Everybody Wants Some (12 page)

When 1982’s “Hide Your Sheep” tour began that July, Eddie was still mostly playing souped-up “Frankenstrat” guitars that were hot-rodded in the truest sense: jimmied for a weekend run in the mud, not carefully polished to look good in a magazine. Even when officially sponsored by Kramer Guitars starting in 1984—making Kramer the top-selling guitar of 1985—Eddie continued to use his old guitars under some subterfuge, sticking Kramer necks on the old Charvel Strat bodies for appearance’s sake. He used other fine touches to his technique—like boiling his strings to break them in quicker, or lightly sanding the parts of the guitar where stage sweat tended to make the surface slick.

At the end of 1982, Kramer swapped out the whammy bars in its guitars, ditching the old Rockinger units in favor of the Van Halen–supported Floyd Rose tremolo. Floyd Rose had patented a number of improvements to guitar whammies that required licenses and royalties in all units sold, and Eddie had been integral in the development of the system, testing and finessing the system from prototype to polished product. “I’ve never asked Floyd for anything for my help,” Eddie told 
Musician
, feeling he deserved more than a thank-you after tens of thousands of Rose-licensed tremolos had been sold. “I was very involved in development on that thing. I don’t care what he says. He kind of threw me a bone, but I’m a bit ticked.”

A 1982 
Los Angeles Examiner
 article contained shocking allegations that the band had gotten mellower backstage, and that Eddie had begun spending more time alone with his guitar behind the little red door marked “Tuning,” slinking out occasionally long enough to grab a sandwich and a bottle of Blue Nun.

There were gritted teeth some nights as the others became less enthused about Roth’s backstage three-panty operas. His credo remained as ever: “What you see onstage with Van Halen is probably what you’ll find underneath the stage. And what you see backstage is probably what you’re going to find upstairs in the hotel.” He proclaimed that vigorous parties were the nightly payoff for a life increasingly spent in the back of limousines and radio station hospitality rooms.

Dave’s entourage expanded to include Danny Rodgers and Jimmy Briscoe, two little people with a big wardrobe, waist-high circus clowns recently escaped from the Ringling Bros. Their tough-guy outfits poked fun at the growing security around the band, and they played a major part of the permanent ongoing photo op Roth called normal. “When you look out of your bedroom door and a midget goes by in a bath towel, you know you’re not in life insurance,” he told the London 
Times
. “I believe in leaving the door open and letting everyone take a look. A fantasy is no fun unless everybody shares it.”

So when 
Life
 magazine arrived in Detroit to photograph the band in September, Roth insisted that the band wives stay at home. He claimed the constantly bickering married couples were a distraction. The others complained that Roth was overdoing Van Halen’s party-boy image. In any case, at least one high-profile wife, Valerie Bertinelli, had her feelings hurt. The rifts in the band widened, yet the gambit worked: 
Life
 wrote that “the most ferocious rock band on the road in America today” was performing “joyful rituals of excess,” while readers gorged on photos of Roth examining a pair of panties thrown onstage and nearly having his snakeskin spandex ripped off by an open-mouthed admirer.

Van Halen’s 
Life
 photo spread appeared in the same issue as a sad report on primates at a run-down animal farm. Wrote one disgusted reader afterward, “I found myself contemplating who the animals really were—the gorillas or the Van Halen rock band. It is my hope that Van Halen and others like them are soon the endangered species.”

The fans could have used a little protection from the band after Dave streamlined his system for ordering sex at shows. The security team had drawn up a grid to help them identify troublemakers, dividing the floor of the concert hall into regions, so bouncers on headsets could quickly point out someone who needed attention: “Aerosmith shirt, hunting knife, sector C-5.”

Roth subverted this system for his own lascivious reasons, distributing laminated backstage passes to the security staff, each marked with their initials, then from the stage calling out, “Blonde, pink top, sector A-4,” pointing out the girls he wanted to see after the show. Whatever crew member’s name Dave saw flapping around on his favorite girl’s neck backstage at the end of the night would get a hundred-dollar bonus at breakfast the next morning. As far as intimacy went, it was a little like the invention of the drive-through window at McDonald’s, but the morale of tour staff remained high.

