Crystal Zevon

I woke up early, getting ready to leave beautiful Sedona.  But, I thought I should try to get back on track here so how about a little more of what you come here for… some of the Michael Ironside interview that got cut from the book…

MICHAEL IRONSIDES
October 2005
Los Angeles

MI:  Warren and I had a bullet-to-the-bone way of communicating.  It was almost elemental like in science classes with all those elements on the wall, there should be one there for conversations between people that get each other.  I think that was the way it was with us.  At least, I got Warren, and he seemed to get me.

The first time I ever heard Warren Zevon, or became aware of what a Warren Zevon song was, I was completely whacked out of my brain.  I was in that kind of pie wedge between low self-esteem and suicide somewhere in Toronto early in the 70’s.  I was having an affair with this very wealthy woman who had a loft.  Her husband was somewhere in Europe and this was her dive into the arts community.  I was teaching at the art college and writing at night, and I was out of my mind, couldn’t even stand.  I was standing in this kitchenette at this lofty loft party.  I remember everyone was in high heels cuz I was on the floor.  I’m wondering why they’re wearing heels.  And, this woman had just gotten back from New York, and I heard her say, in this manner where you can actually hear the money in her voice, “I brought this back from New York.  You have to hear it.  It’s fabulous.”  On came the album “Excitable Boy”.  When it got to “Lawyers, Guns and Money”, it had such an impact on me, it nudged me a little closer to suicide.  I felt like I had blown my shot, and here was a guy who hadn’t.  I’m thinking there’s that guy, and he’s really doing it, and I’ll never be one of those guys who can click that quickly with somebody… to be able to be that present in a medium.  Whatever anybody thinks about Warren’s music, there was a presence to it that is simply undeniable.  “The shit has hit the fan” is what happens when his music comes on.

Cut forward to 1986 or 85.  Warren and I had met through mutual friends.  Both of us weren’t using or drinking anymore.  We’re joking about seizures and shit and past scores… like they say only people like us can joke and find humor about the past tragedies and darkness the way people who survived a car wreck or boat wreck together can communicate.  And, Warren’s saying, “I don’t know if I can tour anymore.  I don’t know if I can physically do it sober.”  And, I think, he and Doc (Dr. Babyhead, Duncan Aldrich) went on the road and they did some outlandish 200 one-night stands in a year… some kind of joyous, self-abusive endeavor.  He called me from the road and said, “Look, I’m going to be in San Diego at this place.  Just me and Doc.  I’m having a ball, and I think I can do this.  Why don’t you come down?”  So, I went down with my wife, Karen, and we’re sitting up in the dark and it’s a joy to watch him perform.  I’d never seen Warren perform, and it’s just him on stage with his guitar and piano, and he’d just done “Summertime Blues”, hoofing the shit out of the stage, and he cut right to “Lawyers, Guns and Money” and I flashed back to that moment in the early 70’s being completely self-destructive and despairing on the floor, and I got that kind of vertigo you get from having the gift of a moment of clarity twice over the same person.  I actually felt motion sickness.  Here I was having a joyous moment of survival, watching a dear friend, and went back to that moment of complete despair, and I burst into tears.  I really got it that night, what cry for happy, that Japanese phrase, meant.  I remember Karen asking if I was okay, and I said, “I’m crying for happy.”  She looked at me like, “You’re weird.”

After the show, Warren’s asking, “How was it?”  We’re in this little dressing trailer pop-up behind the bar.  We’re standing in the dark with the garbage and the gravel behind the club, and we were laughing and crying our asses off.  A true celebration of the spirit.  That disclosure allowed Warren and I to develop this relationship where we had permission to ask each other stupid kinds of questions without feeling stupid.

One night, he said he’d seen “JoJo Dancer”.  He said, “My God, you’re so intense in that movie.”  There’s a scene where I’m playing this Chicago detective and I’m going to go in and save Pryor’s ass, and I come through the door and these mobsters come through the door in a very powerful way and I scoop him  out of the way and get him on a bus.  It’s actually in Lansing, I think.  Warren says to me, “Can I ask you a dumb question?”  I said, “Sure.”  He said, “What were you thinking when you came through that door? I mean, you came in with a kind of honesty and presence, so what were you thinking at that moment?”  I literally, absolutely did remember what I was thinking.  It was one of those rare things.  I had this Fedora, this Borsalino, on and I had this thing with hats.  I always thought wearing a hat knocked my IQ down 30-40%, and I said, “I remember exactly what I was thinking.  I thought, I hope I look good in this hat.”  And, Warren burst out laughing, walking around in circles laughing, hysterical.  And, I said, “What?  What’s so funny?”  He said, “That’s exactly how I feel when people ask me what those lyrics mean.”  He said, “You know, when I write something, I’m thinking, I wonder what  I look like wearing this hat.”  And, we went, “Wow, yeah.  It’s not real but it’s real.  It’s not reality, it’s artificial, but at the same time it means a lot to you.”  What a funny guy.

He called my dad “The Originator”.  My dad’s a very basic man, well read.  And he and Warren would talk, both retrograde type people.  I’m sure they ended up in the same place, wherever that is… or maybe they’re already back.  But, one time, they were talking and talking and talking, and I wander by and say, “What’re you guys talking about?”  And, Warren says, “We’re talking about stuff.”  I said, “Oh, really?”  He said, “Yeah, your dad’s really something.  He’s like The Originator, isn’t he?” The Terminator was out at that time, and so there was The Terminator and The Originator.  I got a picture of him and my dad and Big Ray in a hot tub somewhere.  It was like Stone Soup, you know?

