Everybody Wants Some (5 page)

The boys were organized in their dogged way. They drove beat-up jalopies and secondhand vans with crooked wheels and barely enough room to haul gear. They began recording demos, though on their shoe-string budget it was difficult. They bartered and scraped together enough cash for sessions at Cherokee Studios and Hound Dog Recording Studios on Colorado Boulevard. Among the earliest tracks recorded were during 1974—the tenderly corny “Angel Eyes” with insufferable vocals by Roth, and the hot, rocking “Believe Me,” with Claptonesque leads by Eddie. The thundering “Simple Rhyme” and bass-heavy boogie “Take Your Whiskey Home” from the band’s third album also originated on these early tapes.

After two years of hustling at Gazzari’s, Van Halen took a slot on May 9, 1976, opening for the lethal British rock squadron UFO at the Golden West Ballroom in Norwalk. Usually Van Halen were happy to slip one or two originals into the playlist, but that night they made a major decision to perform mostly their own songs. Besides a midset block of songs by Aerosmith, ZZ Top, and Led Zeppelin, they played “On Fire,” “Last Night,” and “Somebody Get Me a Doctor”—plus a flashy guitar solo Eddie had developed called “Eruption,” which showcased his two-handed tapping style.

These early tracks would resurface over their first five albums, and bits and pieces would appear in reworked form for another decade. Most of Van Halen’s material was unique, heavy, and ready to go. Roth remained something of an ugly duckling, and the band was slightly off-kilter yet ridiculously good. Gigging disco covers, they had honed their background vocals, with Eddie and especially Michael shooting high-pitched harmonies to counter the missing horn section. When they started writing their own songs, those harmonies became a hallmark of the Van Halen package—Michael Anthony earned the nickname “Cannonmouth.”

Local impresario Rodney Bingenheimer liked the band’s originals at the Golden West Ballroom and recommended them for a booking at the Starwood—a den of ill repute in West Hollywood with several spaces, including a rock room that held a thousand. Slash from Guns N’ Roses hung out there as a teenager, selling Quaaludes, he told
Musician
. Unlike the Top 40 bars Van Halen had been playing, the Starwood didn’t want covers—or bands tainted by the stigma of playing Gazzari’s. From then until the end of 1976, Van Halen straddled the line, appearing at more prestigious gigs at the Starwood while still playing covers on alternating nights for old man Gazzari.

At that point, older brother Alex handled the band’s booking and management, and for years he would remain a band authority figure. The outgoing Roth played a different kind of leadership role, constantly repackaging the band’s image for the outside world with stage costumes, flyers, and publicity stunts. The music, the image, and the work ethic all flowed naturally from the same quarreling four heads—young dudes jumping down one another’s throats but united for a just cause.

“We were always disagreeing about what was the appropriate thing to do, but it was that belligerent, confrontational chemistry that created the music you grew up to,” Roth said. “Rather like all those folks who spent time at law or med school, it wasn’t something we got right away. It had to be whittled away and worked at.”

When it came time to register their first original songs with ASCAP, the band sat around a table at Dr. Roth’s house and discussed how to split the songwriting credits. They voted as a band to share the proceeds among all four members. “That was before we found out I’m the only one who writes,” Eddie later told
Musician
with a laugh. It goes without saying, though, that at the time the net proceeds were zilch.

Through their patron Bingenheimer, Van Halen were introduced to the way-out Hollywood in-crowd—tastemakers like Kim Fowley, who brought them to the Rainbow Bar & Grill in Hollywood. They began playing his song “Young and Wild,” which eventually popped up on a record by his protégés the Runaways. “Van Halen is a six-pack of beer, a big-breasted woman, cruising down the highway running over animals,” Fowley said admiringly. In fact, they were cruising across Highway 101 nearly every night, heading home from West Hollywood to Pasadena.

Van Halen saw behind the mask of the big leagues later in 1976, when Gene Simmons of Kiss took the band under his batlike wing. Looking to sink some of his new wealth into producing young bands with his company Man of a Thousand Faces, Simmons unexpectedly scouted Van Halen at the Starwood while out one night with rock courtesan Bebe Buell. When Simmons introduced himself, the band was overjoyed. Their other allies were way less glamorous. “They had a potential backer who was a yogurt manufacturer,” Simmons recalled in his autobiography.