David Letterman confronted Roth on this practice, expressing his disbelief at the apparent callousness toward sex. “Well, this is the eighties, Dave,” Roth said drolly. “We want to interact with the audience as closely as possible, because music is a sharing experience. I feel that we can use technology to bring ourselves closer to each other.”

When tickets went on sale in Las Vegas, at least two thousand fans flew into a frenzy, causing more mayhem than the four members of the band could manage. As the fans on line grew impatient, they began pushing and fighting, smashing glass bottles, and eventually tearing down a security fence and shoving a mobile trailer used as a box office off its foundation. Some things were just simply worth fighting for.

Standards of decency were defined and defied community by community, however, and in October 1982, Worcester, Massachusetts, celebrated the band with “Van Halen Day.” “I’m dealing with all parts of the body,” Roth explained the band to TV’s 
Nightwatch
. “You pay $8.50, and it’s not enough to just hit up your ears. You gotta hit up your ears, you gotta hit up your eyes, and then work your way down.”

On the road with the lightweight band After the Fire in 1982, Van Halen were routinely selling out 14,000- to 30,000-capacity venues almost every night of the week, grossing nearly $100,000 on average. The real money was in merchandise—if only 8,000 kids bought a $15 concert T-shirt, Van Halen were still leaving the venues with an extra $100,000 per night in small bills.

As Roth described in his book 
Crazy from the Heat
, this action drew highly organized bootleggers who sold low-quality Pakistani shirts for $5 outside the shows. The shirts had hilariously bad designs, they were inked with a substance that immediately crumbled off like dried egg, and they shrunk to infant-size if washed. Van Halen’s merchandise team went to war against the black marketeers, battling over turf in arena parking lots across the country, with victory going to whichever team had the most muscle, law enforcement clout, or extralegal allies in their corner. They even copied the shirts, selling low-quality knock-offs of their own, printed in Day-Glo colors with Roth’s approval.

The tour romped into 1983, starting with a victory lap through Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay—well-planned warm locations to play during January. The band’s decadence continued unabated, with cases of booze, crates of beer, and untamed rivers of wild, willing fans. Fresh from military dictatorships in several stops, the South American rock scene was still a fly-by-night business, where unsavory characters were eager to take full advantage of freedom. Van Halen loved the adventure—they were recharging their own youthful enthusiasm, the wild spirit that dies when portioned out only in marketable pieces.

They were among the first Yankee marauders to leap off the pages of magazines onto South American stages. The gesture was appreciated, especially as golden-haired Roth rapped to crowds in Spanish, Eddie ripped through “Spanish Fly,” and Alex’s drum solo adopted Latin-inspired licks. “We sold 140,000 tickets and maybe 15,000 albums,” Roth told 
Faces
. “We had motorcades, escorts, we were treated like national heroes. Now I know how to fight for the right to do this the right way—to tour when we want to, in the right way.”

“Turn off the goddamn bass amplifiers, will ya? Shut ’em down,” Dave shouted in Buenos Aires before winging the four-minute Spanish version of “Oh, Argentina,” accompanying himself on acoustic guitar. He unfurled a large Argentine flag before launching into “Ice Cream Man,” and at that moment he probably could have been elected president.

While the tour continued, Eddie unfortunately lost the chance to produce a record for one of his influences, the British jazz fusion stylist Allan Holdsworth. Now a powerful protégé, Eddie had paved the way for Holdsworth’s I.O.U. Band to sign with Warner Bros. He wanted to work with a player he had already declared a guitar hero’s guitar hero. Unfortunately, Holdsworth grew tired of waiting for Van Halen and forged ahead with producer Ted Templeman. Eddie was disgruntled—especially since he wanted to play with guest vocalist Jack Bruce from Cream. But Holdsworth had underestimated the value of Eddie’s fingers—he found himself back on an indie record label within a year.

When Van Halen retreated from South America at the end of February, Roth lingered below the equator for a few weeks of overachiever’s holiday. Renting a rickety riverboat named the 
Marcia
, he launched a six-week jungle expedition up the Amazon River with his best friend, Van Halen security chief “Big” Ed Anderson. They requested a visa from the Brazilian government to visit protected Amazonian Indian tribes living in the densest rain forest near Peru. It was a reverse kind of missionary adventure—where Roth and Big Ed indoctrinated themselves in the ways of jungle survival. They hunted and fished in loincloths, and Roth got mosquito bites the size of golf balls. They happened upon a remote village where the locals threw a pinga and cachaça sugarcane alcohol party for their guests that Dave described as “Triple Christmas.”