Warren called me up one day and he was doing that kind of overly produced, very electronic album.  There was one song about pollutants and chemicals and stuff.  It was “Transverse City” album.  Anyway, I went into the studio one night and just read the list of chemicals in the background when they were mixing it.  I only listened to the album once, and I just didn’t get it.  I thought it was very over produced, and it’s a lot like a film where it gets so overproduced that what it’s about gets lost.  So much layering of technology and tricks that the actual one-on-one of the performance or personality or story gets lost.   That’s just my opinion, but I thought since I had such an organic relationship with Warren, we could call each other up and piss in each other’s ears, tell the truth to each other… so, he said to me, “What’d you think of the album?”  And, I said, “Oh, yeah, it’s not my taste.  It kind of left me a-back after I heard it.”  He said, “What do you mean?”  And, I said, “I felt like I got pushed away from your music, rather than pulled in.”  He said, “Really?!”  I said, “Maybe it’s the nature of my relationship with you.  Maybe it’s the organic joy I experienced with you that time in San Diego, and the way it feels when it’s just you on stage.  I wanted some of that.  I wanted some of the Troubador.”  And, I thought it was safe to say all this, but he just went, “Really.”  And, he didn’t really say anything, just kind of went away.  But, after that, he didn’t return my phone calls for over a year.  Then, I was going down Crescent Heights one day and traffic was bad, and there was this guy trying to pull out into the traffic, so I waved him in.  He turned around to say, “Thank you” and it was Warren.  He looked like he’d been shot in the ass because he saw it was me and you could hear that “Aw, fuck.”  But, he waved me over onto a side street and we pulled over and he says, “I owe you an amends.”  I said, “What for?”  He says, “I haven’t call you.  My feelings got hurt.  I didn’t know how to take that talk about my album, and my feelings got hurt.”  I said, “I’m sorry you took it that way.”  He said, “Yeah, well, you may have been right.”  And, it got us back together.  I sat there and thought, wow, a year and a half resentment that might have just gone on if the universe hadn’t brought us back together.  In some ways, I’m still feeling apologetic for hurting his feelings.  It’s interesting, because there was absolutely no need for approval on either of our parts, but it changed our communication.  I still don’t know whether it’s my fault or whether it’s part of Warren’s creativity, the way he synthesized the world, his sensitivity… I do know it’s all part of what came out of him and what he gave us all.

Warren was very proud, proud of his life.  I like that.  There’s that Nelson Mandela thing where he says, “We’re not afraid of our darkness.  What we’re afraid of is our lightness.” Our job isn’t to turn our bulb down to make the person next to us more comfortable.  Our job is to turn our bulb up and give the next person permission to do the same.  Warren did that.  In his case, I never got the sense that he was bragging as much as he was trying to document the way events happened in his life to give other people permission to do the same.  Why should you be ashamed…

I remember him and my dad looking at some plant in the garden.  A stupid plant the dog pissed on, and they were studying it, and discussing it.  I remember saying to Big Ray, “What do you think they’re talking about, staring at that urine stained plant?”  Ray said, “I don’t know, but I want no part of it.”

When I heard Warren died, I was on location somewhere.  I was in a car and it was raining, and the radio was on.  It was one of those things where they’re saying, “So and so turned 41 today, and so and so got married, and Excitable Boy, Werewolf of London, Warren Zevon passed away from whatever…”   I remember not feeling isolated from the information.  I didn’t feel alone.  I thought, oh.  Sometimes, feeling nothing can be profound, but it was kind of like I was waiting for Warren to give me a one-liner assessment of what happened when he passed with his album.  It didn’t happen until I sent a bunch of songs to my sister who was having a rough time up in Canada.  I threw a bunch of old songs on like Eric Anderson, Ella Fitzgerald and things from our childhood… because music for me is emotional continuity.  And, I threw on “Keep Me In Your Heart” off “The Wind”.  The email I got back from my sister was “As close as the buttons on your blouse.”  And, I just broke down and started crying.  That song was the coda for me.

Filed by Crystal at 8:12 am under Uncategorized, Book interview
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My friend, Tony Campos, in Barre, Vermont taped this from my reading there on May 3rd.  He just let me know he’d posted it on You Tube… so for anyone who can’t make it to a reading, this is really one of my favorite passages from the book.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qo1jl_eNq0 

Filed by Crystal at 7:42 am under Book, Book interview
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Howdy,

I’ve been doing a lot of interviews the past few days with a lot more to come.  A couple days ago I talked for about an hour and half to Chris Kocher from Gannett Wire Service (no idea when that will go out) and yesterday did a long interview with Brent Hollenbeck of the Burlington Free Press for a feature in the Arts & Entertainment which will come out Sunday, April 29th.  After the interview with Brent, we went over to the Free Press offices so the photographer could take photos… of me.  Talking I love, but oh my God, I hate photos of me… although the friend who was with me had some good advice… “just wait two years to look at them, then you’ll think they’re great.”  Anyway, I think Brent is going to do a follow up interview with Ariel (who was too busy with LACE to do this one with me), so (photo aside) it should be a good story.

Other news:  My dear lifelong friend, Jeff McFadden, is trying to rework this website.  Ben got it up and running, but he now spends his days with a hammer and saw down at LACE, so Jeff has volunteered to give it a go.  Hopefully, we’ll come up with a new and improved look, maybe iron out the glitches about getting passwords and get some additional photos and goodies up for your viewing pleasure.

It is a sunny beautiful day here in Vermont and I would like to be hiking up to the sugar shack with my family, but I’ll be hunkered down with the book trying to figure out what to do at these readings coming up!

