It's my blog; I can be self-indulgent and possibly tacky. So, for posterity, the only words Mr. Warren Zevon, who died on September 7, ever said to me. (It was an interview for two publications, when Learning To Flinch came out.) The properties on the article say I created the file on May 11, 1993, a little over 10 years ago. I have a note at the start of the interview: "his voice is very very deep." Sad that that voice is now silent. But in a sentiment I sense he would have appreciated, going out the way he did -- announcing his fate almost as soon as he learned of it, with dignity, working, two weeks after his last album came out, subject of a VH-1 documentary -- meant at least one thing: A nice long lead time for the newspapers to write you a good obituary. Those are some nice tributes I've read. Here's all I have (I did not record my questions):

Its been about 12 years since I made a live album. I think it's a good idea to have a live document of yourself every decade or so. It's not impossible that I may sing better live, and I'm better able to improvise and do instrumental things I never do on records. I thought I'd tour and capture all the bad Keith Jarett impressions.

I didn't really perform first and then record, and for many years I would spend a year in the studio and then a month on the road, promoting. However much I've developed as a perfomer has been in recent years.

I planned the whole tour as an acoustic album. Playing solo I decided would make it easier to go to hard to reach places and places that wouldn't be horribly money losing to get to, like Western Australia and Finland. And I wanted to go to those places and playing solo allowed me to go to those places.  I haven't been able to play with the same group consistently long enough to feel there was a special feeling about the band I recorded with. Not that there hasn't been a special feeling about the bands I've played with recently, I may hasten to add. I have a new manager that's more likely to go along with my brainstorms this time.

Let it be said that it was in Australia that I said, "Don't put the word 'unplugged' on the poster," of course I also say don't put the word "acoustic" on the poster because it implies that the show is much softer than it actually is. Why not the word "solo." It's interesting, the "unplugged" phenomenon, but I think it's primarily interesting to see L.L. Cool J playing with guitars and artists we don't think of as otherwise playing with bands.

You can look at it two ways: (Or you can look at it in as many ways you want) I guess you can look at it philosophically, about life and getting older and perceiving there are comprimises you have to make. The most horrible possiblity for a young person is that. Or you can look at it more practically from our point of view: it's about deli trays. That's where the flinching idea came from: the rainbow on the meat of the deli tray, that's where the flinching ritual begin. But finally I think it's about an impulse I had, which is one of my higher instincts, which is to avoid anthemic, fist in the air arena gestures. I loathe self-dramatization, not that I'm not as tempted as anyone else, but I manage not to call albums Keep the Faith. I try to subvert my own desire to dramatize and romanticize myself as a mythic rock musician.  "Piano Fighter" was the name of the tour and it's one of the songs on the album, clearly a much more self-dramatizing, self-romanticising notion. We changed it at the last minute.

I happen to think Leonard Cohen is a really good songwriter. I find him very funny. I hardly think there's such a thing as great songwriters. It's a kind of ephemeral, lightweight art form. TV commercials can affect people, too. So can flourocarbons. Art is only what artists insist is art.

I think songwriters are vastly overappreciated. I would guess that the songwriters you are talking about are still probably making a good living. We're in a culture where we hear that Michael Jackson sold 20 million records and now he's only sold 3 million and we all feel bad for him, it's that "Oh, oh, the champ might be unhappy today, he might have a headache." Why are artists given this immense compensation for their work that someone or myself or whoever can't afford to build a recording studio in each of their chalets, that's the freakish thing about entertainment, and when you talk about people like Madonna, too, she's evidently very ambitious and hardworking. Maybe songwriters, maybe me, maybe we don't want to get up at 6 every morning to be Cher or be in a movie, maybe we don't want to be on a diet for the rest of our lives, so you never know when someone will want to see your stomach muscles. Maybe we don't want to do those things for which she is compensated even more than we are.

I've only felt underappreciated on those occasions when I wish I had a recording studio in my chalet. I don't have any chalets. But there are times when I think "Hey, I could make even better art for you if I had those advantages," but then there are times when I think what I do I do within the restrictions of exactly what I have or don't have and that's exactly right.
For the first year, if I had my own recording studio I might not come out for a year.

I can't really tell how much of myself is in the characters I write about. It's not up to me to decide. I think I'm essentially writing fiction. There's probably something of me in everything, except insofar the more wildly fictional it sounds, the more wildly fictional it is. It's sometimes to communicate to people, especially abroad, that the purpose of the song is to make you laugh, that the idea, the style of this song is irony. It's lofty purpose is to entertain you. There is no political agenda behind this particular composition. People have trained themselves to look for those meanings, to look for those kind of agendas, and they have been trained by those songwriters who have those agendas, to look for it.

