to Philadelphia.

Why did you move to Philadelphia, Warren?

"I have to resist the impulse to dramatize that. I went to Philadelphia because of a relationship with this girl who was in Philadelphia, so it was really not so much philosophical reasons—to a certain extent, since I wasn’t involved in making records, I wanted to try something different. I always wondered what it would be like to live on the East Coast, although if you ask someone from New York if they think Philadelphia is the east they might not agree!”

What about the L.A. mafia? Are you ever allowed to leave it?

“Does it exist? It never seemed like it to me. I’m not so naive that I don’t know how it was perceived, but I must say I grew up there and also—maybe I believe this because I was so insulated there—it seems to me like 75 percent of the music in America is pretty much concentrated on the West Coast. But that may be just because I lived there and don’t know so many New York musicians. Just being there and being around those people you’re talking about and working with some of them and having different friends —it never really seemed like a scene.”

So it was never, “Hey, let’s grab a few cans and pop over to Jackson’s house for a jam session? Or is it Ronstadt’s turn tonight?”

“Well, if it ever was that way, it was never someone saying like: ‘Let’s convene the West Coast musical cabal!’ It was just, ‘Let’s go jam at someone’s house.* ”

The Rolling Stone Record Guide described Zevon as “one of the toughest rockers to ever come out of Southern California”; others have called him “Chandleresque.” I always pictured him standing in the shadow of the jacuzzi, never quite squeaky clean enough to be allowed right into the tub; that he was somehow commentating on this L.A. scene as much as being part of it.

“It’s been awhile; I have to think what songs, if any, kind of reflect that.” A few minutes pause. “No, I never felt I was commentating on it.”

Would you describe your attitude to life as one of bemusement, Warren?

“Yes, I think that would be a fair assessment.”

Was he bemused or resentful when Linda Ronstadt was making money with his songs while he was living, a penniless singer, in Spain “because it was cheap”?

“Well, I started out as a song writer. When I tried to get employment they’d say, ‘We’ll give you this if you sit in this room and write us songs.’ It was like, ‘Please don’t sing, thank you!’ But I wasn’t very good at this job because it came to where I wanted to sing it myself and I didn’t really want to give anything away much.

“But, no, I was delighted when Linda sang the songs.”

Did you like her versions?

“I know there are people who don’t like to be covered by anyone, but I’ve never really understood that. I like the Hank Williams Jr. version of my song and I love Linda’s versions. People used to criticize her for changing lyrics, but they didn’t know that she was actually singing the lyrics the way they were originally written, how she heard them in the years before I recorded them. So her versions are actually more correct! I can’t imagine resenting someone singing one of my songs.”

Before Ronstadt covered “Hasten Down The Wind” in ’76 and two more Zevon songs a year later, and Jackson Browne persuaded him to record his Warren Zevon LP, he’d been making money writing jingles (Gallo wine, a catsup commercial, a car commercial; not much you can do with catsup, I guess, but cars are quite rock ’n’ roll. “Yes, the car commercial was fun; it didn’t take a big leap in imagination to try and make a rock song out of it. But the advertising business is scary.”) and touring with the Everly Brothers as their piano player and bandleader. Bandleader? “A pretty idea, but all it really involved doing was hiring a great guitarist, Waddy Wachtel, and letting him do all the work. That was my contribution to the Everly Brothers—but it was a sizeable one!”

What are your greatest memories of that period, Warren?

“It was the first time I’d ever been on the road, so I have millions of them. The greatest memories were playing in hotel rooms—on occasion they would both wander into the room and sing together. There were times their father was on the road with us—and he was a great musician too—and he played an amazing country blues guitar, like a combination of Chet Atkins and Keith Richards, and we’d all jam, me and Waddy and the Everlys singing...

“And it was the first time I came to England. We’d played an oyster bar in South Carolina the week before and suddenly we’re playing the Albert Hall.”

Was this the visit to London where you discovered Chinatown and Lee Ho Fooks?

“No. Waddy heard about it. That was his line. I’m afraid I had nothing to do with that.”

In 1978, “Werewolves Of London” was a Top 10 hit, a massive edifice of a pop song, positively baroque in its hooks and lyrics. Initial hook: werewolf, ornamental trill, in London, minaret, Chinese restaurant, Persian-bleeding-rugs hanging out of the windows and the werewolves in London at the Chinese restaurant going a-oo. It’s a song that carries within it its own analysis of pop genius; you can almost hear his sticky brain prodding him: “A lesser composer would come up with this dusty knick-knack of a word so you’d better think up something else.” In this sense Zevon is closer to Chuck Berry than to Jackson Browne. So did you realize you were writing a masterpiece with “Werewolves” Warren?

“No. I can’t honestly say I did.”

Couldn’t you lie?

“Well, it might take some of the fun out of things, but I suppose I would like to be completely honest with myself all the time.”

An honest answer: what do you think of the scene in The Color Of Money where Tom Cruise does that embarrassingly slimy kung-fu dance in the pool hall to “Werewolves Of London” and, miraculously, no one gives him a pool-cue suppository?

“I loved it.” You did? “I couldn’t help but love it!”

He does agree his songs are cinematic; he often sees them visually. I was surprised, then, that he lets someone else come up with the visual ideas for videos. He asks me what I think of them. I tell him I’ve only seen the one for "Sentimental Hygiene” and the black-and-white cardriving bit reminded me of “Take These Broken Wings.” He looks horrified and promises to tell the director. I try and make amends by saying how much I like the folded ear at the beginning. And then that bugbear of interview-situations, conversation, starts to creep in again, and we’re talking about the Tate Gallery— he’s just been there—and Francis Bacon, whose paintings he loves, and classical music, which he loves even more. He once met Stravinsky while still at junior high. His favorite Stravinsky stuff is “from a piece called Agon on.” Only the most cerebral academic assembly of notes the guy’s ever written! Zevon protests, saying he likes it because “it makes you feel good,” which I guess makes him more academic than the academicians. I make a mental note to ask him how he ever survived L.A. with a brain—sure, L.A. is Paradise, but in Paradise it helps if you’re dead. But forget it. He wouldn’t have said anything nasty anyway.

I did remember to ask him about the booze. His whole career went haywire after “Werewolves” and a bout with alcoholism.

“I’m sorry, but that’s another question I don’t like to answer.” Do you have an official this-is-all-l’ve-got-to-say-about-thebottle statement to shut the likes of me up, then?

“Well, you know at one point I said a whole lot about it. I really held forth on the subject. Then I found myself wondering to what extent I was trying to save the world and to what extent I was being a little self-aggrandizing, too. Sobriety is ultimately a personal issue. I got help, I got help from my friends and a lot of other different kinds of help, and I don’t want to say people should handle it the way I do. That’s pretty much it.”

And it is. There are some radio stations he’s got to call and they don’t like to be kept waiting for their dead air. It’s still raining when I leave. The weatherman says it might go above freezing this summer if we all hold hands and go om. Waiting in the rain for the bus around the corner from the record company, I notice a new Chinese restaurant. It’s called Lee Ho Fooks. Check if you don’t believe me.