Q: Warren, you’re going to be 53 in a couple of days. You’ve been making albums for almost 30 years. Your latest and ninth album, Life’ll Kill Ya, is your first album in almost five years. At this stage of the game, I’m hoping that it’s not you who was in the house when the house burned down.
A: Well, I was in the house, Jody. I didn’t suffer third-degree burns, but I got singed. I think we all know we can take considerable
portions of the song as -- yeah, first person, firsthand experience. Remember what we always said, in the songwriting field, there isn’t a section for fiction and a section for nonfiction. It’s all mixed together. Q: Even though you’ve been making music for about 30 years, Warren Zevon is not a household name like Elvis Presley or Bob Dylan. What do you think the average music fan’s perception is of you and your work?.
A: I don’t think about what other people’s perception of me is. At least not any more than anybody in any field does. Than the cable guy or the guy who parks your car or your dentist thinks. Perhaps to a fault it doesn’t enter into the artistic process. You know, it enters into the daily interactions of real life as much as it does for anybody.
Q: I read that you were born in Chicago and grew up in California and Arizona. Where do you live now?.
A: Los Angeles.
Q: But this record, Life’ll Kill Ya, does not sound like a quote, unquote "L.A. record".
A: Well, nothing ever sounded like an "L.A. record", really, to me.
Q: I think some of the early albums, when there was members of Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles singing along and Jackson Browne was involved it had an L.A. vibe.
A: Well, Jackson Browne is from L.A., you know. And Glenn Frey was from Detroit and Henley was from Texas. Fleetwood Mac was English. I’m not trying to evade the label or anything, but it’s the second biggest city in America and there’s a lot of people there.
Q: You were a self-taught piano player, correct?
A: No, I took piano lessons. I was a self-taught guitarist, with shocking results.
Q: How old were you when you started playing music?
A: Like three.
Q: So would the term prodigy apply?
A: No, you have to be good, not just enthusiastic. I studied piano for a while. But I always wanted to play it and I started writing classical music and getting into some classical music young enough to be called a prodigy. If I’d been, you know, prodigiously talented or succeeded in any public way.
Q: Your relationship with Igor Stravinsky has been written about. Has it been overstated?
A: It’s always exaggerated. But that’s the nature of things. Sometimes you just stand back and smile and let it be exaggerated. It’s flattering. But I knew him, which is unusual, I think. I don’t think there are too many of us old rock musicians who knew Stravinsky. And I visited him. I visited his house. But I was kind of taken under the
wing of his associate, a great conductor and great music writer and critic named Robert Craft. Q: Did you ever write your own symphony?
A: Yeah. I play it for a couple of people that are familiar with that kind of stuff. I played them, you know -- as you can imagine, I played them like the synthesizer sampler rendition of it.
Q: What was the reaction?
A: They liked it. 20th Century classical music, real modern music. It’s a funny thing. Looking back on it from a lifetime’s fascination, interest, it’s interesting. But I have to say, at the end of the day, if the average person hears a piece of music and are really put off by it, there’s no criteria by which you can say they’re wrong.
Q: Well, then, I want to make a left turn to some work you did earlier in your career -- in the early part of your career. You recorded a couple of singles as part of duo. You made jingles. The Turtles cut a couple of your songs. You did some session work. You also played piano with the Everly Brothers on the road. Did you always think that ultimately you were going to make your way as a singer/songwriter?
A: I never really had much choice and I always figured I’d survive one way or another as a musician. I was real lucky because I always had…some kind of …work came along at the last minute, anyway. And I was always able to make some kind of living as a musician. And I also never really got rich. And that might have been lucky, too, you know.
Q: In what way?
A: Well, because the less time you spend with the issues of being rich, they are like the issues of being famous. They’re not real issues, so they’re not real life.
Q: And it leaves more time to be creative?
A: There’s more of an exchange -- human exchange of ideas and feelings to be had on the bus stop than over the phone with your accountant. And if you’re rich, you spend a lot of time on the phone with your accountant. It’s necessary, I believe. Oh I know I’m happy and that means I must be lucky. That I know.
Q: There are Warren Zevon songs played on piano, Warren Zevon songs played on guitar. Is it intuitive how you decide which instrument you’re going to play on each song?