Whenever you have to try to explain the joke it takes the fun out of it.
I remember one occasion in Europe where someone said, "What does this song mean? Did you work in a factory? What does this mean, then? Why use this?" And I just said. "This is a pronoun." "I," "We," "You," "He," and he said, "Ve don't have irony."

It's certainly easier to write about conflict than it is to write about -- if we lived in a perfectly harmonious world there'd be less to write about. But I think of songwriting in some ways like acting. I think most actors are interested in playing villans, I think they may regard it as modest that they don't want to be the hero, the don't want to be the sheriff. It's more interesting to play the bad guy, the actors I know who write about the parts they play, they sit down and write 400 page biography of the character they're going to play, it's more interesting to figure out why this guy is a villan or misguided or sick or cruel or whatever. It's probably just an inclination I have to play certain kind of parts, I have a certain kind of voice, I can only sing triplets when the moon is full, I'm not a tenor so my voice doesn't lend itself mechanically to playing pretty songs.

I never think about it from an overview of my world or my characters, I don't think of myself by my name, "Warren's writing about..." I just don't think of myself that way. I just do it. I discourage myself from any kind of thinking like that, with that second person kind of thinking. I just say "Jorge, let's write this song, I got this idea, let's write a polka called 'Mr Bad Example' '' and he says, "I used to be an altar boy!" and we laugh and drink a lot of coffee and we just write the song.

It's always really hard work, it's really frustrating hard work.  Writer's block is just a description of it being harder. So if it's hard to write a sentence, you just write a word, and if you can't write a word you can't beat yourself up over it. If you're in the season of needing to write you have to be able to write everywhere. Like most writers, the season comes with the deadline. It may be an internal deadline, like, "What the hell am I doing on this planet if I haven't written a song in a year in a half?" -- nah, it takes a business deadline. And then I just start listening to everything and considering everything, listening to the resonance of every phrase.

It's the first time I've every had the powerful impulse to plug something. Not that it'll do me any good, that I go out and mention it in every set and there's a cheer from the loyalist customers, but they're not going to buy the Hundais or the toothpaste or whatever it is that makes a difference that I have on a continuing basis.

It's the same producer as Twin Peaks. It's a dream come true job because I have to compose 24 hours a day. At least up here it's like having the studio you work in all the time. And it's the greatest of fun for me.

I think of the music as I watch it, I watch it and I think of what's needed, and I have instruments around, and I sometimes program things, sometimes write stuff down, sometimes we set up microphones and I watch it and I play guitar along with it, and it has every kind of musical aspect of anything I do or aspire to do, and it has to be done yesterday. There's no time to be afraid, there's no time to doubt oneself, you just have to do it and do it.

I don't know exactly. I suppose one of the reasons they hired me is I don't know the mechanics of how to do it, I'm sure if you've been doing this for sixty years you have a file of types of tension, exact types of tension, diminished chords, flatted 5 chords that go with a certain kind of anxiety and a whole backlog ... in a way that after all these years I can say, "No, that's not a good rhyme, this is a better one." The Beatles once said, "'Don't use the word 'just,' it's a weak filler word," and we all said, "Oh, don't use the word 'just' it's a bad word," so I don't know how to do that stuff mechanically so I don't know exactly how I do it but I think they went through a lot of TV people before they decided to get a loose cannon who didn't know exactly what went where.

[Re: Writing music for a remake of the TV series Route 66]
You wait a lifetime for the job but then they call you up and say, "You're hired." It's not a good idea to ask questions when you get your dream job. It's much better to say, "How much?" not "Why me?" Don't undermine their confidence, if you can bring yourself to say it, say, "Well, I'm actually kind of busy."

Doing a video just means you have a song, maybe you hope it was a miniature movie in people's minds, and then you have to put pictures to it. So you think really hard of something -- since you thought you already did that in people's imaginations because that's what you thought music was for, to stimulate people's imaginations -- so then you have to put that all aside and think of some affordable imagery that will go on television to go with it. And usually at some point you just throw up your hands and say, "You do it."
I've always said I thought the next big talent might be like a director/songwriter. Michael Stipe did a lot of their early videos, didn't he? But I'm not a visual thinker, I have no desire to be a filmmaker, I'm not a director, I don't think in pictures and angles, and it's just somebody who doesn't know anything about a subject who's suddenly forced in the middle of it. It's at least honest if they throw up their hands and say, "I don't know what to do." And in one case I said, "I don't know what to do, get George Clinton to dance with me and Paula Abdul to choreograph it," and they did, for "Leave My Monkey Alone."

The phrase just came to me. My work habits get slowly slightly better over the years. And there was one time when I said, "'I can't do anything unless I think of a cute phrase." And the phrase just came to me. And the next person -- I remember being in the supermarket with her -- and I just turned to her and said, "Sentimental Hygeine, ah?" I had already half-written the song before it occurred to me before it occurred to me that it was a cheap pun, like mental hygeine or dental hygeine. And I suppose a seminotics specialist could analyze it.

