I wrote this for Warren

September 08, 2003

I wrote this for Warren a day after he told me he had the big "C" and things weren't looking well. I sent it to him then and said I wasn't going to show it to anybody else. I think its time I let other people read it.

Mr. Bad Example

Yeah right. The year was 1991 and it was finally my turn to play pirates. I’d been scrapping it out in bars and basements trying to stretch my teens beyond their known elasticity. If I kept them going long enough I stood a chance at being able to reinvent the awkward parts. I was a pretty well behaved and sensitive boy who liked to muck it all up and not get caught. This left me sorely lacking in the kind of reputation that earns you points in the rock n’ roll world. Good grades. I wanted desperately to be caught. I collected mentors that had an egghead streak but were packing heat. Reasons for hope included Iggy, Costello, Lowe, Lennon, Neil Young, Townshend, and Zevon. I drifted from prog rock to punk in my search for the people who could help me validate a passport into this exotic country. From Yes to D.O.A. I dabbled. The more wordy, clever and acidic the better. It was important for the majority of high-schoolers not to "get it". If it had this cache and it was soulful then it was committed to memory. These were the records you studied and bashed out again through the filter of your own mill town boredom. It’s terrible that it was his "hit" record but Warren Zevon’s "Excitable Boy" was one of these records. I had the headphones on, lying on my back, sleeve held at arms length staring at that revolver lying on the dinner plate—and knowing my dad wouldn’t like that at all.

As I said. The year was 1991 and I was playing pirates with the Odds on the way out of New York City. We were starting our second US tour in a rented Winnebago Warrior. We’d played the nights before at the Marquee with the headliners of the tour, "Voice of the Beehive," and now we were off again west to support them on the rest of their dates. The story of what we did to that RV is a diversion worthy of future exploration. As those few weeks drew closer to their conclusion and we drew closer to LA we got a call from our manager, Chris Blake, about the next leg. It had been months away from home already but we were bearing up OK. We had all worked hard to be doing what we were doing so there wasn’t a lot of complaining. Chris asked if we would like to go on tour opening for Warren Zevon and be his band for the headline set. The rest of the band couldn’t really interpret my jumping up and down. They had skipped their Zevon chapter. Not all people get to that end of the dictionary. I am a fan first and a musician second so I was quickly connecting the dots for them and organizing a unanimous decision to accept. I have to thank Steve Ferguson (our agent at the time) for having the human beauty to put our CD on Warren’s listening pile and suggesting this pairing.

A week later we were in our basement rehearsal space/badger’s den in the Roxy on Vancouver’s Granville Street waiting for Warren and the rented electric piano to arrive. This was our little pig sty. The collected icons of our travels and troubles were nailed all over the walls until that room became more us than we were. It was a converted shower room measuring about ten by twelve that had been the secret social hub of a thriving club. While the meat market percolated upstairs the musos invited friends and peers into the sanctuary of their own Mickey Mouse clubhouse in the depths. It was visited by actors, comedians, athletes and musicians all out for a night on the town and stumbling upon four like-minded and relentless hosts. A list of luminaries may one day be available for download. This was the first time the room would play host to a, perhaps reluctant, mentor under the guise of developing a working relationship. These skanky little spaces always prove important.

I had over prepared, as is my duty. Knowing the significance of some of the signature licks was my noose. I learned all the tunes that were discussed and tried to bag the licks I thought were indelibly part of what those songs were. Sometimes I’m a "parts guy". I like to know what the important parts are and learn them just in case I don’t have a brilliant improvisational idea or an actual concept of the overall picture. This can make you look good a lot of the time and make you look wooden and lost at the worst of times. I think it was obvious to Warren from the git-go that I would be the studious and mesmerized apprentice and the other boys would be the rebel smart asses that they always were. God bless them. They had mapped out the skeletons of the songs, some of them, and then threw themselves into it with all the right fire. Things went pretty well.

