Everybody Wants Some (36 page)

The years were flying fast. Hagar was now fifty-six, and Eddie forty-nine. Since they last played together, MTV’s
Headbangers Ball
had been canceled, forgotten, and resurrected. Van Halen returned in a whole new era. Like Rip Van Winkle, they had awakened to a torrent of new realities. Life was no longer as easy as walking out onstage and blazing through “Eruption”—although audiences were paying upward of $100 each for tickets hoping Van Halen could prove that it could be.

Reviewers came away with mixed reports, often from the same show. The band sounded rough and raw—they opened the gates to classic Van Halen spontaneity—not the tightly calibrated war machine that made them great, but actual chaos, which was almost as good. They had never really rocked with Hagar before, and the pop audience weaned on “Right Now” sometimes interpreted raucousness as sloppiness. For one thing, this was the Sammy trained on seventies rock and now shaking coconut trees every night in clubs, not the highly processed poofster of the 1980s. Meanwhile, a whole new generation of fans who know Van Halen only through Internet downloads of their glory days were shocked that the brightly lit boys of 1978 were now old grizzled men.

The fans in 2004 were themselves a far cry from the hearty Pasadena teenagers who had overturned police cars while fighting for their right to party. The typical ticket buyer in 2004 had been a horny undergrad in 1992, and had gotten laid at a dorm room kegger with the help of “Right Now.” Now their kids were entering junior high school, standing right next to them, seeing their first rock concert. The only backyard parties these folks were hosting were suburban barbecues, careful not to piss off the homeowners’ association with loud music.

Playing to upward of forty thousand faces some nights, the tour was a financial success—yet it was a creative wash, and an interpersonal flop. “We had a few bumps because old things came back up again from time to time on the road between Sammy and Eddie so it was a little bit shaky,” Mike told
Burrn!
Bad blood between Sammy and Eddie put the kibosh on early plans to extend the reunion to Europe, Asia, and South America, scratching the chance to return to the Van Halen family homeland, Holland.

Following in his pal Hagar’s footsteps, Anthony was delving into foodstuffs with a boutique hot sauce launched in 2004. Like Hagar, he won peer approval—two awards from
Chile Pepper
magazine. Yet he claimed that Van Halen lawyers called every radio station in the United States in advance of their interviews to warn against promoting Cabo Wabo tequila or Mad Anthony hot sauce. A St. Louis radio DJ was asked to change his Cabo Wabo shirt before the before the band arrived for the sake of keeping the peace. “Isn’t that one of the benefits you’re supposed to reap from all these years of success?” Anthony complained.

The edges were not as sharp, but the band impacted with blunt force. In South Dakota, an overexcited thirty-year-old fell fifteen feet from the balcony and injured his head and shoulders. The Winnipeg show marked the end of an era, as the city-owned Winnipeg Arena was shuttered after forty-nine years as soon as Van Halen left the stage.

In Boston that June, Eddie showed off his talents and his demons. He commandeered the grand piano in the Ritz-Carlton hotel lounge, but rather than hammer away like a rock idiot, he dazzled guests with exquisite jazz standards. He also allegedly wandered into a small restaurant wielding a bottle of wine, stuck his fingers in the water glasses of a young couple, and flicked water on them to give his blessing. But if Eddie was behaving erratically, the public was forgiving. “When you’re Eddie Van Halen and you’ve weathered a hip replacement, overcome tongue cancer, and watched your marriage dissolve after 20 years, you deserve the ovation,” wrote Melissa Ruggieri of the
Richmond Times-Dispatch
.

Eddie missed his former partner in crime by a few days—on Independence Day 2004, David Lee Roth performed “California Girls” and “Jump” during a nationally televised appearance with the Boston Pops. Dressing his age in an open-necked linen shirt and vest, he could still summon a couple of high kicks and 360-degree twirls for the all-American congregation of flag-waving picnickers.

At Van Halen’s Meadowlands appearance outside New York City, Eddie played a blazing solo, then appeared to start to cry. He sat down to play “316”—the song named after his son’s birthday—and was immediately joined onstage by thirteen-year-old Wolfgang, ready to perform the song as a duet.

An exceptionally proud dad, Eddie gushed about Wolfie at every opportunity. Speaking openly about his emotions as a father, he echoed Jan Van Halen when he proclaimed he knew no better feeling than having his son follow in his footsteps. Eddie also touted the boy’s talents as a guitarist, bassist, and drummer in superlative terms. “When his balls drop, he’s my new lead singer,” he had joked in late 2003.

