Crystal Zevon

Rocker Jackson Browne coming to Barre (in the paper Jackson’s photo was included)

March 30, 2007
By David Delcore Times Argus Staff

BARRE – In ‘69 he was 21 and he called the road his own. Now Jackson Browne is 58 and the well-known singer/songwriter, who made “Running On Empty” a smash hit in the late ’70s, is bound for Barre.

On June 10, Browne will perform during a three-hour benefit concert at the Barre Opera House that will help the daughter of old friend and fellow ’70s rock star, Warren Zevon, launch her “Local Agricultural Community Exchange.”

Although L.A.C.E. founder Ariel Zevon’s bid to buy Barre’s historic firehouse came up short earlier this year, she fully intends to keep her pledge to bring a “farm fresh market and café” to the city’s central business district. That effort has focused on the building that last housed Homer Fitts’ clothing store and will culminate with a “grand opening” that will conclude with Browne’s performance and a post-concert reception.

“We hope to offer area residents a chance to support Vermont family farms and have a spectacular evening all in one,” says Zevon, who is optimistic that renovations needed to make the market she has planned a reality will be finished in time for what should be an interactive grand opening.

“All day long, L.A.C.E. will welcome the public to come check out the new market in downtown Barre and meet all the local framers and food producers from the area who will be supplying us with all Vermont foods and products all year long,” Zevon says of an event that will feature a combination of “music, food and fun … for the whole family.”

However, Browne’s concert will highlight the event while providing a financial boost to L.A.C.E. – a nonprofit organization that plans to create a convenient place where consumers can buy and eat locally grown and prepared foods at an affordable price.

“Our goal is to put money back into our community and its land,” says Zevon. “We all make a political statement by what we choose to eat each day. Buying and eating locally is one major way a community can reduce its dependence on oil, fight hunger, improve nutrition and strengthen local food systems.”

Browne, a longtime friend of Zevon’s now-deceased dad, has agreed to lend his voice to her cause. With classic albums including “Late For The Sky,” “The Pretender,” “Running On Empty” and “For Everyman,” and songs like “Doctor My Eyes,” “Rock Me On The Water” and “Lives In The Balance,” Browne is expected to be a big draw for members of a generation who grew up listening to his music.

http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070330/NEWS01/703300374/1002/NEWS01

Filed by Crystal at 9:43 am under LACE, Jackson Browne Concert
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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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I’ve updated the book tour page, so please check it out… Things are happening fast and furiously… all good, of course.  More soon, but for tonight, I have to indulge in the chocolat covered bananas Ariel is making in the kitchen right now.

Filed by Crystal at 9:06 pm under Uncategorized
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I keep hearing that people aren’t getting their usernames and passwords but I can’t replicate the problem on any of my accounts. It looks like the people who are having success are on gmail and yahoo mail accounts. Maybe our hosting company’s mailserver is getting blocked at the ISP level, maybe it’s something else… Anyway, if you’re having this kinda problem drop me an email at accounts@crystalzevon.com and I’ll get that set up for you. Please put [new account] in the subject line. Sorry for any inconvenience. Thanks.

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Filed by webmaster at 8:03 am under technical
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I promised to put some more of the edited out material up… so here’s a bit more on the family history.

The topography of Warren Zevon’s music traverses the borders of far away and far-fetched lands and tramples past the boundaries of most people’s imagination; yet, in all his wanderings, imagined and real, Warren invariably checked back in with his roots. Impressions of a troubled childhood loom large over the landscape of Warren’s lyrics. Sadly, there is no one still alive to tell the first hand tale of Warren’s family history, at least not on his mother’s side. Nevertheless, the Zevon mythology is as prominent in Warren’s songs as it was in his consciousness; his story would be incomplete without a rendering of what came before.

Warren’s father, William Rubin Zivotofsky was born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1903. His father, Rubin, left for New York in 1905 where he manned a street cart in the garment district. He sold women’s underwear. In September of 1907, his wife, Sheindel Chansky Zivotofsky and her sons, Froim Moiske (Murray) and William Rubin (Willie), arrived on Hamburg Line’s “Blicha”. The Zivotofskys of Ukraine became the Zevons of New York.

LAWRENCE ZEVON: My grandfather, Murray is a key Zevon. He came up with the name. When asked why he selected Zevon, he said he could “picture it in lights one day!”