Eddie called Simmons that very night after packing up his gear, and a few hours later Van Halen were ensconced at Village Recorder Studios in West L.A. Simmons talked a mile a minute at them, preening their rough edges with the wisdom of his rock-star polish. Interestingly, Simmons’s offer preempted his original intention—to produce a band who played earlier that night called the Boyz, featuring future Dokken hero George Lynch on guitar.

“Hey, it was our gig,” Lynch later said with a laugh to
Guitar World
. “All I cared about was that they didn’t suck and drive people away before our set. Then to see everything you thought you knew about guitar playing change right before your eyes at your very own show? Talk about depressed!”

To complete some guitar overdubs, Simmons sent Van Halen to Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village in New York City—Dave’s adolescent stomping grounds. Though the purpose of New York trip was for Eddie to record more disciplined solos, Simmons also claimed he took the band shopping for hipper clothes and bought them leather pants. The pants were fine, but Eddie hated overdubbing (recording his guitar parts twice). The process created a thicker sound, like on a Kiss record, but playing exactly the same parts twice in a row drove Eddie nuts.

When the ten songs for the Van Halen demo were finished, Edward and Alex helped Simmons with three new Kiss songs, including a take of the unreleased “Christine Sixteen.” Simmons later claimed in the book
Kisstory
that Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley replicated Eddie’s solo faithfully on the
Love Gun
album. Roth thought that Simmons wanted Eddie to leave Van Halen and join Kiss, which Simmons denies. “In 1977, there was certainly no talk of anyone leaving Van Halen. They seemed to be getting along well in those days.” Yet whenever Simmons invited Eddie to the studio or to a party, Roth made sure he was also there—and suspiciously his name was usually not on the guest list.

From the sessions came a polished studio demo featuring a thicker, more muscular production—a little like Kiss—that essentially captured what the band would sound like on its first album. Back in L.A., Roth took the tapes to Rodney Bingenheimer. His
Rodney on the ROQ 
show became the first radio program to air Van Halen’s “Runnin’ with the Devil,” complete with Roth’s original tremulous, quivering vocals and Edward’s snappy, fully developed version of the famous lead.

Ultimately, nothing happened. Unconvinced by Roth’s commercial prospects as a frontman—he wasn’t especially cute and his voice was far from smooth—Gene’s manager, Bill Aucoin, passed on the project, opting in favor of Piper, a more manageable and marketable Stones-influenced act led by guitarist Billy Squier. Aucoin also thought Van Halen sounded too similar to Black Oak Arkansas. Eddie and Roth remembered Aucoin having his shoes shined during the meeting. Afterward, Simmons handed Van Halen back the demo tapes and wished them the best. Before ending the fling, the Kiss bassist offered some career advice—he urged Van Halen to change their name to Daddy Longlegs, and presented them with a new band logo picturing a spider wearing a top hat.

The band remained a hot L.A. attraction despite the career misstep. The front end of 1977 found Van Halen gigging every six weeks at the Whisky a Go Go, a bank building turned temple of hedonism on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood where the Doors had been the house band until being fired for lewdness. The cover charge was a respectable four dollars, and Van Halen would usually be sandwiched between acts like Berlin Brats and Orange. They shined in a locale that billed itself as the birthplace of caged go-go dancing.

After the brush with the big time, their ambitions expanded, along with their original repertoire. They were constantly dangling new inventions during the act, ranging from the sturdy metal of “We Die Bold” to an acoustic Humble Pie cover between Eddie and Dave called “79th & Sunset,” a kind of protégé for later album cuts like “Could This Be Magic.” They played every cover song as their own, and they treated every Van Halen song as if it were already a huge hit.

Showing their versatility, on March 13, 1977, the band went back to the Golden West Ballroom in Norwalk for a “Punk Rock Ballroom Blitz” where they played first on a bill of three bands headlined by the Ramones. Though Van Halen were a different breed than the punks, they played with punk bands at the Whisky often and they branched from some shared influences: the Sweet, Black Sabbath, and the Shangri-Las.

Van Halen’s image in 1977 was still very glam, swathed in satin and mirrors. As Roth said many times, “We try and look like the music sounds.” In moments of extreme glitter excess, Eddie bought a pink satin bell-bottom suit that made him look like a disco pimp, and Mike donned a glitter gold jumpsuit. Sometimes Eddie wore a cape. “Eddie never needed that stuff,” local musician John Driscoll explained to
The Inside
, Van Halen’s fan quarterly. “He sounded great playing in backyard jam sessions, pinching off lightning quick riffs and smiling sheepishly while David Lee Roth pranced and strutted and generally tried to hog the scene.”

