Everybody Wants Some (2 page)

Around the holidays, the family played music together, with Eugenia seated at a huge electric organ. Yet Mrs. Van Halen was more traditional, and very concerned with taking care of the family. Though she pushed the boys to practice their music lessons, she hated the idea that they would eventually become musicians. Sometimes she was as much a mother to playful Jan as she was to her sons. “The whole time I was growing up,” Eddie told
Guitar World
, “my mom used to call me a ‘nothing nut—just like your father.’ When you grow up that way, it’s not conducive for self-esteem.”

When they reached the fourth and fifth grades, the Van Halen brothers began imitating acts from
The Ed Sullivan Show
like the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five, whose “Glad All Over” awoke Edward to a new kind of popular music. These were the first bands to break into the pop charts because schoolkids liked them—and Eddie and Alex were schoolkids who could already play music. So at Hamilton Elementary School they formed their first band, the Broken Combs, with Alex on saxophone like his father, Edward on piano, and various schoolmates including Brian Hill on drums, Kevin Hill on an Emenee-brand plastic guitar, and Don Ferris on second sax.

Playing original songs like “Rumpus” and “Boogie Booger” at hot venues like the school lunchroom, Alex and Eddie overcame their awkwardness adapting to American ways. Forget about fitting in—now they were somebody special. “Music was my way of getting around shyness,” Eddie later told
Guitar World
.

There were other ways to steel a timid heart. When Eddie was twelve years old, he was attacked and bitten by a German shepherd while on a family trip a few miles from home. To quell his younger son’s distress and numb the pain, his father prescribed a shot of vodka and a Pall Mall cigarette on the spot—inducting the kid into two lifetime habits.

By junior high school, the Van Halen brothers had both picked up the violin, and Alex was good enough to make the all-city orchestra. But the television tempted them with a wilder kind of music. Eddie remembered sitting on the couch, plucking out the cool detective theme to
Peter Gunn
on his violin strings. Classical music didn’t stand a chance—the boys wanted to play music standing up. Hoping to keep Alex’s musical progress on the level, his parents bought him a nylon-string guitar and sent him to flamenco lessons.

Meanwhile, Eddie started a paper route. “The only honest job I ever had,” he later joked. He bought a $125 St. George drum set and began studying songs by the Dave Clark Five.

Alex learned slowly on the guitar. He upgraded to a cheap electric and a Silvertone amp but remained frustrated by his progress. So while Eddie was out making collections for his newspapers, Alex slid behind the drums and started banging away, copying licks by Buddy Rich. Soon he mastered the primitive caveman rolls of “Wipe Out” by the Surfaris, a high mark of distinction in any school yard. Feeling somewhat frustrated at the unfair turn of events, Eddie picked up Alex’s guitar to show that turnabout was fair play. When he impressed his older brother by learning “Blues Theme” by the Arrows, the true natural order of things quickly became obvious.

By age twelve, Edward owned a $100 four-pickup Teisco Del Ray electric guitar from Sears and was tackling instrumentals like “Walk Don’t Run” by the Ventures. His first guitar amp was a chicken-wire model handmade by a friend of his dad’s. Eddie’s early guitar instruc-tor in absentia was Eric Clapton, the heaviest player of the day, as Eddie figured out every riff and solo that Clapton recorded with the Yardbirds and Cream. He tried painfully to mimic the records but later admitted his versions never sounded quite right—his biggest fault was being unable to avoid his own style.

As they surrendered to the growing rock and roll scene, the Van Halens became infatuated with Jimmy Page in the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck from the Jeff Beck Group, and the unpredictable Jimi Hendrix. Surprisingly, considering the comparisons that came later, Eddie was not so into the wilder, free-form playing of Hendrix. “He used a lot of effects, and I couldn’t afford the wah wah pedals and fuzzbox,” he said.

Whenever Eddie broke the rules or neglected his piano, Eugenia Van Halen would lock his guitar in the closet for a week, the ultimate punishment. Friends at school also recalled Eddie getting in trouble for touching the sacred Steinway concert piano, the pride of the music department—but the penalties were light thanks to his aptitude and his impish grin. Remaining in lessons until age sixteen with a new, typically strict Lithuanian teacher named Staf Kalvitis, Eddie took top prize at Long Beach City College’s youth piano competitions for three years running. The first year, he missed accepting the prize onstage. Sitting in the stands when they called his name, he froze, pretending not to hear the announcement. He didn’t know how to accept an accolade.