For Christmas in 2003, Eddie gave Wolfie one of his three original Frankenstrats, last used on the
1984
tour. The guitar had been in its case for nearly twenty years. Eddie installed one of his patented D-Tuna mechanisms, but didn’t even change the funky old strings. “It’s fun showing people I can play guitar,” Wolfgang told
Rolling Stone
, “even though I’m better on drums. I’m gonna keep practicing. Someone’s got to carry on the family name.”

“It’s a bummer that my dad never got to see him,” Eddie later told
Guitar World
, speaking of his son, “but for all I know he may be my dad.”

During the 2004 tour, Van Halen played for as many as twelve thousand people per night in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City—the Mandalay Bay Center in Las Vegas sold out in half an hour. Yet some dates in the Dakotas and Kentucky were more like four thousand, and not even half full. Overall in 2004 Van Halen sold 716,650 tickets, according to
Pollstar
, grossing $54.3 million. They reported merchandise revenue at ten dollars per person. On the backs of over half a million CDs sold in 2004, the band went over the margin and added six additional multiplatinum awards to their walls. Still, the bar had been set very high, with guarantees as high as $1 million at some shows.
Rolling Stone
thought the band had missed its mark, and would have to “settle for less” with its next tour. Then again, the magazine had ranked Eddie the number 70 greatest guitarist of all time in August 2003, only two spots above Joni Mitchell—their metrics were hardly more than idle chatter.

The 2004 tour operated on thin high-stakes margins, however, and one cancellation led to a $2 million lawsuit. In April, the Baltimore Orioles offered the band a cool $1 million to play at their outdoor Camden Yards baseball field, which Van Halen rejected. The proposed date was too difficult to route into the existing schedule, plus Van Halen’s show was geared toward indoor arena venues. The Orioles countered in June with a generous $1.5 million plus 80 percent of merchandise sales, which the band accepted. A few weeks later, however, the Orioles organization cooled on the deal, and in late July reneged on the offer. Incensed, Van Halen pursued the lawsuit, asking for damages to the tune of $2 million. They were no longer in the position to be building relationships—they were collecting on their prestige and legend and did not like being jerked around.

Eddie’s slurring during some interviews could be written off after his tongue operation, but it was apparent that a lot of nights he was plainly drunk onstage. “I hate to talk smack about anyone in the band or whatever,” Michael Anthony said reluctantly during a radio interview, “but Eddie’s still doing a bit of drinking and everything. There were nights where it was kind of like a roller coaster, up or down. I would have liked to see him totally clean up if we were going to take this further, because gosh, we could have gone all around the world with it.”

“He was pretty out of it the whole tour,” Sammy Hagar told Melodic Rock.com. “There were nights when I didn’t even know what song he was playing. Nobody else did either. We just stayed on the same song while he stumbled around the neck of the guitar. I think Eddie is as innovative as Jimi or anyone else. Together we wrote some of the greatest songs in rock history. With Dave they wrote some of the greatest songs in rock history. I would sooner leave it alone and say let this thing go down as one of the greatest things. I don’t want to keep going out there and butchering it.”

Separate dressing rooms and limos soon became separate jets. Mike Anthony bemoaned the lack of camaraderie. By the end of the tour, Sammy was no longer appearing for soundchecks. One of the few bands bigger than Van Halen, their former opening act Metallica, released a soul-searching documentary during the 2004 tour. Titled
Some Kind of Monster
, the all-access film covered the painful spats, alcoholism, and opulent waste that brought a six-year delay between studio albums and nearly broke up the band. Sammy Hagar didn’t think that confessional approach would work for Van Halen. “We already went through the misery once,” he told
USA Today
. “Why relive a horrible experience?”

Hagar had learned lots of new tricks since his tenure in Van Halen, and his approach to fan interaction rankled others in the band. Wielding a microphone in one hand and a pen in the other, he signed all the shirts and posters thrown onstage—a crowd-pleasing turn that distracted the others. The clashes ultimately became evident offstage. Hagar appeared on KSHE in St. Louis with seventeen shows left. “I like my band better, I’m sorry,” he said. “I think the Van Halen thing is great, it was really my idea. I made the initial call, and I’m glad I did. It could have been better than it was. I think it was past its trip—it should have happened a few years ago. God help us if we waited any longer!”