A: I guess, because I played the piano when I was a kid and I played it seriously and I had to learn -- I played it technically correctly and stuff and then I got jobs playing it. I never had as much fun playing the piano, really, as the guitar. I hate to say that. There were other issues like the fact that I ran out of pianos and didn’t really own an acoustic piano from, oh, about the time Mondale lost until today, say. And those determined what kind of songs I wrote, too, because you don’t form a real bond with an electronic keyboard, no matter how swift it is.
Phil Everly made me the music director, like Paul Schaffer kind of, on a TV show he had in about 1970, I think. And it was a great show. I remember he had Kristofferson on. He had a lot of people on that respected him so much, you know, because of the Everly Brothers, that they were very comfortable with him, and he was a great talk show host. It was on late at night for a season. Strange to remember this. And I was the piano guy. And I remember the night this kid came in. And he was, you know, kind of dressed up like I was. He came in and sat down and started improvising on the piano. And it was Billy Joel. I’ve told Billy this story over the years. And he started playing the piano, kind of classical rock piano, which nobody played, I thought, but me, in my loftiest dreams. And as I told Billy, I stood behind him for five minutes and then I turned around and I walked across the set and out of the studio (laughs). And that’s another, probably, one of the reasons why I didn’t stay with the piano quite as much as I had.
Q: Warren, over the years, you’ve written more than your fair share of songs about guns and violence, plenty of songs about outlaws and espionage. Your one-time producer, Jackson Browne called your genre song noir. Is it a dark, fatalistic notion that life will kill you?
A: No, I don’t think it’s -- I mean, the fact that life will kill you is just that. It’s a fact. I don’t think this album is about aging issues. To me, it’s not about aging, because I’m also lucky that I’ve had kids since I was a kid. So I’ve always been papa. In a way, I was old when I was 24, you know. So I don’t think of myself in terms of, "oh, oh, I turned the corner, now I’m old." As Michael Caine said the other day, "I don’t think I’m middle-aged. I don’t know anybody 106" (laughs). So I don’t think that’s the issue.
To me, the song is more about being dead. I think you have to spend a fair amount of time realizing that you will be, so that you’ll remember to enjoy everything you possibly can every minute you’re not. You always want to try and tell younger people that, which is very difficult, because they don’t really hear it because they feel a life has been imposed on them. And of course, they’re absolutely correct. But still, you want to tell them, hey, you know, there’s a lot -- you can be having a lot of fun. It’s all good. As Snoop Doggy-Dog and my father used to say, "It’s all good."
Q: I’m surprised you say this isn’t an album about aging. It seems to me that the thoughts of your own mortality bother you more now than when you sang I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead.
A: No, they didn’t bother me then and they don’t bother me now (laughs). It’s just as true now. It’s not too…is it truer? I guess it’s truer. You know, when Jackson said that about song noir, I know he means it as a compliment and he means it in a style of -- in the sense of those ‘40s Los Angeles kind of tough-guy detective story writers that I had never read until I was compared to. But I don’t really think of my songs as particularly violent. I guess my favorite author really of all was Escalus. And he was more violent, 2500 years ago, than anything on cable TV now. So was Shakespeare. All the time. Real violent. I mean, really, really violent. In every sense. I just think that popular music, as we understood it for a long time, was limited to a kind of -- not limited in any way, but you know, songs about a certain thing. Love songs, for the most part. And Rogers and Hart wrote great love songs. And J.D. Souther wrote -- writes great love songs. And it wasn’t exactly what I was doing, that was all.
Q: Life’ll Kill Ya isn’t the first time you’ve sung about karma and reincarnation. Your songs have always had religious allusions from Mohammed’s Radio to the new song, Ourselves to Know. Were you brought up with certain religious beliefs that creep into your lyrics?
A: Yeah, I was, uh, I was brought up with religious beliefs. Christian religious beliefs. But you know, it’s one of life’s great searches and I don’t like talking about it. And I don’t like talking about it more than I do in my songs in public.
Q: Well, I’ll take another tact, then. Because, perhaps, the ultimate Christ-like metaphor and cautionary tale for those who’ve had fame and fortune is the life of Elvis Presley. You wrote about Elvis before in Jesus Mentioned. And I’m thinking he’s the inspiration for Porcelain Monkey.