More soon…

Filed by Crystal at 6:45 am under Book interview
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Here’s a bit more from Duncan (Dr. Babyhead)… some of this comes from phone interviews, some from follow up emails… The rest is pretty much in the book.  cz

We did a gig in Chattanooga and we had our motor home, and after the gig we’re ready to pull out and these guys come up ask us if we want to go shoot some guns with the Chattanooga SWAT Team.  Warren’s like, “Well, sure.”  So, they took us out to their range and opened up this trunk and there was this cache of weapons there like I’ve never seen.  There’s a great photo of all those Chattanooga SWAT guys and Warren and myself all holding guns, smiling, on that range.  It was pretty amazing… like, “Here’s a Thompson machine gun.”  “Wow.  That’s loud.”  An AK47… all these guns and I’m pinging these target posts in the dark and they’re telling Warren, “Yeah, you hired the right guy.”  Warren got all excited.

He had that same Corvette until he died.  It was a lease, but he finally owned it.  The accountants drove me crazy.  I don’t know what they were thinking.

One time, in Cincinnati, he sees some Carrie Fischer look alike out in the audience…. He said, “Go tell her…”  One of the first things I told Warren when I gave him the lecture that he could be working in a factory, I told him there’s two things I don’t do.  I don’t score drugs and I don’t pimp.  So, I didn’t except one time.  I did invite the Carrie Fischer look alike back to meet him.  The fact that he could get me to go against my motto would become the game.  It didn’t have to work anyway, because most of the time if something was needed, it was there.  But, there were a lot of women.  There were a few main ones, but in between, there were many.  I didn’t keep track of that stuff much, other than if it was somebody I knew, I was glad to see them and glad to see things were still working out, because they tended not to.

He loved his kids.  He would always call them.  Ariel would always come to the shows with her friends when she was going to Marlboro [College].  He dug that.  Especially when he cut his hair and he wanted to see if Ariel thought it was cool…

Warren and I had a very similar sense of humor, that’s for sure.  And very similar perceptions on people as personality reads.  We seemed to be very in line, although he would maybe take it out on someone some way where I wouldn’t want to bother.
I had what Warren called the sensible hot line.  He’d call me for advice because I tended to look at things simply.  I didn’t complicate things.

We [Warren and I] had a lot of similarities.  He liked Glen Gould and Beethoven and that was very much on my line.  We had a sort of ascetic sameness, and I could keep myself out of it if I had to.  The last tour we did was just before he was going to turn 50, in ’96.  He had psoriasis and he was miserable, and miserable to work for.  I ended up giving him a book, The Tao, and that was the way we kind of ended it.  That was pretty much all I could do.
He wrote me an email after I found out he was sick, and I wrote him.  He wrote me that he made it very rough on me, but I made it very fun for him, because of my tolerance or whatever.

Filed by Crystal at 6:12 am under Uncategorized, Book, Book interview
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I did 87 interviews for the book. Some of them got cut entirely, but a majority of the interviews appear - albeit vastly reduced from their original versions. In the end, I think what remains in the book gives a fair representation of what was discussed/revealed in the interviews, so I want to be clear that, hard as it was to let go of some of the finer details, I’m pretty happy with what is in the book. From the publisher and reader’s point of view, I understand that we couldn’t come out with a 700 page book (which is what it was when I wrote ‘the end’ the first time!), but I do want to give anyone interested an opportunity to read some of the interviews and some of my narrative without cuts and edits. I don’t necessarily think it will change the story, but it might add some texture, and it will certainly add content.

It was an amazing process through which I learned a lot and made many new friends. I have to say that probably my favorite interviews were with the guys who traveled with Warren on the road or worked with him day-to-day in his home recording studio. Thinking about what I will choose to read on the upcoming tour, I look at the celebrity interviews and say to myself ‘That’s what people will want to hear’, but I keep flipping pages back to the interviews with Duncan Aldrich, Stuart Ross, Eric Deterding, Noah Snyder… these were the people who knew Warren like no one else.

Here’s a bit from my interview with Dr. Babyhead (Duncan Aldrich). cz

DA: A guy named Ron Moss used to travel on the road with Warren before me, and I knew him from working with Chic Corea. Ron had the gig for a few years and passed it on to me. This was in 1985. The job was to go on the road. It had been awhile since Warren had done any records, and it was maybe a year and a half after I started with Warren that he did “Sentimental Hygiene”. So, I met with Andy Slater and he offered me low money and I said, “Forget it”. He called me back, desperate at this time, and I agreed to take it on. I kept saying to Slater that I should really meet Warren before I went out on a six-week tour that was to be just the two of us. He’d say, “Not important, not important, not important.” I didn’t know that Warren was in rehab and got out roughly before he got on the plane to fly back to the East coast on tour. I never saw him drink, but he was looking for doctor’s permission to take Valium or any kind of pain killer. It was like, “Oh, my back hurts, I need a doctor.” But, it was really not that much of an issue. He had some sports medication.

I had never met him. We sat on a plane and talked for five hours and I found him to be a very interesting and witty guy. We went out to do the first gig in Rochester, and he’s trying to work me into some frenzy, complaining about this and that. I just figured I didn’t really need to do this if it was going to be like that. So, I lectured him, “As far as I’m concerned, you’re among the luckiest people in the world to be doing this kind of work. It’s what everybody else in the world envies. You could be working in a factory.” From that point on, I guess he took on a respect for me that I guess I’d had to earn through that little exchange. That went on for years and years. I worked for Warren on and off for the next 12 years.

We started the first tour and it was apparent that this guy wasn’t easy. He wasn’t a low maintenance kind of guy. I’ve done a lot of touring and a quintet was easier to manage on the road than Warren was. Like, he had to have his burgers every two hours. The hotel was never good enough. The usual kind of road stuff, just more consistently and more adamantly.

