Everybody Wants Some (3 page)

At fifteen, with younger brother Steve on drums and friend Mike Hershey on guitar, Mike formed Poverty’s Children, later known as Balls. His bass was a cheap Japanese Teisco guitar belonging to Hershey—they removed the two highest strings to create a “bass” guitar. Though he played catcher on local baseball teams as a left-hander, he considered himself ambidextrous—in fact, he started playing bass as a lefty, and switched sides because a right-handed instrument was easier to find.

Since Michael wasn’t sure how to tune a bass, he tuned the four strings to an open E chord for the first year. He soon acquired a Fender P-bass copy at a local flea market. Like Alex Van Halen, Michael also played with his father’s band, a polka combo, tooting a trumpet for pocket money up until college.

By their midteens, Alex and Eddie were regularly performing live sets of covers by Black Sabbath and ZZ Top, while joining their dad for his regular gig at the North Continental Club in North Hollywood, acting as designated drivers when needed. They were several inches, many dollars, and quite a few decibels short of where they wanted to be, but they were resourceful and shameless enough to beg or borrow any equipment they needed for their gigs.

In 1971, the Van Halen boys formed the Trojan Rubber Company, a power trio with neighbor Dennis Travis on bass. Already the boys were little-league outlaws. They smoked cigarettes like European street kids—their mom, Eugenia, even bought them packs to smoke. They had to call themselves the Space Brothers to get permission to play a Catholic high school—the priests and sisters found cosmic drug references more acceptable than a band named after condoms.

By any billing, the Van Halen brothers became known for their spot-on impersonations of cool hard rock bands like Cream and Cactus. Eddie had been playing through a 100-watt Marshall guitar amp from the time he was fourteen. Competing in a local battle of the bands against kids eight to ten years older, Alex was already stealing shows with a bombastic set piece—Ginger Baker’s entire fifteen-minute-plus drum solo from “Toad.”

While other kids were dating, experiencing heartbreak, getting into fights, and enduring the endless social humiliation of high school, Eddie sat most of those years out. Sequestered in his bedroom, he entered into a long-term relationship with his guitar. “Everybody goes through their teens getting fucked around by a chick or not fitting in with the jocks at school. I just basically locked my room for four years,” he said.

His mind may have been with his guitar, but his skill as a guitarist made him popular. He experienced sex at an early age, and girls were always interested in this sweet, shy boy. In the eleventh grade, his steady girlfriend became pregnant. “It was very confusing,” he told writer David Rensin in
TeenAge
. “We didn’t even have enough money to go to a doctor to see if she was pregnant. And getting out of school to take care of it was a feat in itself. Luckily I had a friend in the school office who gave me blank admit slips.”

The potentially life-changing event was over quickly, before gravity really kicked in for the young couple. “She wanted an abortion,” Eddie said. “We went to Planned Parenthood and talked it over. We were worried about her parents and my parents finding out, about getting busted for cutting school. Eventually her parents did find out, and their reaction surprised me. It was ‘why didn’t you come to us and let us help?’ I thought they’d call us scum.”

Stashing the experience in the back of his mind, Eddie stayed focused on his guitar and his band with his brother. Though their schoolmates were already wild about them, at one show they completely changed the life of a kid from a nearby school, Dave Roth. He was a sponge for all forms of culture, high and low, mass and micro, and followed every dance craze from the Twist to the Freddie—yet he was somewhat sheltered. His parents forbade him to go to big rock concerts—until he was nineteen and snuck off to see Humble Pie. So when teenage Roth first saw Eddie Van Halen playing guitar, he saw the light.

“Eddie was kind of a mentor,” Roth later told a TV interviewer. “I saw what he did with his fingers, and I knew that’s what I wanted to do with my feet, and with my voice.” Praise be and hallelujah.

By the time Alex Van Halen graduated from Pasadena High School in 1971, he and his brother were well-regarded fledgling musical professionals. Continuing to direct and manage his band with Eddie, Alex started music classes at Pasadena City College. He signed up for a composition class, where he arranged
West Side Story
for a fourteen-piece jazz orchestra, and was still subbing with his father’s wedding band when needed. “I was surprised by how well Alex played our kind of music—polkas and waltzes,” said Richard Kreis, a regular bassist in Jan Van Halen’s group. “He carried the rhythm of the band! And while we set up before the bar opened, he’d watch the door while I got the beer from the tap.”