The Zevons had three more sons, Al, Louis and Hyman. The five brothers grew up in virtual poverty in Brooklyn alongside tens of thousands of Jews who had escaped the persecution of their homelands.

DR. SANFORD (SANDY) ZEVON: The five boys lived in one room in Lavonia Street, in Brooklyn. Rubin was tough and very strict with them, and Willie didn’t get along with him. Willie was very strong headed, but my grandpa got the respect that he wanted… Willie, although he was short, was tough–built like a brick. He was my father’s protector. Murray was more of the dandy. The haberdasher. Willie was a fighter. Not professionally, but he was a fighter in the neighborhood to protect his brothers.
Willie and Hymie left New York at an early age and headed West. Willie was in his mid-teens and Hymie was younger than that. Their first stop was Chicago. They got into some gambling business. Sam Giacana, the famous mobster who was Sinatra’s friend, put him into some shady business. He told the two of them they were kids and he didn’t want them to get into any serious stuff with guns and that kind of thing… It was like a Damon Runyon story.

Filed by Crystal at 3:49 pm under Book
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Here’s a link to the Barre Opera House in case anyone wants to come up to Vermont for Ariel’s Grand Opening festivities, including the Jackson Browne concert at the Barre Opera House. Tickets go on sale April 3rd.

http://www.barreoperahouse.org/calendarmore.php?id=47

BTW I’ve updated the page on Tour Dates to include radio interviews, magazines, etc.

Filed by Crystal at 5:42 am under Jackson Browne Concert
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The latest news is that Los Angeles Magazine is going to publish a 4,000 word excerpt in their May issue (on the stands April 15th, I think). They asked for permission to use 5 or 6 photos, so it should be a good piece.

The magazine Aspen Sojourner will have a 1,500 word story with photos that revolves around Warren and I on early visits to my hometown, Aspen, in search of Hunter Thompson; then, some diary entries and quotes coming after he found him.

I’m supposed to speak with the publicist late today or tomorrow about the latest schedule of events, interviews, etc. I’ll keep you posted… and I will get back to posting some edited out text in the next few days.

Filed by Crystal at 4:19 pm under Book
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I’ve been really lax at keeping up with this blog… The truth is that so much is happening, I barely have time to breathe. It looks like HarperCollins is starting to fill in the calendar. I have an interview next Tuesday with Bob Mehr of The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, they’re setting up lots of radio interviews and slowly looking into setting up some book signings. Today, the publicist sent me the press release that went out with the galleys, so I thought I’d share it with you here.

“A harrowing ride through the backstreets of the L.A. music business with the King of Song Noir. It reads like a rock and roll Rashomon, laying bare Zevon’s unusual life and the outrageous times that produced some of the funniest, darkest, and most tender songs ever written.”
— Jackson Browne

One of Warren Zevon’s final requests before he died was that his former wife, Crystal Zevon, compile his memoir. I’LL SLEEP WHEN I’M DEAD: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon (HarperCollins Publishers; Publication Date: May 1, 2007; $26.95; Hardcover) is the realization of that request. Told in the words of his musical accomplices, fellow-travelers, friends and lovers, I’LL SLEEP WHEN I’M DEAD is a unique scrapbook of memories, stories and memorabilia from the wild and famed life of the iconic singer-songwriter, Warren Zevon.

Perhaps most well known for such dark, rock-and-roll classics like “Werewolves of London” and “Roland, the Headless Thompson Gunner”, Zevon was a prolific and storied musical legend. He released nearly 18 albums and collaborated with countless artists including the Everly Brothers, Linda Ronstadt and Bruce Springsteen.

Told in the words of Jackson Browne, Mitch Albom, David Crosby, Carl Hiassen, Bonnie Raitt, and other legendary artists as well as family members and friends, I’LL SLEEP WHEN I’M DEAD includes stories of drugs, women, insanity, creative highs and lows and charts the genius behind some of the most timeless songs in rock history.

Crystal Zevon, who was Warren’s former wife and lifelong co-conspirator, narrates the compilation. For more information on Warren Zevon please see www.warrenzevon.com.

Filed by Crystal at 7:09 pm under Book
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I couldn’t resist sharing this email the book’s publicist got today!