The Obsessive Compulsive stuff didn’t set in to my perception for awhile. I didn’t really know what that was, but I kind of learned. The 10,000 hand washing trips a day. Not stepping on the lines in the sidewalk. I’d kind of go, “Why are you doing this?” I told him he should piss on his hands and cure himself. I was a normie. It’s hard to get, and I got to the point where I wasn’t going to worry about it any more. I didn’t buy into his stuff. The first day of work with Warren, he started to get petulant and I just said, “Why are you doing this? This is bullshit.” That kind of changed the whole path. A little light went on in his head, ‘oh yeah, I could be working in the factory.’ He got on the road and I discovered, it was an excuse to get something…. ‘I’m out here doing this and I can get that. I get served this, or treated to that.’ He would get to the point where I wasn’t taking shit seriously, and he would want more action, so I would do something like “Okay, we’ve got to get there.” And, I’d drive on the sidewalk. That would give him a thrill. Instead of taking the way someone said, well, we’ll just go this way. It was a game. It had a sense of importance, but also a sense of being contrived. He felt like everybody was trying to take something away from him.

The way my mind works, if you bring something up I know… otherwise…

The first girlfriend I remember was Merle Ginsberg. That was within the first year I was working with Warren. She went around with us in the car a little bit. I liked her. I thought she was good for him. I didn’t make it my business to know the sordid details of his affairs. We traveled in a Lincoln Town Car then. I did all the driving. He’d want to stop at the Mall. Any time we passed a Mall, he had to stop and buy socks and underwear. Half the stuff he’d buy, he’d toss off as bad luck pieces. That was a bit disturbing to me. I’d bring it up, but it didn’t matter what I asked, there was no logical reason for it. Whatever that condition manifest, that was one of the things with Warren.

We played every rock den up and down the East coast. From Florida to New York, New Jersey, Boston… that was the circuit we traveled mostly. We’d travel and play every day. The venues were usually pretty full. Warren always had a good core of fans. The strongest places were always Chicago and Boston for some reason.

I met Roy Marinell a couple times in Chicago. He sat at the piano bench and sang “Werewolves of London” with Warren at the Park West. Then, he got mad at Roy for some reason, but I never knew what happened.

The first record I worked on was “Sentimental Hygiene” which was the first thing he did since he hit bottom. I worked on “Transverse City”.

Filed by Crystal at 5:41 am under Book interview
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I have been asked several times lately if I intend to publish or make available the edited out parts of the book in some sort of chronological or logical order. Indeed, I do hope and plan to do that. I am not sure exactly what form it will take, and it is a major job because there are two or three hundred pages of narrative mixed in with longer interviews… so I’ll have to do a complete review and figure out how to put together a version that won’t be too repetitive.

For now, here’s more of the interview with Howard… I left out a little of it which will appear in the book, but for the most part it’s complete. Note: In the beginning, he’s talking about the fact that The Turtles decided to give WZ the “B” side to “Happy Together” even though they’d already used the same song on a single that flopped, and their manager wanted them to put a song of their own on so that they could make the money… cz

HOWARD KAYLAN: I’m not a philanthropist. I don’t really believe in giving money away. I really to this day cannot explain the group emotion that took over except to say that back in those days that we were really living Woodstock emotionally. That sharing and making sure your brothers were taken care of on down the line didn’t seem that bizarre to us. It wasn’t really about being materialistic. It was really about making promises and about seeing your friends reach the same strata that you reached, or taking them along with you, or enjoying the ride together. I don’t even know what it was. But, I do know that I’ve never experienced anything like that since, or before. I’ve never volunteered to give my money to anybody because I liked them. And I never spent that much time just free-style hanging out with somebody, just for the sheer fun of it for no reason at all. Because I had nothing to gain by my relationship with Warren, nor did he. And we just partied and hung out. We would come home at 5:30 every night from Pioneer Chicken and we would drink more wine and we would smoke more weed and the evening would wind down and we usually would wind up like at Griffith Park Observatory or something as the sun set, and we weren’t alone. There were a million freaks that were hanging out back then watching the sunset, too. So, I don’t know there was a communal feeling that hasn’t really come around since. And I know that listening to Warren’s later stuff, and certainly, his solo stuff, that he, too, seemed to lose touch with that communal feeling. I mean, when it all got around to “Lawyers, Guns and Money”, we were older. But, at the time that I experienced my Wonder Years with Warren, it seemed to me like, you know, we both had everything going for us, that the world was literally at our feet, and that we were going to conquer no matter what. And do it having the most fun and being as high and as loopy and being as happy and communal as we possibly could. I know that was a very short span of time in the lifespan of this culture, and certainly for the life of the planet, but I’ll tell you something that I told Warren many, many years ago. This is 1967. This is after “Happy Together” came out and we were both tripping. We were on acid. We were in what passed for his backyard, but I believe it was like this courtyard that was shared communally by the people in his apartment building, and literally, I was outside with him in that backyard area and we were both of us hugging trees. And I don’t mean metaphorically. Literally hugging trees and tearing. Tears were coming down my face and I said to him, although he very easily could have said the very same thing to me, “We’re so damned lucky, man. Look WHEN we exist. Not just THAT we exist, but look at the time frame we’re existing within.” I mean, this is the time that The Beatles were singing about ‘turning off your mind and floating down stream’ and we were there. And we were doing it. And just the doing of it was enough to make us cry. Well, looking back on it now, of course, we were just a bunch of hippie stoners, but the connection we had to the planet and to the music, to nature and to each other for those brief months or years out of time, did very much influence and mold my life. So, I’m not exaggerating at all when I speak about how large a part Warren played in my growth. I’m eternally grateful to him and I think he knows it.