There seems to be something going on lately that sounds shockingly like what I would call bubblegum music. It's got a lot of distorted guitars, but essentially it's kind of candyass music. I guess I like hiphop music generally better than I like pop music. I think it's exciting, it's vital, and sometimes it's very good rock and roll, whatever your criteria for rock and roll, which I don't hear a lot of. When they bring back the musical equivalent of bellbottoms for a day, it doesn't move me. So I like Ice-T, I like Schooly-D.  I think  it's a very powerful music. And the irony is that the only original music being made today is being made of bits and pieces of the past. A lot of the rest of the music is like a tired rehash of the past -- "Llet's do '69, let's do 71." 

We're past the end of rock and roll. In our time, nothing lasts really long. We've already closed the book on Bill Clinton and it's only been three months because the media assimilates and disseminates information faster and faster. But they have new polls for new data and we've all had our personal responses to it. But to nostalgically believe there is a rock and roll music is unwise, because then our eyes will be closed when the virtual reality Picasso comes along. In my era all of a sudden guys sang as well as they could and wrote their own songs. Tony Bennett didn't do that, Frank didn't do that, and Gershwin didn't do that. But suddenly it was what people did. And some of us worked hard to sing passably well. Because that was the only way we saw ourselves doing it. 'I'm going to write these songs and I'm going to sing them. If Linda Rondstadt wants to record them, that's great, but I'm going to sing them.' I think rock and roll is Neil Young. I think rock and roll is the Rolling Stones. And I think it's perfectly appropriate when they're sixty to sing about being horribly misunderstood old people as it was to sing, "My Generation." 
"Start Me Up," it's just one of my favorite songs, and I definitely didn't write it. I've always said I write songs because I want to hear them. I try to write my own hit parade. I've always said, "No one wrote 'Lawyers, Guns and Money,' so I did,"' but I didn't write "Start Me Up." There's no other reason to write songs. My job is to write the songs I want to hear, and record them in a way that whatever I've heard seems the most entertaining recording, and work on it until I'm so sick of it I can't listen to it myself.

---

It may make me one of those "kidults" the NY Times wrote about recently, but I have a hard time not running my mental fingers over the scabs of things I enjoyed so much in the past. To that end, I've been obsessively chasing down things Duran Duran (despite having only a passing interest in their continuing viability in the past few years; admittedly, they are a fivesome again, which changes things) and reveling in the glory that is Fame. 
 

It was one of the first R-rated movies I ever saw, and I only got a chance to watch it because I had nice kindly parents for whose kid I babysat who would a) let me use their VCR when we did not have one to watch my, uh, Duran Duran greatest hits video album (yeah, I was that kind of fan -- I even kept the receipt from the video store when I bought it) and b) rent me movies to watch when the kid went to sleep. Nice people! So Fame kind of went over my head at the age of 13 or 14 that I saw it, but it was so bloody wonderful (and much more grown up than the TV series, which I think is what got me into wanting to see it in the first place) and mysterious and that, coupled with my love of Grease solidified for me that high school was going to be way cool. Achem. Anyway, the neat thing was some of the actors from the TV series were also in the movie, but in the movie they could beR-rated! So you can see where this is going: I had a raging crush on Bruno the magnificent, played by Lee Curreri (above there on the piano and at left in all his big beautiful curly hair glory). (I think he's showing off that his hands are insured by Lloyds of London, but I'm not sure.) (I would like to note here that my middle-school to college-age years were, largely, a series of unrequited crushes on famous or semi-famous men with amazing hair. That seems to have been a theme. If you had great curly dark hair you were mine, mine, mine, but that wasn't a requirement. I see my continuing admiration of Patrick Stewart (baldie at left-o'clock) as a major leap of evolution on my part.) But I digress. How wonderful was that movie anyway? I'm a sucker for musicals; I have a fervent, if totally cornball and idiotic wish that we could all just break out into song and be proficient on whatever instrument happened to be nearby and be able to jam with everyone in the room at a drop of a hat. So, I loved Fame, and I loved the series. (And yes, having listened to film director Alan Parker's DVD commentary -- shut up -- I know he hated, hated, hated that show.)

And come on, talk about hair: Paul McCrane (Jesus, that's a butt-ugly Web site) went from a sensitive, gay, actor songwriter in the film with an incredible bush of red hair (barely visible in this shot from the film, but the only one I could find) into the asshole we know today on ER. I still can't see him any other way. (Though he'd be perfect playing the title role in The Michael Moriarty Story, should someone ever pen one.)
 

before. gay, with hair

after. asshole, no hair.

I rest my case on the hair situation.