Unlike other club bands, Van Halen weren’t too cool to put on a show. Besides the spandex and spangles, they experimented with smoke bombs and lighter fluid. Former high school jock Michael Anthony did somersaults while playing bass. Alex bought a board rigged with horns taken from different cars, which he abused to create sound effects during “House of Pain” and “Runnin’ with the Devil.”

During 1977, the band started playing almost monthly at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium before an audience of three thousand per show. They didn’t need to paper the town with flyers anymore—the promoters did it for them. An advance team of fanatics became the self-enlisted Van Halen Army. Led by a giant kid named Danny who drove an old Ford Econoline van with the words “Van Halen” painted on the side, the Army encamped outside gigs, tailgating from late afternoon until the band hit the stage, wherever the next battle might be. Van Halen were hometown heroes—and that pride only increased as those wild teenage partiers grew up to be the social pillars of Pasadena.

Already the backstage was becoming a social focal point. The goal was for everyone to outdo the others, whether it was with girls, gusto, guitars, or graffiti. When all else failed, Alex could be counted on to act weird, popping open beer bottles with his teeth and draining them without using his hands, pushing a party over the edge. He was especially fearless, like a six-foot-tall version of Animal the drummer from
The Muppet Show
.

While the young men of Van Halen started to feel like rock stars, they were still rehearsing in Dave’s parents’ basement. Except for the filth and noise of their practice room, the nine-bedroom Roth mansion was a glamorous Mediterranean spread. Though Dave’s dad may have hoped for something more stable for his son than singing, Dr. Nathan Roth himself began to venture beyond ophthalmology around this time. Bitten by the show business bug, he began renting the family grounds for film and television shoots, then got into acting himself, winning bit roles in
The Bionic Woman
and a couple of beachside bikini movies.

The realities of a band fighting its way up from the gutter were too harrowing for prime-time TV dramas. There were countless close calls, potentially the stuff of Hollywood tragedies. After witnessing a disem-bowelment on the dance floor following a knife fight at an early show, Van Halen learned that setting their amps two feet away from the wall gave them room to hide if necessary—in effect, they built their own secret safe tunnels for when a gig got rough.

To distinguish himself from the crowded field of flashy rivals and imitators, Eddie decorated his guitar with a roll of tape and some spray paint, creating a trademark stripe motif that would eventually be used by the band to market everything from keychains to foam beer-can cozies. Eddie later applied the pattern to his golf cart. For the time being, it was just Eddie being different.

One of his peculiar stage tricks came from simple paranoia. Hoping to keep his innovative method of finger tapping to himself, Eddie began playing with his back to the crowd. The move didn’t work—word had already spread among the other guitarists on the scene—and it wasn’t necessary, as none of the others could touch his mastery of the technique. In any case, it was great showmanship, drawing the lay audience into his guitar cult.

As his arsenal of secret weapons grew, Eddie modified an Echoplex tape echo box to create a slower, lower delay, and then transplanted the guts into an Army-surplus torpedo dubbed “the Bomb.” Standing nearly as tall as Eddie, the big metal ordnance-cum-reverb-chamber took center stage during Eddie’s guitar solo, “Eruption.” He later claimed that playing with his back to the audience was only partially an attempt to shield his two-handed tapping technique from prying eyes—he also needed to face the Bomb to twiddle the knobs.

Alex added a second bass drum to his kit, creating a double bass tower behind which he was a monster. Double bass drums were not common at the time, but Alex’s idols Ginger Baker of Cream and Keith Moon of the Who had pioneered the practice. During Deep Purple’s early-seventies tours, Ian Paice played two bass drums on the song “Fireball,” but the Purple roadies would bring out the extra kick drum for that number only and remove it after the song was done.

All the California kids knew about Van Halen by now—the word was out among high schools, guitar stores, and hangouts all over Los Angeles. Finally, on a rainy weekday night in 1977, again at the Starwood in West Hollywood, Van Halen were discovered for the second and last time. A nephew of Milton Berle, talent manager Marshall Berle, showed off Van Halen to two big shots: Doobie Brothers superproducer Ted Templeman and Warner Bros. president Mo Ostin—the label exec who signed Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967.