I loved him dearly. Last year, I went into L.A. to do a little solo record project that I haven’t done anything with since, but I just needed to get some music off my chest, some songs that I’ve always wanted to sing and never had the chance to, and that Mark and I are never going to do, and the Turtles are never going to do. So, I just kind of put my own money together and went into the studio and did this record. I wound up taking in to Billy Bob Thornton’s through a friend, and met Billy. It was during the time that Warren was completing his record there. The vibe was very, very strange and I did not see Warren during the recording of my record or his, although I know I was missing him by a day or an hour at that point, and it probably wouldn’t have been wisest thing to try to get together during those months anyway, but the connection was still very much there. And late at night, after we were done working on my stuff, Billy would come downstairs and we would talk for hours about cabbages and kings and very often about Warren. So, I know how present he was for Billy, certainly during the last five, seven… I don’t know how long they knew each other. He’s not an easy guy to reach, but he loved Warren so much that I don’t think you’re going to have hard time finding Billy.

It’s amazing truly that Warren touched so many lives. I mean for a guy that prided himself on being an isolationist and a hermit, he wasn’t. He really, really wasn’t. I know people that don’t consider themselves hermits that don’t have half of the friends that Warren did. That they couldn’t get anybody to speak for them posthumously about how they effected their lives. And yet, you see this so-called isolated man, and he was beloved. And, he is.

I thank you, Crystal, just for the chance to remember.

Filed by Crystal at 7:23 pm under Book, Book interview
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I apologize to anyone reading this (I know at least one or two people are checking in here!) for being so haphazard in my posts. Between the job of demolition associated with renovating an old department store into a market, cafe, community kitchen, etc., promoting the Jackson Browne concert, keeping twin 3 1/2 year old boys entertained and trying to put together a book tour… I’m not keeping up very well. I was going to the gym to maintain my sanity, but yesterday I threw my back out. Anyway, here’s the next chunk of the Howard Kaylan interview…. cz

HOWARD KAYLAN: But, this will show you how absolutely stupid we were as a band, and how loyalty and smarts don’t necessarily go hand in hand. We were disappointed that “Can I Get to Know You” wasn’t a hit, not only for ourselves, but because we had become so friendly with Warren that instead of putting one of our own compositions on the B-side, we had put Warren’s “Like the Seasons” on the B-side. For which he thanked us profusely. Any few dollars he could make was appreciated back then because he was starving and we were trying to help him. Okay, that was acknowledged. But, when “Can I Get to Know You Better” wasn’t a hit and we had to come up with something very, very quickly, we couldn’t. White Whale stalled and we kept looking for the right piece of material. We eventually found, in a pile of demo records, a song that had been passed over by every single group and person that had heard it. We found this scratchy, awful demo from a publishing company in NY of these two guys, one playing guitar and one slapping his legs in rhythm, singing a falsetto version of this song called “Happy Together” which had no band on it, no feel, no bass line, no drums, no nothing. Just these two guys and an acoustic guitar and screeching like dogs and hitting their legs for rhythm. So, it took an awful lot of imagination to even understand what these clowns were trying to do, but when we figured out that “Happy Together” was going to work for us and we literally took it out on the road and worked it, and perfected it, and arranged it… it took us eight months to do that with Chip Douglas our bass player and Johnny Barbeda and the band as it was at the time… when we went into the studio with “Happy Together” at the beginning of 1967, we absolutely knew the night we recorded it it was going to be a #1 record. There was doubt in anybody’s mind. And when the owners of the record company came up to us and said, “You guys, this is going to be a #1 record, think carefully. Think about what you want to put on the B-side of this record because it’s all gravy money. It’s all going to be coming in to you.” …. we wanted him [Warren] to share our good fortune. So, “Happy Together” wound up with Warren’s song, “Like the Seasons” as the B-side internationally, and of course, it sold millions and millions and millions of records.

As Warren’s career as a singer and a songwriter began to take off later in that decade and certainly into the 70’s, I saw less and less of him as he was sort of pulled into another entire world. We wound up only being Turtles for maybe another year and a half after that before suing Lee and Ted and White Whale Records for an unbelievable job of thievery. No secret – we went the Harry Fox Agency in to do an accounting of six months worth of books I 1969 and they came back with 2.7 million dollars that they couldn’t account for. So we sued them for a great deal of money. The lawsuit dragged on for years. Mark and I were not allowed to use the name Turtles, nor the names Mark and Howard, because they owned us individually as well as collectively. So, when we joined Frank Zappa’s band several weeks after the Turtles broke up – and he really did save our lives – we took the names Flo and Eddie based on the nicknames of two former Turtle roadies. Frank needed other names to use and we needed aliases. So we were not the Turtles anymore. Took us a great deal of time to recover. By the time we finally won back the name Turtles and the masters and the right to put those songs out again, to lease them to other companies, the year had already come around to 1983. Mark and I had been writing scripts and screenplays and working with George Carlin and Lily Tomlin and Rockover BC and doing TV stuff. Screenplays and scripts. We had done all the music for Strawberry Shortcake and the Care Bears. We had gone on radio and done many years of syndicated radio, and we were just looking for anything to do BUT the road, because there was no money in being Flo and Eddie on the road. So, when we got everything back in 1983, we were able to use the Turtles name again and we resurrected our touring career to the point now where we’re doing much better than we ever did in the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s or 90’s. It’s a wonderful resurgence of taste, I feel and the generations are seeing us, and they’re seeing us as we were then, as closely as we can approximate it. And they’re listening to those songs that we put out.

