Everybody Wants Some (7 page)

The album was not an instant hit but a slow and continuously rising success. At the end of May, it was certified gold. After a thousand nights in the beer halls, the cover band from Pasadena was finally about to be taken seriously.

Warner Bros. found Van Halen a production manager, Noel Monk, fresh off the road wrangling the previous year’s self-destructive great white hope, the Sex Pistols. He and acting manager Marshall Berle arranged an eight-man team to get the Van Halen convoy rolling. On March 3, Van Halen hit the road opening for Journey, a light rock band from San Francisco whose audience ranks were swollen with females. “People say this is Van Halen’s first world tour,” Roth cackled. “This is our first world vacation, man!”

At first they felt out of their element, no longer basking in the approval of thousands of hometown fans. They left home wearing three-inch platform shoes, pushing Eddie and Michael up toward six feet, where Roth stood in his socks. Alex decked himself out in a black-studded leather jumpsuit, his hair a nappy UFO that jived with his reputation as the wildest banana in the bunch. The whole band wanted so badly to look ace that observers remember even the crew wearing platforms. Before the first month was over, it was back to more practical sneakers for the band and Capezio dance slippers for the high-leaping Roth.

Everyone thought that Van Halen should consider themselves lucky to be earning a few hundred dollars a night, playing brief thirty-minute sets with dodgy sound, but they were used to raking in thousands selling out clubs back in Hollywood. The desire to succeed had brought them to the top of the barrel—now they flopped over into the very bottom of a much bigger pool. With sets as short as six songs some nights, no catering or sound check, the band soothed themselves by stealing food and girls from Journey’s backstage area while the host band was onstage. Eddie, out from under his parents’ watchful eyes for virtually the first time in his life, later admitted to “squeezing everything that walked” in 1978.

For half an hour each night, Van Halen bounced across the stage as if they were weightless on the surface of the moon. David Lee Roth worked his body into contortions and then sprang airborne with vertical splits. And those legs were straight—the corrective braces he had worn on his legs for two years as a toddler did their job. Roth allowed no resistance to his existence, except the tiny internal pilot light that told him it was all turbulence ahead. His was an ever-renewing energy that could be toxic when pointed in certain directions, but there is no underplaying how high his hyperactivity lifted the band upward.

At the time, few people thought rock would still exist in five years. Yet Van Halen played as if they didn’t yet realize that in rock and roll, nobody expected them to be this consistently good. Eddie traveled with a suitcase of guitar parts, often found open and scattered across motel rooms as his compulsive search for the perfect weapon continued. He continued composing new song parts into the wee hours, though he admitted to Jas Obrecht that often he was jamming just for the sake of it. “Most of the time I’m so high I forget them!” he said, laughing.

The stage effects in the Army-surplus bomb guaranteed chaos as the round, heavy, unstable war artifact toppled over and rolled around during nearly every show. That torpedo, a strobe light on Roth’s spinning scarf, and a logo banner fit for announcing a half-price pizza sale were the sum total of the production value for that tour.

The name Alex Van Halen soon dominated damage reports issued by band management, detailing lamps that had been drummed to pieces, smashed hotel room mirrors, bathroom doors off their hinges, toilet seats found in the parking lot, telephones hanging out the window, and room service carts wrecked from Mississippi to California. The rest of the band and their support staff and road crew made frequent guest appearances on the deduction sheets as well—Roth traveled with a wrench to open windows in hotels that tried to exercise climate control. He claimed he needed fresh air.

In Wisconsin, the touring menagerie trashed the seventh floor of the Madison Sheraton. There were no girls on the scene, nothing but a band of California wildmen set loose in the snow, tossing furniture out of a window several stories above ground. When Eddie found his room empty, he snuck into Roth’s room and swiped the table and chairs to replace his own. The adventure led to an apology of sorts in the liner notes for the next album, a gesture that also extended to “all the hall managers who waded through the rubble of Van Halenized backstages across the world.”

It paid to remain alert around the Van Halen encampment, especially after someone figured out how to build rockets by stuffing aluminum hotel towel rods with firecrackers. One uneventful evening, Alex was inspired to re-create one of his famous pyro displays in a motel parking lot. He found a pile of black rubber tires and, salivating at the idea of filling the sky with wretched black smoke, tried to light them on fire with a pack of matches, oblivious to the policeman waiting nearby with his gun drawn. “Finally, he says ‘what are you doing?’ ” Alex recalled, and the stunt was thwarted.