A: Yeah, Porcelain Monkey, it’s hard to deny. I was writing a song with one of my oldest and best friends and most frequent collaborators Jorge Calderon. And we were working on a different song. Actually, a kind of violent and terrible song. Too terrible to talk about now. And I noticed on his songwriting notebook as we sat on the sofa suffering in my apartment, working, he had a postcard that turned out to be from Graceland - of the TV room, with the porcelain monkey sitting on the coffee table with the, you know, the onyx eyes. And that inspired us. I said, “What’s that?” And he said, “That’s Elvis’ porcelain monkey.” And then we had to spend the next week or two writing the song. Jorge and I talk all the time. You know, almost every day. And I called Jorge last night and his daughter -- his grown daughter was there, he wasn’t. And she said, “You know, a friend of mine just came from a trip to Memphis and she said to me, “You know, I went to Graceland?” “Yeah.” “And the most striking thing I saw in the whole place was this porcelain monkey of Elvis’.”
Q: To produce Life’ll Kill Ya, you chose two guys, Paul Q. Colderie and Sean Slade. Their best-known production credits are with groups like Radiohead, Hole, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, not people who you’d think would be your first choice to produce your new record.
A: They were, though, when I found out they produced Radiohead. That was all the recommendation I needed. Radiohead is one of my favorite groups, which means out of two or three of all time.
Q: So you really like Radiohead and their records, yet the instrumentation on Life’ll Kill Ya is very sparse. It doesn’t sound tied to a
specific time. Why did you keep things so stark?
A: I recorded the main parts of each song. You know, the vocal and the guitar, piano accompaniment at home, over years. And I had done it before -- I had done it the album before I had started doing that. And I enjoyed it very, very much. But I did a lot of things that were self-indulgent. It’s very hard not to when you have your own mini-recording studio. So I wanted to keep it very simple…at that point. So that if I did take it into a studio, I wouldn’t have already created a lot of things that I couldn’t undo.
I wanted to keep it simple because I find myself -- for the past few years, I’m essentially like a heavy-metal folk singer. I play by myself. For economic reasons, because I’m anti-social, and, because it’s not as loud. There’s a number of reasons. But I play alone, and I wanted to write songs that I was going to be able to play by myself without disappointing people, you know, disappointing their expectations in hearing the guitar solo from the record or the sax section or something. So that was the second reason.
And the third reason might just be because I’ve always loved Nebraska so much and John Wesley Harding and the records that were really like that. You don’t really necessarily want to do it yourself, but I find that I’ve always liked the records that were really the person. And I like the shows that are really the person. I remember Bob Dylan solo. That was something else, singing Mr. Tambourine Man and you’ve never heard it before. and I remember Jackson solo, and that was something else, too. Q: So when you go out on the road with Life’ll Kill Ya, will it just be you?
A: For the time being.
Q: Over the years, you’ve had everyone from Bob Dylan to REM to Chick Corea appear on your songs. Did you purposefully avoid casting special guests on this record?
A: I didn’t do it as purposely as Sean and Paul did. I had a couple of ideas. But their feeling was, you know, you haven’t made a record that people listened to anyway in a few years. You know, you and Jorge and Winston, this is fine. You don’t need any celebrities. You don’t need any guest stars. And I appreciated them…I appreciated that attitude.
Q: Your songs have been covered by, most notably, Linda Ronstadt, but also by country singer, Teri Clark, Shawn Colvin, Flaco Jimenez with Dwight Yoakam, Stevie Nicks. It seems that a lot of the new songs, especially the -- what I call the semi-disguised love songs in the middle of the album -- are ripe for interpretation. Do you have anyone in mind to sing any of the new songs?
A: I almost never send songs to people. It’s my experience that the idea of Tin Pan Alley, for me anyway, it’s a myth. People have done songs of mine that seemed very unlikely. And on a few occasions I’ve sent songs to people. I sent a song that I wrote a few albums back to George Jones. “I wrote this for you.” Nothing. Zero. I think, you know, how many records are they selling. So I don’t really believe in that. You know, I’ve done it on some kind of weird whim occasionally or I’ve done it in secret. You know, I’ve secretly thought, boy, Jennifer Warnes could sing this song. But then I just write it and then I selfishly keep it.