Filed by Crystal at 8:52 am under Book, Book interview
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This is the first part of my interview with Howard Kaylan (Turtles, Flo & Eddie). It was a great interview and very little of it ended up in the book. I will put the entire interview up, but because it is long, I’ll do it in two or three postings… Hope you enjoy! Ciao, Crystal

HOWARD KAYLAN
5-24-04

HK: Let’s go back into the memory banks, pretty much. My time with Warren was pretty much in a stupor that we both fairly shared, I would have to say. But, it was indicative of the time we were living in and of the innocence with which we prowled the night. It was a strange time for me, in particular, with the success of The Turtles having taken my partner and myself and my band mates right out of high school, and having thrust us into the area of making hit records and on a tiny little label, White Whale, where soon Warren would find himself as a writer, we were the only act who was really selling any records. It was a miracle, in fact, that they had discovered us at all. And maybe that plays a part into this tiny little circle that we were in with the White Whale people.

What had happened was that my partner and myself and our little happy band were known as the Crossfires in high school. In 1964-5, we’re working at a place called Rev Foster’s Revelliere Club in Redondo Beach, CA. as a high school band playing teen shows on the weekend. These two guys came in to see us the night literally we had decided to break the band up. The reason we had done that was because we had been together as a band the entire time that high school had continued and now that high school was ending, our lead guitar player had a wife and a child, real responsibilities. Everyone was moving on in the real world and we realized that this teen club fantasy, Fri. Sat. existence, was never going to pay the bills. Also, that it was a total lie and that it had no real place in the real world as we were about to emerge. So, we put together a letter, a resignation letter. We were going to take it upstairs to the guy who ran the club, and on my way to the office I was literally stopped by two gentlemen who said, “We’re forming a record label. Would you like to be on it.” Well, it was dumb, but we figured we’d take the chance. We had nothing to lose. It was a very stupid thing. We went into the studio for them. We recorded three songs. One was a Bob Dylan song, “It Ain’t Me, Babe”, the other two were B-side songs that I had written. One was a very Kingston Trio kind of a folksy throw back to the days I had never experienced as a white, middle class easy going rich guy. And, the other was sort of a Kinks rock n roll tribute. The three songs were our first recording session. They released the Dylan song as a single on a label that didn’t even have a name when we recorded the thing. And it was a top 5 record. And we were thrown out onto the road with Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars. This was six months out of high school. I had told my parents that I had quit UCLA and I had a full scholarship to be there. So they were panicked. But, I told them if I didn’t have a hit record in six months, I would go back to school. “It Ain’t Me Babe” came out four months after that, so I never had to go back to school. Nor did I have the desire to go back, and they were justifiably freaked out, but I bought them a color television and a trip to Hawaii and they seemed to calm down after that. Never gave me any problem.

Anyway, we had a couple of records in a row. It was a freaky fluky thing that we did. Then we kind of hit a brick wall. We had our first record, our second record. The third record we put out wasn’t a folk rock song. We didn’t want to do folk rock songs. We had nothing to protest. It was really, really stupid. In fact, they had submitted ‘Eve of Destruction’ to us as a follow up record to our first hit, “It Ain’t Me, Babe”, and they’d introduced us to P.F. Sloan and he played us this stuff and the record company people were all gung ho for it, and we listened to it and said “You’re nuts.” First of all this is a very, very strong anti-war song… we’re just little high school guys. We’ve got nothing to protest, man. We’re white, we’re middle class, we’re fat. I mean, you know, why am I singing about the inequities of the world? It doesn’t make sense. So, we turned down “Eve of Destruction”. We recorded it for an album, and later White Whale ended up releasing it after we departed the label in 1970, and it still made the Billboard Hot 100. Unbelievable. But, at the time, we didn’t want to put out anything that strong, so we decided to go lighter, and “Let Me Be” was a lighter follow up. “You Baby” the third follow up was lighter yet and took us into a good time music sort of a mold. We had seen the Lovin’ Spoonful in NY. We wanted to change our entire thing and sing about up stuff, not necessarily the down stuff we had been saddled with as a folk rock protest group. So, we told our label they had no choice but to listen to us because we were their only act, so we made unreasonable demands like little pricks, which we were, and eventually got to do the good time music that we wanted to for the third record. Came time for the fourth record, it was not so easy. We couldn’t get a hit. We released a song called, “We’ll Meet Again” regionally. The old Vera Lynn WWII song that The Byrds had had some success with and we didn’t know it. That’s how ignorant we were. So, we released our sort of razzle dazzle boogie woogie verson of it and it kind of tanked. And, we were in serious trouble.

Then we found… Actually we were called into the White Whale office, Lee Leseff and Ted Feigin, who were very, very scary dudes, I might add and had backgrounds in record distribution which was and is a very shady area of the record business, wherein you go in and you make deals with people to stock your records or to play your records or to sell your records based on whatever heavy handed techniques you could use, these guys were pros at it and so they started their own record company. At any rate, they were also signing singer/songwriters and they introduced us one afternoon to Warren. Warren was introduced to us as half of the song styling team of Lyme and Cybelle. We had no idea what these clowns were talking about. They played us Warren’s record, “Follow Me”, and we were very impressed. I mean, that was a great record. He sounded like an incredible songwriter. They asked us if we wanted to meet him, and we said, “Oh, absolutely. That would be really, really great.” So, we did. We met Warren and God he seemed like the nicest guy. He seemed wrong for their kind of show business. These guys were really hustlers. These guys hired people to buy people. I am not really sure about how we made the initial charts when our records first came out locally in Los Angeles on the smaller stations, KHJ, KRLA, KFWB, these were AM rocker stations when our first records came out. And, Lee and Ted were notorious for getting things played by just hanging out with DJs… being at Aldos downstairs at the right time…. Being at Musso and Frank’s at the right time. So, to see Warren who was a rather innocent child sort of being swept in by these guys… you know, I never really asked him what they were paying him, but I assumed they were paying him a salary as a songwriter. At any rate, one of the first things we heard from Warren was “Outside Chance” and it was an amazing Beatles song. We thought, my God, this is going to take us right out of that lighter than Spoonful frothy good time stuff we were doing, and maybe put us into an arena where we as a band could compete Beatle-wise with stronger groups. “Outside Chance” was a very Beatle-esque kind of record and we really thought we stood a chance with it. But, the public didn’t accept us for doing “Outside Chance”. They thought it was just too hard, I suppose. I still love the record. It’s one of my favorite Turtle records of all time. But, as I said, you know, it’s all about marketing. And The Turtles were never marketed to be that sort of a band.

