“Next thing I know, I’ve got the Everly Brothers sitting in my hotel room.” Waddy Wachtel on his 1970s adventures with Warren Zevon — from Robert Johnson’s licks to “Werewolves of London”

Years before he became a go-to guitarist for artists like Linda Ronstadt, Stevie Nicks and Keith Richards, Waddy Wachtel cut his teeth as an L.A. session player. It was there that, in 1972, he was hired to play guitar on the Everly Brothers’ Stories We Could Tell album and join them on a subsequent tour.

The man who hired him was Warren Zevon, the keyboardist and guitarist behind 1970s hits like “Werewolves of London,” “Lawyers, Guns and Money” and Linda Ronstadt’s “Hasten Down the Wind.” At the time, Zevon was just another struggling session player. As Wachtel explains, he and Zevon didn’t hit it off at first.

“We were like oil and water right away,” he says.

In addition to working on songs for the album, Wachtel rehearsed the Everlys’ set list in preparation for the tour. Although Wachtel knew the songs, Zevon proved to be a taskmaster.

“He said, ‘We’ll play this song, and then you’ll play it,’ and I said, ‘You can leave out that step and we can just play it, because I know these tunes.’ He goes, ‘No, we’ll play ’em the way I say.’”

When they got to “Walk Right Back,” the Everlys’ 1961 number-seven Hot 100 hit, Wachtel noticed Zevon wasn’t voicing the piano chords correctly.

“I’m sitting there thinking, This guy doesn’t like me already, and he’s not playing it right. There’s something wrong in the voicing he’s playing on the piano. This is not gonna go down well at all.

“So I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it this way, but you’re not playing it right.’ And the bass player, who had been with the Everlys for a long time, tells Warren, ‘He’s right.’

“We were always kind of like that with each other.”

Despite their initial problems, Wachtel says working with Zevon was illuminating.

“Every night we would get together after we’d play the show and go to someone’s hotel room and play and sing all night long. It was so great, and I learned so much about blues from Warren. Aside from his amazing songwriting, he knew so much about blues and playing these Robert Johnson licks and singing these tunes I’d never heard.

“It was really educational for me — as it was when he would say, ‘Oh, yeah, here’s something I wrote,’ and he would play me ‘Frank and Jesse James.’” The song would be the narrative-driven masterpiece that leads off Zevon’s 1976, self-titled album. “And I’m like, ‘Where did that come from?’”

Eventually the Everlys began to wonder where their band went every night after the show.

“One night Phil Everly goes, ‘What’s going on here at night? What are you guys doing?’ I said, ‘We’re playing all night long. You should come by.’”

Phil came one night, followed by Don the next.

“Next thing I know I’ve got the Everly Brothers sitting in my hotel room, sitting on the floor. Everybody’s having a drink, smoking cigarettes — you can’t even see, there’s so much smoke in the room. And there’s the Everly Brothers singing in your hotel room.

“It was more than a dream come true could ever be. I idolized them from the second I saw them on TV when I was a child, and there they were, sitting on the floor singing these country songs.”

Years later, in 1977, the guitarist and keyboardist were reunited for Excitable Boy, Zevon’s 1978 breakthrough album. This time, however, the two men were well established in their careers and got along like old friends. In addition to playing guitar and synthesizer and contributing backing and harmony vocals, Wachtel co-produced the album alongside Jackson Browne, Zevon’s friend who helped champion his career.

He even had a co-writing credit on the album’s break out hit, “Werewolves of London,” on which he played alongside Zevon and the Fleetwood Mac rhythm tandem of drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie.

Warren Zevon - Werewolves Of London (Official Music Video) [HD] - YouTube

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“Jackson brought me on to co-produce Excitable Boy,” Wachtel says. “When I was working with Warren, we had this understanding. I could hear the way a band should interpret his songs, so that was my gig, really. I could hear the way the songs went.

“There were no written-out parts or anything. I would play the guitar, Warren would play piano, Bob Glaub or Lee Sklar would play bass, and for drums we had Russell Kunkel or Rick Marotta or Jeff Porcaro, Jim Keltner — we used every drummer in town.”

“I had a lot of leeway on Excitable Boy. I was able to try things and do a couple of multiple tracks, just the set-up. Like, ‘Johnny Strikes Up the Band’ — at the beginning of that solo there’s, like, three different tunes making up the melody, but the notes kind of ring into each other, which would be impossible to play normally. So there’s things like that.

Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner - YouTube

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“One thing that was a great moment is when we did ‘Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.’ The ending on that song is a specific, written-out section. I got to the studio before Warren, with Russell Kunkel and Bob Glaub, and I said, ‘Don’t worry about the rest of the tune. We can read that down as it goes.

“‘When we get to this ending I want to surprise Warren, so let’s work on this ending now — the “Patty Hearst heard the burst of Roland’s Thompson gun and bought it.”

“So we learned that part, ran it over and over.”

When it came time to record with Zevon, the take went off without a hitch. Zevon was impressed that the band had nailed the difficult ending on what he assumed was their first attempt.

“Warren just jumped off the piano bench, saying, ‘What?! Man, pay these guys double scale! They really know their business.’”

Clearly, Zevon knew his. As Wachtel notes, the keyboardist was also a guitarist — he left his favored Modulus Blackknife electric guitar to David Letterman in 2002, shortly before his death — and had a feel for where and how to use the instrument. One song that stands out in particular is the Excitable Boy track “The Envoy.”

“Normally he’d let the rhythm be him on piano and me on guitar,” Wachtel says. “On ‘The Envoy,’ Warren looked at me and goes, ‘Can I play the guitar solo on this?’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure, of course.’

“And it’s great. It’s a real melodic, structured section. Beautiful.”