The Return of the Rockabilly Ibsen

L.A. Style, January 1988
 
 

Step into the rented Corvette
called the Gray Visitation. There's Cajun music on the tape deck, a cassette of Elliott Carter's Double Concerto for harpsichord and piano with two chamber orchestras (1959-61) on the floor beneath your feet. And next to you, his hands on the wheel, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a bit of what could one day grow up to be a beard, looking at least five years younger than his chronological age, which you have deduced to be a hair or three on the near side of 40, is Warren Zevon, the Excitable Boy, the Envoy, the Werewolf of West Hollywood. Maybe he's smoking a cigarette. It's a day not long after the release of his latest album, his eighth.

Sentimental Hygiene (Virgin) is a typically ferocious dismantling of all your worst fears about singer-songwriters from Southern California. Titles like "Bad Karma," "Detox Mansion," "Trouble Waiting to Happen" and "Even a Dog Can Shake Hands" give some hint of the blackly comic, twisted-grin outlook that informs much, though not all, of his work. Zevon's protagonists -- fighters, lovers, junkies, soldiers, politicians, pop stars -- are mostly a luckless lot, driven to accident, bad choices and messier manifestations of the downside of the human condition. Life wears a joy-buzzer, and it's wired for juice.

Zevon is recently back from a promotional tour of Europe and the American East; it didn't exactly agree with him, though Norway was good. They like him there. "I'm the rockabilly Ibsen in Norway," he laughs. Today he has an errand to run. "I've got some posters I'm going to try to find some cheap framing for," he says. "There's an Aron Brothers out on Ventura. There's also a little tea-room joint I discovered, next door to the mystery book club, and right by a first edition bookstore that doesn't realize it's a first edition bookstore."

Posters of what? "Francis Bacon -- my favorite. There's an exhibit of new work in New York. I've been on a campaign to see all the Bacons this year. It's been cheering to me on this publicity junket, because he's about 40 years older than people realize; so when they ask me how it feels to be old, I point out that Elliott Carter and Bacon are the most active they've ever been.

"In England, they asked me over and over why my lyrics are violent. I tried the 'blues tradition' explanation, and failing that, I told them I'd spent the afternoon at the Tate Gallery sitting in front of a Francis Bacon in a state of blissful calm. But this new exhibit -- I must say it's infinitely disturbing. There's one triptych: My guess is that it's 'Woodrow Wilson goes to the doctor's office to get a cyst removed.'"

That's just grist for the mill for the man whose one bona fide hit, "Werewolves of London," issues the admiring caveat, "Better stay away from him/He'll rip your lungs out, Jim/I'd like to meet his tailor." And the mill wheel is turning again. Sentimental Hygiene is Zevon's first album in five years, which in pop music is just 15 seconds short of "forever." Five years almost equal the entire recording career of the Beatles. Warren Zevon has taken precisely as long between albums as the recalcitrant Michael Jackson, and without a pause to have his face worked on.

But as he sagely notes, as the Corvette rolls toward the Hollywood Freeway, "If Kubrick takes seven years, we think he's working harder; Pynchon takes twelve years, and we figure this'll really be worth waiting for. In rock & roll, the guy's having serious problems."

Zevon has had at least his share of "serious problems" -- they centered around compulsive intoxication and can be found detailed at length in back issues of Rolling Stone. But they were under control before the latest hiatus began. This particular long pause likely had more to do with the singer's poky songwriting pace, lack of a label and perhaps the market failure of his last LP, The Envoy, which, with its centerpiece meditations on pain and painkillers, must have been close to the author's mending heart. Anyway, he has not been idle. He toured regularly solo, tried living in Philadelphia, and went down to Athens, Georgia, to jam and record and eat barbecue with underground leaders R.E.M., three-quarters of whom appear on four-fifths of Sentimental Hygiene. Recorded on a regimen of "coffee and chiropractors," the album burns with life, rage and the accordingly high spirits of one who has hung by his heels halfway into his own grave (dug it himself) and decided, finally, firmly, not to drop. There are significant appearances also by Neil Young and Bob Dylan, as well as by repertory players David Lindley, Waddy Wachtel and Don Henley. George Clinton arranged one track.

"The past few years, my life has been very simple," says Zevon. "I did quite a few of these solo tours. I'd be in your town -- actually not your town, but everyone else's -- to play. I wasn't selling anything, and I played whatever I wanted, and more or less made a living. A living that was more commensurate with working and worrying about the rent and getting by okay. And now I'm back in the record business, and I'm responsible for making large sums of money move around -- ideally. I'm not sure how much I like it.

"I don't want to be disingenuous and say there's not some time when you're lying awake at night and thinking, you know, Peter Gabriel. But for the most part, I would say, look, I will definitely be able to go back to Hilton Head Island and play Aunt Fanny's Barbecue Porch, and probably play two nights."
 

Born in Chicago
to a Russian Jewish father (a gambler and former prizefighter) and a Midwestern Mormon mother, Zevon was hauled west as an infant. He lived "all over the place": Arizona, San Pedro, the San Fernando Valley, Fresno. He began his musical career as "one of those kids singing 'Sixteen Tons' in the talent show in grammar school." As a teenager, he'd go "dancing to the Byrds, and I'd stand this far away from Roger McGuinn to try to see how he played that stuff." He played in bands himself, "but not for long and not with any success. Mostly, I wanted Bob Dylan's job."