Though his fingers were dazzling, Eddie could never read sheet music as well as he should have. Alex was an excellent sight reader, but Eddie’s performances were painstakingly crammed into his brain note by note, phrase by phrase, in advance. The judges at piano contests praised his unusual interpretations, but as far as he could tell he was playing it straight. “The only reason they ever wrote music down is because they didn’t have tape machines,” Eddie later complained. “Do you think Beethoven or Bach would ever have written things down if they had twenty-four-track tape machines?”

Since the Van Halen home was too small to host band practice, the brothers keyed into jamming with local kids whose houses had garages. They formed a band called Revolver, and progressed from the Ventures to heavier covers by Cream and Mountain—power trios centered around guitar and drums. “I approached the drums not as an instrument, per se,” Alex remembered, “but more as an attitude—viciously attacking something” with the biggest, heaviest drumsticks available.

At thirteen, Alex began subbing for the drummer in his dad’s wedding band, keeping time to jazz and salsa tunes driven by clarinet and accordion. Eddie frequently joined on bass, playing the oompah music lines. “One of Al and my first gigs together was with my dad at the La Merada Country Club,” Eddie recalled. “We’d be the little freak sideshow while the band took a break. I would play piano or guitar and Al would play drums.”

The first night on the floor, the boys passed a hat around to the dancing couples and collected twenty-two dollars. Their father gave each of them five dollars, and said: “Welcome to the music business, boys.”

David Lee Roth was born on October 10, 1953, in Bloomington, Indiana, where his achievement-oriented father, Nathan, went to medical school. After the senior Roth graduated, he moved his family several times, first to a small ranch in Newcastle, Indiana, where Dr. Roth became the caretaker of a menagerie of horses and swans. Next the parents took David and his two sisters, Allison and Lisa, to the East Coast, settling on East Alton Court in Brookline, Massachusetts, outside Boston.

David was an energetic kid, but he was plagued by allergies and fought with health problems that forced him to wear leg braces from almost the time he could walk until age four. Then he was shipped off to therapy for the better part of a decade. At nine years old, he began three intensive years of clinical treatment for hyperactivity. He had a few healthy outlets—Roth’s parents called his dinner-hour routines “Monkey Hour,” when he acted out cartoons and sang revved-up vaudeville songs for dinner guests.

Though his mother, Sibyl, taught high school music and language classes, Roth claimed his parents were nowhere near as tuneful as the Van Halen family. “I had no musical influences to speak of,” he told MTV. “My idols were always Genghis Khan, or Muhammad Ali, or Alexander the Great, or the guy who invented McDonald’s hamburgers.”

By his telling, he wasn’t suffering from lack of concentration. Everyone else was simply having trouble playing their part in his continuous mental picture show, a fast, animated flipbook of
Mad
magazine and
Playboy
. Dave was obsessed with Bugs Bunny, Tarzan, and blackface song-and-dance man Al Jolson, whose songs he played on old brittle clay 78s. Later, he loved Elvis Presley—but not the music, just the movies.

While Roth’s head was swimming in pop culture, his roots were knotted tightly around the Old World—his grandparents were Ukrainian Jews who traded the mountains and steppes of Eastern Europe for the sweltering cornfields of the Midwest. In fact, all four of his grandparents spoke Russian. “My great-granddaddy died dancing,” he later joked with a TV interviewer, “at the end of a rope.”

When Roth was seven, his movie-buff dad took him to see
Some
Like It Hot
, the classic Billy Wilder film where Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon dress in drag to get close to Marilyn Monroe. “Life turned into an ongoing quest to be in that movie, just somewhere in that movie,” Roth told
Rolling Stone
. On the way home that night, while his eyes were still boggled, his dad detailed the plot to
Robin Hood
—the movie Mrs. Roth thought he was taking their son to see.

The rambunctious David found a kindred spirit in his uncle Manny Roth, a bohemian hepcat whose small Café Wha? on MacDougal Street was a nexus of New York’s Greenwich Village beatnik scene in the early 1960s. Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen, Bill Cosby, and Richard Pryor all tempered their antiestablishment acts there before a highly engaged cosmopolitan audience. “New York certainly reflects the dinner table I grew up with,” Roth later told an interviewer. “Obviously it encouraged me.”