After Alex finally lit his hair on fire by accident onstage, he no longer doused his sticks and entire drum set with burning lighter fluid. The band decided to leave pyrotechnics to the professionals. His drum hardware also needed to be welded together, to support the weight of the singer jumping off the kit. “Drummers are people who make their living beating things with sticks,” Roth said admiringly. “Alex has got to be the main spirit of Van Halen—we named the band after him.”

Hitting Holland that May—where record shops couldn’t decide whether to file
Van Halen
under “V” or “H”—the California quartet with two Dutch-Indo brothers was welcomed with curiosity. They appeared on DJ Alfred Lagarde’s influential “Concrete Hour” show on national VARA radio, speaking Dutch with marked American accents. At the Amsterdam-area concert, the band added a cover of “Summetime Blues,” and won over an audience heavily populated by aunts, uncles, and proud cousins.

Van Halen were so good opening for Black Sabbath in England in 1978 that Sabbath toppled and broke apart immediately afterward. Their singer, Ozzy Osbourne, became completely demoralized and left the group. Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler later quipped sardonically that it was the first time after eight albums that Warner Bros., their American label, had ever bothered to come see the band—and then only for the sake of catching Van Halen.

To Sabbath’s credit, the metal forefathers recognized they were imploding on their own problems, and they bore the Californians no grudge. There was none of the sabotage that Van Halen had come to expect as an upstart opening act—in fact, Osbourne invited them to his home after a Birmingham show for a night of madman-style drinking. Roth recalled seeing Ozzy’s wife bring out his children in the morning to kiss their father good night, the helpless Ozzy sprawled unconscious on the couch.

The torch had been passed. When David Lee Roth victoriously opened bottles of champagne over the British crowd, he left Black Sabbath little room but to mop up after Van Halen’s party. The only cloud over the parade was that Sabbath’s British audience was just too male. Van Halen made up for lost time with an old-fashioned romp through the red-light district as soon as they hit Paris.

In Aberdeen, Scotland, the group learned of their first gold sales award. Celebrating both the gold record and their introduction to Glen-morangie scotch, they trashed their hotel room during a six-hour fire extinguisher fight. Since they had little to no Top 40 singles chart activity, the success of the album caught them by surprise. When the foam cleared, baton-wielding bobbies escorted the band out of the country, and Van Halen were not invited back to Scotland for almost two decades.

Van Halen were ushering in a huge change—they were a heavy metal band with obvious crossover appeal. But for all their black leather posturing and heavy metal riffage, they were equally at home onstage alongside the radio dreamboats in Journey. The secret formula was made up of equal servings of rebellious fire and old-time schmaltz like “Ice Cream Man.” The boys came for the guitar solos and flaming drums, the girls came for the bulging trousers and the winning smiles, and everyone went home happy. “Most of our songs you can sing along with,” Eddie explained in his first interview, “even though it does have the peculiar guitar and end-of-the-world drums.”

“I think a lot of Van Halen’s music could be construed as heavy metal,” Roth said. “A lot of it can’t be construed as any specific thing, except what we call ‘Big Rock.’ In essence that’s high-velocity music—we use volume to drive out the evil spirits. I see a lot of these categories as being based mostly on haircuts and shoes. My haircut’s alright for heavy metal, but baby my shoes are all wrong.”

Van Halen trekked to Japan for seven shows in late June, where they were hailed as conquering heroes. Jetting straight back to the States, the band arrived in Dallas, to play the first ever Texxas Jam on July 1. The other bands on the bill were strictly representative of the 1970s—including Cheech and Chong, Mahogany Rush, Eddie Money, and the Atlanta Rhythm Section. Arriving before their equipment, not for the first time Van Halen needed to borrow gear for the show. Funny, considering the later mass obsession over Eddie’s exact setup, Van Halen ripped apart eighty thousand Texas rockers with an early-afternoon detonation using rented equipment. “It was the most awesome show ever,” said Vinnie Paul of the Texas metal band Pantera, then a teenager.