As Roth and Big Ed’s boat sputtered into the heart of darkness, the villages along the river were warned of the advance of the Americans by shortwave radio. The entourage was hard to miss. At their final stop, they were welcomed with the desperate message: “Call home!” Some kind of catastrophe had happened that needed immediate attention back in the States.

As it turned out, Van Halen had been offered a million dollars to play a single show in front of half a million people, and they were freaking out because their singer was floating around a jungle out of contact. So Roth and Big Ed located a German geological expedition and were bivouacked out of the Amazon during a fierce rainstorm. They spent four more days traveling back to California. A week and a half later, after a brief hospital visit, Dave was cured of microbes, parasites, stings, dehydration, and was ready for Memorial Day.

US Festival ’83 was a three-day confluence of music and new technology masterminded by multimillionaire benefactor Steve Wozniak, one of the two founders of Apple Computer. Wozniak had lost $5 million on US Festival ’82, and he was looking to lose a few million more for the sake of a breakthrough cultural event that would draw hundreds of thousands of people to the San Bernardino Valley over the holiday weekend of May 28 through May 30.

Describing the event as a whole tour’s worth of work for one show, Van Halen needed to put together video and radio programs as part of the agreed package. Preparations began while the band was still sweating out the arrival of all of its equipment and its lead singer from South America. To promote their lucrative appearance, unofficial band photographer Neil Zlozower re-created the classic Iwo Jima photo, with the four soldiers of Van Halen raising an American flag over a pile of dirt while David Lee Roth gripped his rifle and gazed off into the great unknown.

The paycheck for this gig would land Van Halen in the 1984 
Guinness
 
Book of World Records
. The initial offer was for a scant million, but their contract called for a payday equal to or greater than any other band on the bill. When Wozniak offered David Bowie $1.5 million to appear the following day, Van Halen automatically got a $500,000 raise. If Eddie had taken his mother’s advice and studied computers at DeVry, he wouldn’t have earned as much in ten years as he brought home that evening. Roth joked that after paying for the production and giving the managers and agents their cut, he barely had enough money left to buy a dual-motor off-shore racing yacht. Asked if he thought the band had been overpaid, Roth laughed and said, “Honey, I always sing like a million bucks!”

For their first show in over three months, Van Halen would play on Sunday—heavy metal day. The temperature reached ninety-five degrees by early afternoon on site at Glen Helen Regional Park by the time the music began. The $20 ticket also bought performances by Quiet Riot, Mötley Crüe, Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest, Triumph, and Scorpions. “I think the only way we really fit in was volume-wise,” Eddie told 
Guitar World
.

Quiet Riot and Mötley Crüe were still unknown L.A. club bands, while Ozzy Osbourne was finding his feet after the devastating loss of guitarist Randy Rhoads in an airplane accident. Judas Priest were a known quantity and delivered powerful, leather-clad British metal to the hot summer crowd. Triumph were the oddballs—a breather act, a mellow Canadian power trio whose best years were behind them. The adoring crowd loved them one and all—journalists reported that the applause at 1 P.M. for Quiet Riot was higher than for the headliners the previous day.

Creating a stupendous buildup, Scorpions played a well-choreographed and cataclysmic set, culminating in a human pigpile with the guitarists scraping their strings and squalling feedback for at least ten minutes. The German band brought the day to an explosive close. Before Van Halen could begin, however, announcements and proclamations for world peace on the stage ate up more than an hour. And while the band waited, naturally they partied.

The previous day, headliners the Clash had made much ado about their own $500,000 payday, scraping their consciences loudly while a band spokesman hilariously denounced fellow performers Sting, Stevie Nicks, and “Van Halen and 
his
 moron music.” They petulantly agreed at the last minute to play, saying, “Van Halen will call us Commies if we don’t.” A later conversation between Eddie Van Halen and the Clash’s Joe Strummer reputedly cleared the air, but there was a line drawn in the sand between them. As it was, many rival bands already felt like Van Halen used up all the oxygen in the room.