I felt bad, really, that we couldn’t have a hit with “Outside Chance” because I had gotten to be pretty friendly with Warren. What we would wind up doing on any given afternoon, I particularly remember summer times for some reason, although I don’t know why because when you’re unemployed 9/10ths of the year, it’s always summer. But, I do remember hanging out with Warren. We would start out typically, I would drive over to his place. It was an apartment, but it was really a house. It didn’t feel like an apartment. It didn’t feel like a unit. It really did feel very homey. He had it all decked out. Plus the fact that we were very, very high added to the intrigue of the season. And it was the end of ’66, now we’re talking almost into ’67… So, what we would do ritualistically, I would come over to Warren’s house. We would really get loaded. Of course, that’s what you did back then. And, if you’re lucky, that’s what you do now. But, back then it was very ritualistic and we would literally sit and see how stoned we could get. And I’m not talking about any serious drugs. I’m just talking about pot. We would do pot, and we would do acid. We did do acid. We did a lot of it, in fact. And Warren’s place was conveniently located within walking distance of many, many Hollywood landmarks. Whereas I had lived in the hills and it was pretty impossible for me to get anywhere. I also at the time was just about to be married, so my whole life was just in permanent flux and my only stability came from hanging out with Warren. Well, that ought to tell you something! So, I wasn’t stable at all, and neither was he. We would drink red wine in the afternoon, we would take acid, we would smoke bongs, and then we would start walking. We’d walk down to Sunset Blvd. and we’d hang out, and this is the stupidest thing… I have no idea what drew us to this place… but we wound up using as a hang out Pioneer Chicken on Sunset Blvd. which is a notorious bad fast food place that caters pretty much to 24 hour biker, hooker and dealer servicing. And, it did then. But, I believe that either we didn’t care, or we were just too high to notice. We would spend hours and hours and hours literally just hanging in front of Pioneer Chicken. We wouldn’t be eating. We would literally just be hanging. We would meet friends, we would stake out a table, we would have drinks. I don’t believe they were bottled waters at the time. They were probably just sodas or bodas of wine or whatever we could take with us. And we kind of made fun of the people and we would hook up with people, sometimes, while we were there, and we would wind up going over to their places and continuing the trip with them. But, we were always loaded, we spent almost an entire season doing it.

Filed by Crystal at 7:48 am under Book interview
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Most people who know anything about Warren know that his father, William Zevon, was known as Stumpy. I’m not sure how much people know about his life… a gambler, a mobster, a rough and tumble little guy (5′4″ at most)… but also a proud father. Anyway, here are a few stories that didn’t make it into the book (the editors thought readers wouldn’t be that interested in Warren’s family history…) Another argument I lost. So… for those who ARE interested, this first quote is from Warren’s cousin, Dr. Sanford Zevon, who was considerably older than Warren and someone Warren and Stumpy always looked up to. Stumpy used to tell me, “If you’re ever in trouble, just call on the doctor, Sandy. He’s a big shot heart doctor, you know. He’ll help you out anytime you call. He’s a Zevon.” He was right.

This incident took place when Sandy was a boy, long before Warren was born.

SANDY ZEVON: There was one incident I remember where Willie visited us in Brooklyn when I was probably 12 or 13. He brought with him one of his good friends, the very famous Jewish gangster, Mickey Cohen. This I remember. It was just the two of them, and there was my mother and father, my sister and I. Cohen had a hankering for some ice cream. This was on a Sunday, so I knew of a little candy store around the corner. The guy who owned it was a miserable son-of-a-bitch. Very nasty to the kids in the neighborhood. “Don’t loiter. Don’t hang around.” So, we walked around the corner and he was just closing. Mickey Cohen said, “We want some ice cream,” and the owner of the candy store waved us off. Mickey Cohen wraps on the door again and says he wants ice cream. The owner says, “Can’t do it.” He says “I want a whole tub of ice cream.” So, he let us in and Mickey bought an entire tub. You know what a tub is? It’s like five gallons of ice cream. We walked home with that tub to my house and we all had ice cream. I don’t know what happened with the rest of it, but that was a very memorable occasion…

This next quote is actually from Mickey Cohen’s autobiography:

MICKEY COHEN: “…Then we went and got married in some marriage chapel. I’ll never forget this. I had come with Tuffy, who was my dog at the time. Now we gotta stand there to get married. So I got Stumpy Zevon as my best man. Now I look down at this preacher guy’s feet, and I says to Stumpy, “Take a hinge at this guy’s feet.” So Stumpy looked down, and I guess the preacher guy got blown up because I like made fun of him, and he said, “The dog can’t be in here while I put the ceremony on.” I said, “Let’s get outt of here, we ain’t gonna have no marriage”… Anyway, he finally said Tuffy could stay. So we did too. We got married.”