I kind of wrote I Was in the House When the House Burned Down for my friend, Chris Whitley, because I was doing a tour with him. And I was driving to the Wal-Mart that’s about an hour north of Austin in a rainstorm in the middle of the night. You know where I mean? It was like Pflugerville or someplace. And I got the idea for the song. And I thought, gee, maybe I’ll write a nice slide guitar song for Chris. But of course, by the time I had written the song, I write so few songs and I need them so desperately, that I never give them to my friends. So I hung on to it.
Q: Outside of the Hindu Love Gods album of covers on record, you very rarely do other people’s songs. What made you choose to do a version of Steve Winwood’s Back in the High Life Again?
A: Well, of course, it struck me as ironic, but also I love the song. I love Steve Winwood. All human beings love Steve Winwood.
Q: When I first heard your version of Back in the High Life Again, I was wondering if you were singing it straight or ironically. How did you approach it?.
A: Let me answer you this way: I wrote a song a few years ago for the great, unique American director, Alan Rudolph. And I wrote the song Searching for a Heart for a movie of his that didn’t do very well. And strangely for an Alan Rudolph movie they had one of those test showings for a test audience in a mall and a theater in a mall, way out in the valley in LA. And the audience was laughing and hooting, but I guess they were laughing in the wrong places or something. It wasn’t…It didn’t go well. They have a focus group that gives their opinion and they give them $5 so they give a bad opinion and they hope they’ll get compensated for that. I don’t know. But I stood outside the theater with Alan Rudolph and I said, “I mean, I guess, I guess they don’t know if it’s ironic or not. They don’t know if you’re trying to be funny or if you’re not trying to be funny, Alan.” And he said, “Well, do they ask Neil (Simon) that?”
Q: Well, let me ask you: Song-wise, does Warren Zevon have a split personality, the sensitive balladeer versus the arch-narrator?
A: Well, if I had a split personality, I’d only know…I’d only know it half at a time, wouldn’t I? I mean, with all due respect to Alanis Morrissette, who I think is very, very good, I think that irony is something if you define that you’re being ironic, you’re automatically being not being ironic and vise versa, whatever that means.
Q: When these two elements of your songwriting personality are in the same song, you know, the sentimental Warren and the arch-Warren are in -- both in, I think, For My Next Trick, I’ll Need a Volunteer and Hostage-O, which are both on the new album, is it harder for you to get across what you’re trying to say than when you clearly do a sentimental ballad or clearly do a humorous song?
A: Unless I’m overwhelmed by some kind of toxic emotion, I don’t know if it’s every completely clear to anybody what they’re trying to get across or what they want. And also, you know, my parents came from such incredibly different backgrounds and we’re so different from each other that there’s always been, I guess, two sides to me. That’s what people always tell me. And that’s what people seem to perceive about me, but again, I try and spend as little time as possible addressing what people perceive about me.
Q: And necessarily, everything doesn’t have to be a clear linear message that a song gets across. And you’ve got these images sometimes -- I’ll throw a few of them at you: "sentimental hygiene", "monkey wash donkey rinse", "an invalid haircut", and my favorite new one is "you know I hate it when you stick your hand inside my head and switch all my priorities around." Where does this stuff come from?
A: I don’t know.
Q: Well, do you keep a notebook around for when these phrases arise and then jot them down?
A: Well, certainly, like a comedy writer or anything else, you think of a phrase and you’re on the phone with a friend saying, oh, oh, you got a pencil? You know - that’s a goofy idea. I don’t really keep notebooks or anything too much because if I get an idea that I like well enough, then I can go to work, then I have a job again. And I work on that song until I develop something out of the original idea.
Q: There’s one song on Life’ll Kill Ya, that is packed with outstanding imagery. It’s almost a Celtic gospel song. And it also stands out because it has some of the few harmonies on the whole album: Fistful of Rain…what inspired that song?
A: Jorge. That was Jorge’s idea. I think we kind of saw it as a Buddhist gospel song, about the, you know -- the harder you try to hold on to
|
things, the more they slip through your fingers sometimes. And the more they flow, then the more they stay with you. Q: In 1996, there was a double-disc anthology of your work, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, on Rhino Records. Did you feel it was definitive and did it motivate you to take a break after it came out?
