Crystal Zevon's story: Warren from A to Z

Through interviews and diaries, the musician's ex-wife chronicles the hedonistic life of one of the genre's bad boys.

By Fred Schruers, Special to The Los Angeles Times
May 4, 2007


In August 1980, Warren Zevon, onstage at the Roxy on Sunset Boulevard, sat down at the piano and introduced his song, "Hasten Down the Wind," which had been covered by Linda Ronstadt on a platinum-selling 1976 album.

"This is the song that intervened between me and starvation," he told the crowd.

This night found Zevon fairly fresh out of a rehab stint and grateful in a larger sense: "As someone who abused the privilege for a long time, I'd like to say, it's good to be alive."

Zevon, who had strained a nerve in rehearsal, was on painkillers and steroids, and the rebirth he cited that night would soon give way to half a decade of heavy boozing and drug abuse that finally yielded in 1986 to a rededication to sobriety. That resolve would last 17 years — until, in a small tragedy engulfed by the larger tragedy of his slow decline from lung cancer, he temporarily succumbed to drugging and boozing again.

"It was very painful," recalled former wife Crystal Zevon of that spell leading to his death on Sept. 7, 2003. "Because we lost that time with him."

One thing that can definitively be said of Crystal Zevon, whose new memoir "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon" is that she's forgiving. Now living near her (and Warren's) daughter, Ariel, in central Vermont, two decades after the breakup that helped send her and Ariel spiraling through years of addictive behavior, she's touring the country to promote the book, which came out this week. It's a compulsively readable oral history composed of brief narrative blocks, a wealth of personal anecdotes from her husband's friends, lovers (including his first wife, Marilyn "Tule" Livingston), and collaborators, and most importantly, Zevon's journals.

Going through his microscopic daily notations, she noted in a recent interview, "There were many times where I said, 'I can't do this, I don't want to read another word, let alone put us all out for public consumption.' Then I'd run across some great line or the moment when a song trigger came to him, and I'd say, 'The story has got to be told.'

"As I say in the acknowledgements, I fell in and out of love a lot of times."

A life on tape

Released simultaneously with the book is a two-CD set (from the small-label Ammal, headed by Zevon's late-career benefactor Danny Goldberg), which has been compiled from carelessly stashed recordings by Zevon's son with Tule, musician Jordan Zevon, 38. It's clear from these 16 tracks, mostly demos of well-known songs, that the performer's classical music grounding made him a deft arranger of his compositions — and also clear, as he growls his way through, that his producers must have worked hard to get some more tuneful barking and crooning out of him for the finished records. (Three of those LPs, never available on CD, were recently released by Rhino in expanded, remastered editions.)

Goldberg believed in the worth of exhuming Jordan's pick of about 150 tracks that Zevon left behind and compares him to John Lennon and Bob Dylan: "I think you could count on the fingers of one hand those songwriters that created an original, distinctive, long lasting and important body of work as Warren," Goldberg said.

Jordan Zevon, who's become an activist against his father's form of lung cancer (mesothelioma, blamed on asbestos), was careful to wear a mask when he delved into the storage areas. Amid old boxes of .45-caliber ammo and T-shirts and cassettes ("Dad would shed a skin every few years, and it was all in there"), he found the real trove in the form of "a floppy, green vinyl suitcase, very 'Death of Salesman,' full of reel-to-reel tapes."

Perhaps most intriguing is the demo of the mournful East L.A. ballad "Carmelita," an emotional rendition in which we hear the original line, "Well I pawned my Smith & Wesson, and I went to meet my man," which was later to be replaced by the much more writerly — in the most literal sense — "… pawned my Smith-Corona."



The accompanying 36-minute interview disk, done circa 2000, displays Zevon's eloquence in answering even pro forma questions. As Goldberg says in the album notes, Zevon "combined sensitivity, intellectual acuity, macho sarcasm, wit, crudeness and aggression. He was the tough guy who wore his heart on his sleeve."

From that same nest of contradictions came Zevon's valedictory body of work, both in his final album, "The Wind," and in earlier work, like the 2000 "Life'll Kill Ya" album, which seems eerily predictive of his fate.

Troubled childhood

But to read Crystal Zevon's unstinting compilation is to swing between admiring and abominating the man. He could be "cruel for cruelty's sake" (as confessed in "The Sin") and during blackout drunks was physically abusive toward Crystal. His itinerant parents' early divorce made Zevon's childhood troubled. When his dad, a Russian-immigrant gangster from Brooklyn, asked him to help with a letter, he "wept with joy." Yet when Jordan, then 8, was ushered into his presence for a rare get-together before a major gig at the Hollywood Bowl, Zevon had little to say.

Jordan finds that forgivable: "Yeah, he's not playing catch with me in the park, but I knew his position in the world — sitting among so many thousands of people as the center point. I never harbored the bitterness, and he ended up being one of my best friends."

"You know, he had a pretty rough beginning," Crystal said. "I think he always suffered. He would angrily reference that, but he took responsibility. I don't think he believed it was a justification."



Ultimately, the dying Zevon pulled out of his binge. His determination to leave a recorded legacy was greatly aided by pals like Billy Bob Thornton, Dwight Yoakam, Bruce Springsteen and his two most indispensable, career-long collaborators, bassist and co-writer Jorge Calderon and singer-songwriter Jackson Browne. Calderon took recording gear to the failing singer's home to get the affecting "Keep Me in Your Heart." Goldberg bankrolled the sessions and was rewarded with a gold record, which Zevon lived to see enter the charts. He also lived to see Ariel's grandsons born.

"He made this decision that the best spiritual connection to this life was to make that album and leave whatever legacy he could in music," Crystal said. "But then when it was all over he kind of let that go, and he really sobered up and he looked at the relationships in his life. He turned to his family and was really there and present."

It was just days before he breathed his last that Zevon reaffirmed to Crystal, "You gotta tell the whole truth, even the awful ugly parts," whereupon "I said, 'Warren, I don't know what the whole truth is.' And he laughed and said, 'You'll find out.' "