Summer trips to New York impressed on young David Roth that, guidance counselors and behavior therapists be damned, there was a big wide world that craved and coveted extravagant personalities. Uncle Manny bought him a radio for his eighth birthday, hoping to feed the kid some inspiration. “I put it on, and there was Ray Charles singing ‘Crying Time,’ ” David said, “and I just knew I had to be on the radio.”

The Roths left the East Coast for California in 1963, when Dave was ten, just in time to fall under the spell of the Beach Boys in their prime—America’s only real defense against the Beatles. From his new home in Altadena, young Dave shuffled off with his tousled hair and tennis shoes to fourth grade at the Altadena School. Meanwhile, Dr. Roth’s ophthalmology practice thrived—he became a successful eye doctor, and was also active in local theater productions. Throughout junior high, Roth remembered a poster hanging over his bed given to him by his father, picturing two chickens meeting a turkey above the caption “To thine own self be true.”

After three years as a Tenderfoot Scout, Roth left behind his boyhood like the Van Halen brothers abandoning their tree house when he discovered his life’s future work. He once reported losing his virginity on a beach in Tahiti at age thirteen, under a full moon and over a girl who didn’t speak English. “She kept saying she liked me, she liked me. I know she meant she
loved
me—but ever since I’ve had a complex.” Tahiti came to be Roth’s catchall perfect setting for stories that may have only taken place in paradise. In his memoir,
Crazy from the Heat
, he reported another crucial moment in his early sex life—getting a blow job behind the bushes in the suburbs while looking through someone’s living room window and seeing Johnny Carson on the TV.

As Dr. Roth’s career bloomed, the family moved to the affluent section of Pasadena. When integrated busing arrived, Dave became a societal guinea pig, sent to predominantly black schools from sixth grade onward. He boasted of his ingrained blackness later, but at the time being a fair-haired white hippie meant lots of fights. He put gobs of Brylcreem in his hair, he liked to do headstands, and school became an all-day talent show. Teachers didn’t know what was wrong with him.

Despite his effusive personality, Dave was something of a loner, an overly intelligent rich kid with delusions of grandeur. He felt persecuted, and yet above it all. He had vulgar candy-sprinkled ideas of sexuality, a by-product of learning about the world through the twisted twin lenses of
Mad
and
Playboy
. Despite his father’s money, he was always a worker: at the end of his junior year at John Muir High School, Roth bought himself a stereo with the dollars he earned shoveling dung alongside Mexican gang members at a stable.

A bench-clearing brawl during a gym-class football game led to a brief stint at boarding school. More rules only brought more resistance, so after one semester in uniform David rejoined the teen scene at public school, his wild streak intact. “I never went to class, but I went to school,” he said. “I used to sit under a tree in the parking lot playing guitar.” He attracted girls and cultivated a rep for his unusual old-time repertoire and generally gleeful demeanor. While fighting a constant cultural war at home with his attentive parents, he carefully pushed his public image to the brink—his short-lived trademark was a bleached skunklike strip down the center of his hair.

A native midwesterner like Roth, Michael Anthony Sobolewski was born on June 20, 1954, at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Chicago. His family lived in a working-class section of what was then the breadbasket of blue-collar America. Michael was the second of five children, and the oldest boy. His dad, Walter, played in polka combos, gigging often at the Aragon Ballroom with musical prankster Kay Kyser, the popular bandleader who wrote “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.” Walter encouraged Michael to play the trumpet too.

The Sobolewski family heeded the same clarion call that lured the Van Halens and the Roths westward, first testing the waters during a short move in 1963. In 1966, they left Chicago for good, settling in Arcadia, California, a town five miles east of Pasadena, where Jan Van Halen worked as a hospital dishwasher. Walt Sobolewski continued playing at dances, performing standards for other midwestern transplants and old-timers.

Michael became a long jumper at Dana Junior High. He played trumpet in the marching band, and stayed active in sports, going out for baseball. After his older sister, Nancy, brought home psychedelic acid-rock bands like Electric Flag, Cream, and Blue Cheer, Michael’s attention wandered to the loud, animal side of music. He learned the walking bass line to Electric Flag’s “Groovin’ Is Easy” and admired the band’s bassist, Harvey Brooks. Straying from the conformity of the high school band, he idolized bassist Dickie Peterson of Blue Cheer—an iconoclastic hippie whose tough attitude was basically one giant middle finger to the world.