A: I think it was reasonably definitive, within, you know, what they wanted. I guess I more or less picked the songs out. But, you have to understand, I’ve been motivated to take a break since 1965. I’m not a real ambitious person. Especially since I can’t write more songs that I get ideas for. So it doesn’t do any good to have better work habits in creating those tunes, which is the thing that’s really important to me job-wise.
Q: Was there a period, say, after Sentimental Hygiene, that some of your core audience stopped taking the ride with you?
A: You know, I don’t think it’s ever been a case of there being a big audience that stopped taking a ride with me so much as a big audience that accidentally stepped on a Mr. Toad’s ride on the way to the funhouse, on the way to the Michael Jackson Expo. I don’t know. I used to say that I was just a folk singer, that because I had had a hit record, I was sort of perceived of as like a down and out ‘70s superstar or something, as opposed to a very successful folk singer, which is how I’ve always seen myself.
Q: Life’ll Kill Ya, to me, easily stands with your best work. And a lot of people think that with some of the earlier records, around the time of Excitable Boy. The last ten years recording-wise, some of the new albums haven’t been as widely heard. Transverse City, The Mutineer. Was that disappointing to you?
A: Well, naturally, it was a little disappointing. But you know, some writers are wrongly appreciated for what they do at the beginning and then what they do at the end of their career. The fact that they’re appreciated again in their career or after the one thing that they were appreciated for, even that’s unusual and lucky. But you just keep doing it if you’re a writer. Even if you try not to, you’ll keep doing it. Sometimes it’ll be better and sometimes it’ll be worse, from various different points of view.
Q: Outside of making records, you’ve become in high demand lately from a variety of media. You’ve contributed music to TV shows, movies. Was this an avenue for your songs that you sought out?
A: No. Like I said, I don’t, I don’t find, for my music, that seeking anything out does much good. People just come to me for some reason or another. I often never find out why they did…but they do.
Q: And you’ve become a personality on the small and big screens lately from filling in for Paul Schaffer on the Late Show to a variety of other TV appearances. And you’re set to be in the film "South of Heaven, West of Hell" that was written and directed by Dwight Yoakam. Did you want to be an actor? Was that an ambition of yours?
A: It crossed my mind, but I’m certainly not an actor. Tom Waits is an actor. I’m not an actor. But I can do it. It’s fun. Oh, anything that gives you an excuse not to write is good.
Q: Is that why since you’ve become multi-media you haven’t written a book like your buddy Hunter S. Thompson?
A: Let’s remember that Hunter S. Thompson is the finest writer of our generation. He didn’t just toss off a book the other day. And no, I never think about writing a book. I’ll never write a book.
Q: What was it like performing Lawyers, Guns and Money at the Inaugural party for Minnesota Governor Ventura?
A: It was a lot of fun. And I just want to go on the record and say that the Governor performed a very fine version of Werewolves of London. He was criticized for it, as he has been for many things. But there was nothing wrong with his performance of Werewolves of London.
Q: Speaking of Werewolves, I’d imagine every night you get on the concert stage you have to play Werewolves of London, you have to play Lawyers, Guns and Money. How do you keep that experience
fresh?.
A: Getting on stage is always novel to me. I don’t know why that doesn’t go away. I mean, I never went on the road for a year or, you know, did any of that kind of touring. But I think, in a lot of ways, I’m like the goldfish in the Ani DiFranco song. You know, they go around the bowl and every time they see the little plastic castle it’s like they’re seeing it for the first time. That’s me. It’s happiness…or bliss. Q: Life’ll Kill Ya closes with this song that’s almost a prayer. It’s called Don’t Let Us Get Sick. It’s such a beautiful end piece song. I know you don’t write songs anticipating a reaction, but have you gotten a response from people that have heard that song? What’s it been like?
A: I don’t know. I think people like it. It means a lot to me.
Q: Why does Don’t Let Us Get Sick mean a lot to you?.
A: Because it’s pretty good and therefore I consider myself lucky to have written it (laughs). And because it has -- you know, it has a lot of feelings for a lot of people, and for me to say that it’s got a lot of feelings for a lot of my friends in it is quite an admission (laughs). It’s more than I normally say about my songs.