Playing with Boston and Black Sabbath before fifty-six thousand people at Anaheim Stadium in California, Roth conceived a parachute stunt where a quartet of acrobatic skydivers would plummet from the sky onto the stage. During the mass confusion of the moment, the real wig-wearing daredevils ducked behind the amps, and Van Halen rushed onstage to fanatical enthusiasm wearing skydiver suits. Though he didn’t dive from a plane, Alex still managed to twist his ankle during the episode, tripping over a massive cable.

At the Day on the Green festival in Oakland, California, in July 1978, Eddie encountered a rock upperclassman, former Montrose singer Sammy Hagar. Eddie asked him why he quit his band, and Sammy told him that Ronnie Montrose, the bandleader, wouldn’t let him play guitar. “Ronnie Montrose was the type of guitarist who didn’t want another guitarist in the same building,” Sammy said.

After Van Halen’s show that day, Eddie granted what famously became his “first major interview” with writer Jas Obrecht of
Guitar
Player
. Eddie seemed almost unsure that he deserved the attention. “I’m always thinking music,” he said. “I’m always trying to think of riffs, using my head. Like sometimes people think I’m spacing off, but I’m not really. I’m thinking about music.”

Van Halen were assaulting the monsters of rock on their own terms and winning. The other young bands playing Hollywood in 1978 were mostly punks or new wavers like Devo, X, and the Germs, who attacked from below—the punks couldn’t beat Peter Frampton at his own game, so they changed the rules successfully. Van Halen went gunning for the majors head-on. They knew all of Aerosmith and ZZ Top’s tricks—they had been practicing them for years in backyard parties.

In October,
Van Halen
went platinum, a stunning mark for a debut album. It would remain on the
Billboard
charts for over three years—a total of 169 weeks. Edward bought a Porsche 911e Targa and practiced not smashing himself into pieces with it.

At the end of the year, Warner Bros. threw a party for their newest platinum playthings at the Body Shop strip club in Hollywood. Newly annointed manager Marshall Berle wheeled out his legendary uncle Milton to present Van Halen with their shiny wall plaques. Afterward, the Van Halen brothers went back to their parents’ small house, where the whole family still lived. Thanks to the amazing math of the record business, where every limo and light bulb is eventually charged back to the band, for their labors Van Halen now owed Warner Bros. close to a million bucks for expenses paid on their behalf.

The production plan for Van Halen’s second album was simple: If at first you succeed wildly, retrace your steps and try, try again. The band returned to Studio 1 at Sunset Sound Recorders on December 10, 1978, within a week of completing its first world tour. Eddie was stressed out trying to bring the band down from full party mode. “I was trying to wake the guys up,” he said, “saying ‘Hey guys, we’ve got to chill out a little bit, because we’ve got another record to do’ ”

Within a week the album was nearly finished—despite the success of the first record, their label allegedly gave them a smaller recording budget the second time around. Many of the tracks used were first takes. Though Eddie publicly mentioned his desire to bring electronic synthesizers into the mix, no such drastic changes were made. If anything, the songs were more focused, pointed rockers—probably because the more dynamic songs had been cherry-picked into service for
Van Halen
.

Van Halen II
kept the party rolling at close to full steam. At Sunset Sound they recorded with an old Putnam 610 console, a not at all state-of-the-art mixing desk that dated to the 1950s. Everyone from Frank Sinatra to the Doors to Walt Disney’s animated movies had recorded using that same equipment—a good representative survey of Van Halen’s forefathers and influences.

There were fewer dizzying peaks than the debut, but the debauch-ery was more up front. The record was more fun, showing that the band wasn’t just some lethal-precision hit squad from Southern California. They laughed at themselves during a bebop bit in “Bottoms Up!” and offered a timeless pop single in “Dance the Night Away.” Written on the spot in the studio, the song was inspired by a drunk woman who had sex with her boyfriend in the back parking lot of Walter Mitty’s in full view of the band, then danced for hours in the front row of the club with her jeans put on backward.

Though Roth’s aerial spread-eagle jump on the back cover was supposed to look like just another day at the dude ranch, it was a staged stunt for the photo shoot. On the third try, the singer landed sideways and broke a bone in his foot. The last panel in that Bazooka Joe comic could be found inside the sleeve—a photo of Roth with his bare foot bandaged, holding a cane while entertaining a bevy of nurses.