The brothers had outgrown their neighborhood bands—the Trojan Rubber Company closed shop after bassist Dennis Travis moved away. In 1972, Alex and Eddie formed a new group with bassist Mark Stone. They wanted to call themselves Rat Salad, the title of a Black Sabbath instrumental from the ultra-heavy, groundbreaking new
Paranoid
album. Instead, the Van Halen brothers chose the name Genesis—the optimistic beginning of a musical career of biblical scale.

As Genesis began playing backyard parties in Pasadena, a friend jokingly drew up a poster announcing “Genesis at the Forum”—summoning a hilarious fantasy that the band would ever be big enough to play L.A. Forum. Then one sad afternoon Eddie came home from the record store and glumly informed Alex that their band already had an album out—he had discovered the latest record by the British progressive rock band Genesis on the new-release shelf.

Afterward they became known as Mammoth, a wild and woolly beast that promised a heavy step. For a while, the Mammoth lineup included a keyboard player, which Eddie hated because the electric piano filled up the sound and tied down his guitar playing. Besides playing guitar, Eddie also sang lead vocals in Mammoth, though singing was not his strongest point.

“Rock Steady” Eddie, as he became known at school, soon followed Alex to Pasadena City College, where he studied composition with Dr. Truman Fischer, also a former teacher of Frank Zappa’s. Fischer was a follower of the visionary composer Arnold Schoenberg’s stern belief in learning the rules so you could completely ignore them. From this professor, Eddie received his lifelong creative license: If it sounds good, it is.

While setting up on stages in high school gyms and auditoriums, Mammoth met fellow heavy travelers like Snake, boogie rockers who played ZZ Top and Foghat covers. Snake also lent the Van Halen brothers equipment—which was to be expected. Alex remained perpetually a few pieces of gear short of the bigger, better show, and he was shameless about borrowing what Mammoth needed to slog onward.

Snake’s leader, vocalist and bassist Michael Sobolewski, had graduated from nearby Arcadia High in 1972. He crossed paths with Alex Van Halen at Pasadena City College, studying psychology until his father gave him permission to switch to music. Even on rudimentary originals, Mike’s powerful lungs, expanded by blowing trumpet and running track, were an obvious strong point.

Another of Alex’s classmates at Pasadena City College, Dave Roth, frequently supplied Mammoth with a PA system, but at least he had the good sense to charge ten bucks a night for rental. At one point, Roth auditioned for Mammoth, but the band was unimpressed with his free-wheeling renditions of Cream and Grand Funk Railroad standards. At that ill-fated meeting, a nervous Eddie left the room so older brother Alex could break the bad news.

Undiscouraged, Roth formed the Red Ball Jets, an R&B-influenced act that played old rock and roll covers like “Johnny B. Goode,” a band where a huge horn section wouldn’t have been out of place. They rehearsed in the basement of Dr. Roth’s office building in San Marino, and frequently faced off against Mammoth in local battles of the bands in public parks. “It was never about the music for him, it was about the show,” Eddie recalled. “He was like an emcee, a clown. He was great at what he did.”

Biding his time with theater courses in junior college, Roth was a big personality for a small suburban city. His constant manic energy grated on the down-to-earth teenage rock scene. He wore ridiculous costumes, talked constantly, and strutted and preened like the sex god he obviously believed he was. Mike Sobolewski’s first reaction when meeting Roth was, “Jesus Christ, get this guy away from me!”

Borrowing liberally from his inspirations, Roth built his singing voice from an articulate palette of screams, including the primal roar of Ian Gillan from Deep Purple, the orgiastic squeals of the Ohio Players and Cold Blood, and a whole bag of tricks from obscure midwestern soul singers like Major Lance. Jim Dandy Mangrum of Black Oak Arkansas, a godfather of cock rock, claims that Roth asked permission to film his shows at a Hollywood club. If true, Roth was learning stagecraft from a lurid master. “It’s better to steal,” Roth later told MTV. “Inspiration doesn’t come from nowhere. You don’t lie in a dark black room and a burst of light appears with the hand of the Lord offering you a song. It doesn’t happen like that. You have to steal it from somebody. You change this and you change that—if it was good enough for Beethoven, it’s good enough for me.”