Here’s where I don’t know where to go. I decided to write this because I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t sleep because I was haunted by the detail in which I remember this whole time of my life. Freakish detail. If I thought about something that was said I could remember what the day felt like and where we were and what time it was and how my stomach felt. My memories were complete with all the subtle emotions. Even memories I had tarted-up for public reinterpretation were restored to their original state. Sometimes a picture of an event becomes the memory and the memory becomes extinct. The telling of the story changes it. Not so now. I was really on my toes back then. I was in Warren Zevon’s band on my first rock tour bus and goddamn it if I wasn’t going to drink it all in. Let me repeat, "tour bus". We’d done tens of thousands of miles in stinking vans and one doomed motor home and now we had graduated to the Creem magazine wet dream. To cap it off we were playing great songs from a great new album (Mr. Bad Example) by a great writer and our own debut album had crossed the line enough for our record company to almost blindly dump their money into trying to make us household words. This was the honeymoon stage. His "old velvet nose" logo (a skull wearing his glasses and smoking a cigarette) was on my laminated backstage pass for christ-sakes. I was a real pirate with real credentials. If he was Mr. Bad Example then I was finally close enough to have some of that reputation rub off on me.

So how do I summarize what the tour was like? The character development is as dense as I can make it under the circumstances. If you need more background on Warren then pick up any rock encyclopedia at any book store. He’s in them all. There’s a reason. His story and his body or work are worthy of valuable ink. "Colourful" is a pretty dull way of describing a rainbow. Add another couple of dimensions to that. I had read these things. I had read the publishing information on the sleeves. I was hunting down every bit of music I didn’t own. I was cramming for the exam. I’m glad I did.
The tour lasted two months and covered most of the United States and two Canadian cities. Rockumentaries have illuminated the backstage of the rock process so you can fill your minds with those visions of sleepy eyed clusters of man-boys dragging themselves out of a Silver Eagle bus and into a musty barn to do sound check. Sound check is bashing around on old B-sides punctuated by squeals of feedback. From sound check its into some harshly fluorescent space to eat overcooked food. Milling about fills a couple of hours before you put on your gig jeans and step out under the par can beams and let the sweat pour down. Afterward it’s all falling back into chairs and feeling that mix of tapering adrenaline and building fatigue. Refreshments are a big part of all these daily scenarios and they reach the apex of consumption at around midnight. Its back on the bus and its arsenal of bad videos, pizza boxes, and shop talk winding down to the last two steps toward your bunk and the six beer slumber into the next city. This is what I dreamt I would get to do. But what about Warren? Would he still be into this?

Let me say first that he is one of the funniest men I have ever met. He can sometimes need his space. This is no secret. When he got short with us, however, there was never a time he didn’t apologize or explain himself. The things he got mad about I would later learn to get mad about in my own way. What I thought were his indulgences would later become my own necessities while on the road. I don’t speak of illicit indulgences. He had long been clean & sober and our ever tolerant tour manager Stuart Ross warned us that elements of our "fun loving ways" were not to rub off on Warren. Warren himself never said a word to this effect and eventually the revelry became a comfortable mix of different approaches. Clearly he was not the one in danger of swaying under anyone else’s influence. I picked my spots and when the generally amiable and forgiving Warren was showing I asked questions. There were plenty of these instances. I believe he started to catch on. For all the following weeks I was treated to my own private master class on the "songwriter’s way". At the same time I was learning that it was possible to really become yourself. Warren Zevon is definitely the only Warren Zevon that will ever walk this earth. When you meet him you know this right away. As much as he is, in his own estimation, just a buff guy from Los Angeles with the residual surfer skill of the one-handed pushup he also must understand that everything he knows makes him what he is. No matter how hard you work you will always be left with the impression he holds a face card under the table. Everyday is thus a quotable day. His self deprecation is artful. His deprecation is artful. He can even appreciate for himself the times when he really pins the idea to the dart board with beautifully sharpened words. A couple quick examples. There was a particular town on the tour that he hated so much he wouldn’t allow us to utter the name in his presence. This was for effect and had us all quite merry as we approached the city limits. During sound check he bashed his head on a poorly marked bit of ill-conceived ceiling that hung right over the piano. Paul Brennan (Odds drummer) yelled out, "Hey Warren. How you liking this stage?" Warren shot back, "This is not a stage. This is a portal to hell and if you fall through this sucker you’ll be smelling sulfur pretty damn quick". After stomping a monitor wedge to death in Cleveland to get the monitor guy’s attention and later almost doing the same to the guy himself I ventured a few words in the monitor man’s defence. Warren replied, "Craigiwegs, friend’s don’t let friends mix monitors." His form of compassion for those in thankless tasks had made its way out in that statement. I could go on with these anecdotes, but that isn’t the point.

