The 1974 acid-fuelled Nevada road trip that resulted in Warren Zevon’s marriage: “Pouring down vodka the whole way”
While Warren Zevon was a vastly underrated songwriter who seemed to receive the bulk of his attention from his peers, one of the main reasons for being so overlooked was perhaps his propensity for self-destructive behaviour.
The likes of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen are just two names who have called him a genius, but having a host of immensely talented songwriters hailing him as an unsung great didn’t mean that he got anywhere near the commercial attention he deserved, especially not during the height of his activity in the music industry.
Even his most famous song, ‘Werewolves of London’, was something of a disappointment, failing to break into the top 20 in the US, while the album from which it originated, 1978’s Excitable Boy, was his highest-charting when it peaked at number eight. These aren’t terrible returns by any stretch, but they’re arguably far below what would be expected of someone who has written a song that has now reached a certain level of ubiquity, only further underlining his misfortune.
The gaps between releases probably didn’t help his case either. After one unsuccessful solo album in 1970, he spent most of the rest of the first half of the decade as a sideman, performing with the Everly Brothers and occasionally writing songs for others before returning to his own craft with his self-titled 1976 record.
But while the lack of attention he received during this time may have been a source of frustration for him, it was arguably his impulsivity and excess in other areas that provided one of his biggest obstacles. For example, Zevon chose to move to Spain on a whim in 1975, seemingly cutting himself off from the career he’d been building slowly, but had made an even more extravagant trip of sorts the year before.
It was during 1974 that he got married to his wife, Crystal Brelsford, but to call it a conventional tying of the knot would be incredibly amiss, given how the pair chose to be united in holy matrimony following a drive across the Nevada desert completely out of their minds on LSD. During a 1981 interview with Rolling Stone, he recounted the events of the day as best he could, although how reliable his version of events was could be up for debate.
“Hunter Thompson-style, we drove all night with a best man and bridesmaid, recruited at the last minute, across the desert to Nevada after dropping acid, me pouring down vodka the whole way,” he recalled. “In spite of the dope, which had worn off anyway – we both cried and took the ceremony and our marriage very seriously.”
His erratic tendencies around this time would seemingly only continue, with him deciding to up sticks and head for Tangier in Morocco shortly after he was betrothed to Brelsford, supposedly only taking a small amount of luggage with him in the form of prescription drugs, vodka, and F Scott Fitzgerald as reading material. It was the following year that he decamped to Sitges in the Catalonia region of Spain, allegedly to stave himself off the substances and get his head straight.
You could say that things ended up working out for Zevon, given how it was after this tumultuous period that he had the most success in his career, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s the troubled life of Zevon that tended to make the headlines more than his exceptional work.
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