Reconsidering his early rejection, Alex Van Halen sensed a fellow warrior in Roth. Besides, his brother was struggling as lead vocalist of Mammoth. Though his voice would have been adequate in any other local act, compared to the wunderkind’s magical guitar his singing sounded dodgy. Not only did Eddie’s playing shame other guitarists, it shamed his efforts as a frontman. Alex started to envision a whole package. Besides his boundless drive, Roth came with a rehearsal space, an Opal Kadett station wagon for transportation, plus the PA system that was currently costing Mammoth plenty of dough. So in late 1973, David Lee Roth joined Mammoth, and the band ditched the Blue Cheer/Cream power-trio configuration that had gone out of style in the late 1960s, becoming a quartet like Led Zeppelin—the template for the 1970s.

As Eddie’s reputation spread, his picture-perfect renditions of the guitar gods gave way to a fluid yet unpredictable style he described as “falling down the stairs and hoping I land on my feet.” “I sometimes wonder myself when it was that I turned the corner and went my own way in playing,” he told
Musician
, “because the last thing I remember was playing ‘Crossroads’ and being Eric Clapton. All of a sudden, I just changed.”

Shortly after David Lee Roth joined Mammoth, their hapless keyboard player was given the boot. The next business was a name change—“Mammoth” sounded too ponderous. Roth suggested “Van Halen,” a cool, memorable moniker like Santana that would stand out on a poster next to other local bands like Snatch or Kuperszyth. Next, Van Halen devised their first band logo—loopy, with descending lines that looked like musical notes.

Graduating from high school auditoriums, the next step for a fledgling hard rock band was playing the informal backyard party scene. Rock ruled for California teens in 1974, and massive crews of kids in tank tops and cutoff jean shorts passed the hot summer nights with kegs of beer and ample opportunity to score cheap grass. By the time Van Halen played their first backyard party, they were already able to muster nine hundred paying heads.

In demand from the start, Van Halen played everywhere they could draw electricity—outdoor parks, the backyards of mansions, and roller rinks. Where extension cords couldn’t reach, they took electric generators. The locations became familiar—Huntington Drive, Arden Road, Colorado Avenue, Hamilton Park, and Madison Avenue—all announced on mimeographed party flyers with hand-drawn maps. Friends remember an early flair for showmanship, like Eddie sticking his cigarette in the headstock of his guitar in emulation of Keith Richards. Eddie’s lead guitar playing was unrivaled. He usually closed shows with an extended firestorm based perfectly on the electric blues boogie “Goin’ Home” by Ten Years After—no easy task, as their guitarist Alvin Lee had been billed the “fastest guitar in Britain.”

Inevitably the police arrived to bust the backyard parties, sometimes in helicopters, to keep the revelry from going too far over the edge. For the kids, it was all part of the light show, and “crime scene” videotapes made by the police remain the ultimate unseen early documents of Van Halen. When the cops broke up the show, the kids would scatter, spreading out into suburban neighborhoods, scrambling in their sneakers through culverts and vacant lots, evading the long arm of the law, hoping to regroup before night’s end. If they were lucky, Van Halen would arrive at the next party, and Eddie would seize whatever guitar was available and reel off a few choice tunes in the living room.

There were minimal distractions at that time—no video games, no VCRs, no Internet chat rooms, and no cable TV. There were barely even any skateboards. When they outgrew GI Joe dolls and Evel Knievel action figures, live rock bands gave kids a setting to entertain one another. While the adults of California partied with cocaine in hot tubs, the children got wild in the streets with cheap beer and little plastic sandwich baggies stuffed with green grass. Not only was AIDS not an issue, there was no War on Drugs, and the drinking age was for all practical purposes nonexistent. “Back in 1972 I OD’d on PCP, thinking it was cocaine,” Eddie later told radio interviewer Mark Razz. “That’s when I first got exposed to that stuff, and I didn’t know what it was.”

Along with neighborhood divisions came territorial rivalries. Van Halen represented the San Gabriel Valley and fought for turf against the San Fernando Valley’s Quiet Riot, who dressed in polka dots and showcased their own guitar prodigy, Randy Rhoads. Innocent but extremely headstrong, Van Halen weren’t above a bit of sabotage, unplugging amps to steal the thunder of opening bands and hurry themselves onto the stage. “What’s a party without any guests?” Dave taunted from the stage. “A Quiet Riot concert!”