Like his music he is able to distill so much of what he has learned into crisp statements you can take to heart. Because he is so much himself he encourages you to look for your own singular vision. When it all boils down and falls away that is what will be left of you. He told me he’d never been in a band and that "he wouldn’t do very well in that situation." The music of this phantom band would sound like it came only from him in any event. He can cover a tune or collaborate on a tune and it always sounds like it came only from him. Other than any new ideas he wanted to try out he gave us virtually no direction on how to approach his music. He let us do what we thought would make it our performance as well as his. It all came out sounding like it was all him but alive with the enthusiasm we had freshly flown in. I learned that this was how you should approach collaboration. Never start with instructions or you might miss your chance to ride this wave. If you’re lucky to pick the right people the wave comes up under your ideas and drives them home. There was practical advice about the business of doing what we do ("save your gig jeans," "never pass a mall," "a simple gray T-shirt will be a good friend") but his lessons to me were mostly about finding space for myself and making good use of it. He came on the bus one night while we were watching the same cult movie we’d watched the night before. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Craigiwegs, have you watched this movie before?" I replied to the positive and he said, "then you should be writing." Hasn’t been a day on tour since that I haven’t heard his voice saying that to me. He would warn me how fast the expectation for the next album would come up and that if I was not going to write crap I needed to keep the motor going. He said after we limped in from a day of Odds press, "Craigiwegs, next time they’re dragging you off to a dinner you know you don’t need to go to just tell them you can’t because you have to write. They all respect that. It’s where the money comes from". I think we really would have had a sophomore slump without him. He encouraged me to be more methodical with the words, "it’s all about distilling it down." I was going to need more time if I was going to do it that way. A year later he said, "Craigiwegs, this time I tried just throwing it out there and it felt like the right thing to do" (here I paraphrase). Its always been a combination of both for me since then. There are ideas that instantly shine but most things have to be weighed and pondered and polished. You start to recognize what measures up for you. If you’re always just creating and letting go you never really get to intimately understand your own taste. Within taste lurks the elusive elements that will eventually soothe you and satisfy your senses.

I realize now that Warren came along at just the right time for me. To give me books by people who would turn out to be my favourite authors and to validate my dark sense of humour. He really understands what makes him what he is and articulates that understanding in devastatingly funny bites. I wanted to have that understanding of myself. I wanted to truly feel at peace with all my decisions based on the fact they came from that solid place. I think he’s OK with all that is happening to him in these last days, and that is proof I have more work to do. I don’t think I know myself well enough to take that on just yet. We reconnected last year and after I finally made a humble solo album he wrote to me and said something that I just realized means a lot aside from the initial compliment from a peer held in high regard. I could have lost its significance if I hadn’t written out my bouts of insomnia with this piece. He said, "...I dug it in a big way. Really terrific. It's so you!" I know he always had an idea what elements made up "me" but I sure didn’t see it until much later. I have an idea I’m on the right track. Many thanks go to Mr. Bad Example. Mr. Bad Example indeed.