Anyhow.

It was just a great little bunch of stories about adults (well, for me at that time, older teenagers were adults) who were dealing with all sorts of things I'd never seen in the movies yet -- and they were singing and dancing! Spontaneously! -- at the same time. It was also infinitely irritating that some plot points never got resolved (this is "adult" storytelling; still, it frustrates me): Was the comic's little sister raped? Did the comic and Paul McCrane get it on after he bombed at the comedy club? Why, oh, why, didn't Bruno have more of a story than propping up Irene Cara? These questions and more were not answered by the DVD, alas.

I'm not sure where I was going with this. Except that I'm enjoying Fame all over again, having bought the DVD and the soundtrack, which I'm now playing obsessively. And no, I'm not watching that stupid reality-TV version, nor do I have any intention of going to see whatever it is they've got going on Broadway. Yipes. Unless Lee Curreri makes an appearance. I love that his phone number and email address and real address are on the Internet. And that he wrote his own bio at the IMDb. How cute is that? He's on Earthlink!

I've known about them since the 3rd one; I'm on a mailing list that sends me fun and unusual activities going on around the city. But once they hit the main media and became gimmicks, I knew it was near the end. So when I got the email below, I decided: Now or never. Be a part of the fad. Why not? Maybe in the 70s I would have streaked. 

So, the anatomy of a Flash Mob.

First, the email:

XXXXX WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10 XXXXX
 

Mob No. 8

You are invited to take part in Mob, the project that creates an inexplicable mob of people in New York City for 10 minutes or less. Please forward this to other people you know who might like to join.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. The end?

A. Yes.

Q. Why?

A. It can't be explained. Like the individual mobs, the Mob Project appeared for no reason, and like the mobs it must disperse.

Q. Will the Mob Project ever reappear?

A. It might. But don't expect it.

Instructions for Mob No. 8
Start time: Wednesday, September 10, 7:41p
Duration: 5 minutes

1. During the day on September 10:

a. Synchronize your watch to
http://www.time.gov/timezone.cgi?Eastern/d/-5/java/java
b. Obtain two $1 bills. Keep them handy.

2. By 7:20p, based on the month of your birth, please situate yourselves in the bars below. Buy a drink and act casual.

January, February: Bellevue Bar, 538 9th Avenue, between 39th and 40th streets; March, April: Dave's Tavern, 574 9th Avenue, between 41st and 42nd streets; May, June: Bull Moose Saloon, 354 West 44th Street. between 8th and 9th avenuess; July, August: Mercury Bar and Grill, 659 9th Avenue, between 45th and 46th streets; September, October: Siberia, 356 West 40th Street, just east of 9th Avenue; November, December: Smith's Bar and Grill, 701 8th Avenue, just north of 44th Street.

3. Then or soon thereafter, a Mob representative will appear in the bar and will pass around further instructions. The instructions will tell you when to disperse. Make sure that two minutes after the specified time, you are no longer at the Mob site.

4. Do not return to what you otherwise would have been doing. The instructions will tell you another place to go, afterward, if you like. And do not await instructions for Mob No. 9. They will not arrive; not for a long time, at least, if ever.

I love absurdity. So I told my friend Cheryl and we met at Smith's, both having birthdays in November and December. I got there early and read while sipping a vanilla Absolut/Diet Coke. It was pretty cool, low-key and the drink was only $4, a relative bargain -- basically what you'd expect from a bar not a few feet from a nudie bar and complete with an open-air food fryer in the front. I liked it; the bartenders were older and wore ties. But slowly, the younger class and people with piercings began to fill up the place. Cheryl and I talked until the designated time of 7:20, when a hipster slacker looking guy in a fisherman's cap walked around with a stack of small papers, face down, and handed them out indiscriminately. If you were there, you could have one. Here is the paper:

Cheryl was intrigued.

She sipped her soda ("too sweet!") while I used the can; when I got back she said she'd overheard this dialogue: First guy: "What's a mob?" Second guy: "Something for bored white people to do." Heh.

We figured we had a minute or two to get to our location, but by the time we got to 42nd and 6th, we could see a crowd gathering and people rushing to reach the spot. A feeling of insanity and delight overcame us and we ran to, to a place where there were so many people we couldn't see what the "performer" was doing, although I did see someone filming us, so perhaps that was it. Anyway, on the way running over we imitated the crowd and screamed as if the Beatles were there. It was hilariously freeing and, on top of the drinks, perfectly appropriate. I heard someone behind me say, "What is it? What's going on?" And I just started snapping pictures.
 
 

And this was all I got to see, really. A lot of yelling and laughter and hilarity at a spot we couldn't make out and then, five minutes later, dispersal.

Cheryl and I got the next train home; it's a school night and parties on 10th street are not for us.

The mob endeth!