Or Igor Stravinsky's. An instinctive fan, and sometime composer, of modern "classical" music, Zevon slipped two string interludes into Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School (1980) and a harpsichord quartet on a recent 45 B-side. "Stravinsky," he says, "was Elvis Presley to me. I struck up an acquaintance with him when I was in junior high. 'Sixty-one is the date of an inscription I have from him. Our band teacher was a classical studio trumpet player and did a lot of sessions with Robert Kraft and with Stravinsky. So he took me along. I got to know Kraft, and I'd go top visit him at Stravinsky's house, which was down the street form his. I'd sit around and chat at length with Kraft, and Stravinsky would come in and chat briefly about the traffic. Once, he brought in an album, and he said, 'Here's my new record.' I said [proudly], 'I have your new record, Mr. Stravinsky.' And he said, 'But this is in stereo.' On another occasion they had a new Stockhausen tape from Germany and the four scores you needed to follow it, and Kraft took two and Stravinsky took one and I took one. It was fantastic. The great formative experience of my life."

On the pop side, some years on, "I did various weird musical jobs, real unlikely stuff, in the late '60s. I was actually a studio guy, 'cause I had a Rickenbacker twelve-string. So I did a lot of big sessions. I'd do one for each arranger. He'd hire me because he knew I had a twelve-string. And then I'd play, and that would be it for me. And then I'd get a Wrigley commercial with the next guy, and I'd be sitting next to Glen Campbell...."

In the early '70s, an introduction to Phil Everly through pal David Marks ("one of the original Beach Boys") led Zevon to work as the Everly Brothers' bandleader and pianist. And he commenced also to work alone as what he now calls "a heavy metal folksinger." In 1976, with the support of Jackson Browne, Zevon landed a deal of his own with Asylum Records. Critical rose petals were strewn in the path of his self-titled debut, from which Linda Ronstadt pulled "Carmelita" and "Poor Poor Pitiful Me." For his dark wit, sharp eye, and tougher-than-the-rest edge, Zevon found himself pegged as the conscience of the SoCal pop Mafia -- though he says that "since [the time when] I was a teenager and a surfer, I don't think I felt any profound connection to the idea of Los Angeles. When I started making records, I'd be compared to Nathanael West, and I'd read him and think, 'I hope not. This is not my world view.'"

To whom would he like to be compared?

"Well, I used to think long ago that Mailer was the most interesting writer, because I thought his exhibitionism was a form of commitment -- I thought that everything you did, your private life, belonged out front. I acted [that] out. Eventually I decided, 'This isn't right for me. This is a bad approach to entertaining people.' I used to say that I had more of problem than my audience perceiving the ironic nature of my work. They understood more about how funny 'Jungle Work' [a cartoon anthem about mercenaries] was than I did. I thought, 'Jeez, maybe I'm supposed to sign up and go to Grenada.'

"Probably the writer that had the biggest impact on me was Ross MacDonald, who was my friend, too. It would be nice to be compared to him, because he was the most compassionate writer I've ever read.

"It is a little self-aggrandizing, but I do think there are some ways in which I am kind of like Ibsen. 'Play it All Night Long' ["Daddy's doing sister Sally/Grandmas's dying of cancer now/The cattle all have brucellosis/We'll get through somehow''] -- that's pure Ibsen. His plays are funny, and there's always something wretched and strange in every scene. There's a feeling I get every now and then that, you know, they're saying, 'Well, what does this duck mean, Henrik? What exactly do you mean by the duck?' And he's saying, 'Aw, I dunno, gimme a break, it's a duck.'

"There was one journalist in Europe," he continues, "who seemed particularly displeased that I insisted on demythologizing the job of being a rock & roll musician. And he said something to me about, 'Rimbaud said that you have to--' And I said, 'Wait a minute, now, if I'm not mistaken, ol' Rim-baud got out of the business at twenty. I don't think I want to take his advice to heart.'

"Hendrix was our greatest musician, but he's dead, and he's been dead for twenty years. I can't see anything good about that. We have that way of dealing with death, of course -- to say, 'At least he'll be well remembered.' And that's the biggest comfort you have. But to carry that to an ideal is like saying, 'Dead children -- at least they'll never be corrupt and they'll never be ugly.' But that doesn't mean the best way of living is to perish at eight."

Yet how to live in the world when you don't perish at eight? How to make the inevitable accommodations with corruption, with age, with sure loss, with all the millions of flaws big and small built right into the fabric of ... everything .. without merely capitulating to rot? How do you negotiate the ubiquitous bars of cosmic black soap, the snakes in the can, the tempting candy that proves to have a core of solid pepper? The search for a way to stay in the game, even to love the game, when you know it is absolutely rigged against you -- that's the errand Warren Zevon runs every day (it's the errand you run every day, for that matter), and it's implicit in every song on his latest record, even the "funny" ones. "I need some sentimental hygiene," Zevon sings -- not even knowing what that means, it's hard to disagree.

"I'm going to take the terrible risk of the day," he announces. "All my songs -- writing songs is an act of love. I have no idea why I chose to write 'Boom Boom Mancini.' I love the guy. That's what it's about."

As for the other, more prosaic errands he'd set out to run: Aaron Brothers' proved a wash, coffee came in buckets at the little tea room, and though Zevon didn't find any Thomas Pynchon at the unconsciously first-edition bookstore, he later did unearth a translation he did not yet own, and had not read, of the collected plays of Henrik Ibsen.

 

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Copyright Robert Lloyd © 1988 and 2006