Before 4,300 fans in Tucson, Arizona, on November 19, the final show of the tour, Eddie smashed two Peavey Wolfgang guitars and so ended his thirteen-year affiliation with the manufacturer. During the past decade, the Peavey 5150 amps had become extremely popular with heavier forms of music, used by grungesters Alice in Chains, Swedish death metal band Arch Enemy, and Ozzfest mascara metalcore lads Atreyu. Eddie himself had been given over two hundred EVH Wolfgang guitars. Speculation at the Peavey shop centered on whether Eddie was miffed at sharing their attention with guitar guru Joe Satriani, who had joined forces with them for an amplifier.

After the breakup, Eddie kept the rights to his Wolfgang guitar, while Peavey restyled the 5150 amplifier as the Peavey 6505, retaining the same electronics and design. Interestingly to guitarists, one EVH Wolfgang collector went public with photos and descriptions of two versions of an EVH Wolfgang hollow-body prototype made by Peavey during the 1990s. He claimed the instruments had never been shown to Eddie, for fear the increasingly temperamental guitarist would fly off the hook at the sight of a mellow version of his trademark riffing monster.

The same night that he smashed his guitars, Eddie almost belted Sammy. “We almost got into it after the last show,” Hagar told
Billboard
. “They just pulled him one way, and me the other. We didn’t even say goodbye to each other. It was a horrible way to end the whole thing.”

While the media questioned Eddie’s stability, actual working musicians put a lot of amplifier royalties into his pocket for his contributions to the Peavey 5150 amp. Young guitarists didn’t buy the equipment simply for Eddie’s name, either—bands like In Flames were buying 5150s for their juicy distortion and multiple gain stages, not just because the guy smiling in the “Right Now” video designed them.

Not leapfrogging to a new guitar endorsement just yet, Eddie tapped the nostalgia market with a pricey EVH Art Series reproduction series from one of his original suppliers, Charvel. Three varieties of striped guitars aping Eddie’s glorified Frankenstrats were available for a few thousand dollars apiece, summoning the sound and feel of a San Dimas 1975 guitar if not the do-it-yourself attitude.

Chasing the momentum of the 2004 tour, as late as October Alex was still saying that Van Halen planned to record a new album with Hagar. By the end of the year, however, feelings had soured. Sammy claimed that Eddie was working too slowly, unable to finish his solos. “I don’t get along with Eddie anymore, and that’s all there is to it,” he said. “I don’t know what his problem is, but he’s miserable and he likes to make everyone around him miserable.”

Disappointed, Hagar moved his family to Cabo San Lucas, put his daughters in school, and spent time cooking, gardening, and managing his Cabo Wabo Cantina, tequila empire, and solo career. Whatever battering Hagar took, like his boxer father he did not allow himself to be knocked down. He was well practiced at making contentedness look convincing. “Whatever makes you happy,” Hagar advised, “you need to get more of that in your life”—and none of those things had the last name Van Halen.

Whatever momentum Van Halen summoned was sapped—which was sad for many reasons, not least because when Eddie’s energy was bottled up in this band, he could be explosive. Left free to wander, he hadn’t revealed as much music to the public in years. Privately, he wasn’t doing so well. He had long ago given up tall cans of Schlitz Malt Liquor for a full-bodied syrupy red wine called Smoking Loon, a far more potent and absorbing vice.

He was reportedly redesigning the Wolfgang guitar and his signature amps for the following year’s NAMM show. “Very few people keep up with my ass,” he told Iowa radio station KCQQ during a 4 A.M. interview. “I’m always doing something. People think I take on too much, but no I don’t. But when someone tells me they can do something, I expect them to pull through sometimes. I am probably the simplest guy you’ll ever meet.”

The next Saturday night, December 8, 2004—the anniversary of John Lennon’s killing—heavy metal guitarist “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott was shot dead onstage in Ohio by a deranged ex-marine. It was a horrible moment for anyone attached to the electric guitar in any capacity. Dimebag had been a member of Pantera for over twenty years with his brother Vinnie Paul, and had racked up an impressive portfolio of gold and platinum albums while continually speaking his adulation of Eddie Van Halen. During the lean era of the 1990s, Pantera kept stadiums filled with faithful hard rock fans eager for guitar solos.