Another story from Sandy:

SANDY ZEVON: It was probably around 1956… before I got married, a friend and I went out West to check out an internship… I remember Willie, on a trip we made to Vegas. We were looking for them, Willie and Hymie. They were supposed to be staying at The Stardust, and someone at The Stardust said they were probably at a club in downtown Vegas at a card game. They’d been gone for days in this game. Believe it or not, we found the card game. The two of them were sitting behind piles of chips, obviously making a lot of money. Willie had his teeth out on the table, and he showed us his bank book which contained something like a million and a half dollars. As you probably know, he made it and he lost it, many times over.

Filed by Crystal at 8:03 pm under Book, Book interview
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Today I was working on an article I’m writing on Warren’s quest to find Hunter Thompson over many years and many trips to Aspen, and going through the book archives, I found a copy of the very first version of the book… which bears practically no resemblance to the book that will be coming out in May. My son-in-law has encouraged me to share some of the original material with you. (As you may have noticed, Ben’s opinions carry a lot of weight with me… actually, over time I’ve learned it’s useless to argue with him, so now I just obey (not really… but the truth is, more often than not, he’s right.)) Anyway, I’m going to share the original beginning to the book. It’s better now, but some of the information got lost in the transition to a more stylized transcript.

Chapter One

MAMA COULDN’T BE PERSUADED

Gambler ambled down a country lane
Looking for a game of chance
She was twenty-one or two
And she knew what she wanted
And she wanted that gamblin’ man

Her parents warned her
Tried to reason with her
She was determined that she wanted Bill
They’d all be offended at the mention still
If they heard this song, which I doubt they will

FRESNO, CALIFORNIA - 1946

“He’s a Jew!”

“He’s a diamond in the rough.”

“You’re Mormon. A good Mormon girl. You have no business carrying on with some Russian Jew more than twice your age. Have you thought about what this will do to Pop and me? We just lost your brother Warren to the war. Losing you too will be the death of your poor father..”

“I’m not dying. I’m getting married.”

“But, he’s a Jew!”

“He’s a diamond in the rough. Just wait. You’ll see.”

Of course, I don’t really know the precise words they used, and there is no one still alive to tell the tale. But, of the stories I heard over the years from both sides of Warren’s family, this is probably a pretty close approximation of how the conversation went when Warren’s Mormon mother told her parents she was marrying a Russian Jew. Certainly, this was the image Warren held years later when he wrote “Mama Couldn’t Be Persuaded”; and, just as certainly, the cliché “diamond in the rough” was the one his mother repeated endlessly to rationalize her misplaced attraction to such an unseemly character as Warren’s father.

“Mama Couldn’t Be Persuaded” was only one of Warren’s attempts to exorcise and to capitalize on his family history. While he relished the notion of putting the story to song, the cliché involved in this particular historic episode haunted him. “Diamond in the rough” was a phrase he deliberately chose to leave out of his song, even after writing a verse where it should have/would have/could have gone.

“Mama Couldn’t Be Persuaded” was, for the most part, written one night in Las Vegas where Warren was playing with The Everly Brothers. Don, his girlfriend, Karen, Warren and I had gone downtown, and while Warren stood aside and watched Don winning big at the craps tables, he had the inspiration for a song. When we got back to the hotel, he was up until long past dawn, trying to keep up with the song that was writing itself in his head faster than he could get it on paper.

After Warren had finished writing “Mama Couldn’t Be Persuaded”, he was uneasy. Something was missing. When we got back from Las Vegas, he spent days and nights scribbling “diamond in the rough” in various scripts on scraps of paper around our apartment. He sketched diamonds in the eyes of stick figures sitting at poker tables. Finally, he began crafting an additional, painstakingly perfected verse to “Mama Couldn’t Be Persuaded”. The new verse included his mother’s admonishment of his father’s unrealized potential as a “diamond in the rough”. The writing was agonizing and went on for weeks. It was a nearly impossible phrase to fit into the song structure he’d already created, but he felt if the song were to be right, he had to find a way to do it. Anyone who made the mistake of dropping by or calling paid the price for the toll the writing of this verse took on Warren’s soul. But what I remember far more clearly than the torturous period when he was writing the verse was what happened when it was completed.

It was a rare thing to witness Warren as unabashedly delighted as he was on the day he woke up and knew he had written the “perfect verse”. I was still in bed, but I followed him to the kitchen as he gathered up the scraps of paper, tossing them into the wastebasket as he went. The page that held the handwritten ‘final’ verse to “Mama Couldn’t Be Persuaded” remained in his hand when he arrived at the kitchen door.

Stepping like a Dressage stallion, he pranced inside and lit the gas stove. He held the page just high enough to tempt the flame higher. He began to giggle as the corner of the paper sparked and curled. By the time the page was engulfed in flame, Warren’s laughter had reached maniacal proportions. It was contagious and we both had, albeit for different reasons, tears of laughter, relief and release streaming down our cheeks. With calculated deliberation, Warren had eliminated his perfect verse from the song. It was as if he had cured the plague – at least the plague that had infected his father’s name. That, in Warren’s mind, was an act provoking extreme ‘good luck’. The burnt spot on the linoleum floor where he had been forced to drop the burning page became his talisman reminding him on a daily basis of the exorcism and the relief it brought.

Having grown up in a home where the “diamond” descriptor was attached to his father like an unmet omen, Warren remained convinced that anyone who uttered this particular cliché was, unwittingly or not, a bearer of ‘bad luck’. His own mother was not exempt from this judgment. Until she was too old and frail to care, and until Warren was the only one left able to look after her needs, he believed his own mother brought him ‘bad luck’.

Filed by Crystal at 3:03 pm under Book, Book interview
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