Night Beat (34 page)

“Dave was more entertainer than musician,” says Eddie. “As a result, he had a better eye for the commercial thing. He was into short-format stuff because people’s attention spans are only so long.”

After Roth joined up, the Van Halens also enlisted rival Pasadena bandleader Michael Anthony to play bass, then elected to change Mammoth’s name to Rat Salade. Roth persuaded the brothers that their surname might prove a more imposing title. “I didn’t like the idea at first,” says Eddie, “but now I have to admit it sounds powerful—like a German nuclear bomb.”

Van Halen traversed the city’s basin for almost four years, handling their own management and booking their own dates. Finally, following a successful series of self-produced concerts at Pasadena’s Civic Auditorium and an extravagant demo session produced by Kiss bassist Gene Simmons, record labels began to express an interest in the group. One night in 1977, Warner Bros. producer Ted Templeman hauled the label’s president, Mo Ostin, over to see the group at a near-empty Hollywood club. In effect, Van Halen signed with Warner Bros. that night.

“The guys in the band still don’t know this,” says Templeman, who has produced all three of Van Halen’s LPs, “but I went down to see them the night before I brought Mo Ostin along, and they just floored me. David Roth came across as the most convincing thing I’d seen in a rock & roll theater since Jim Morrison, but mainly it was Eddie who impressed me.

“Of all the people I work with, besides Michael McDonald, Eddie Van Halen is a true virtuoso. I think he’s the best guitar player alive, and I’ve listened extensively to George Benson, Django Reinhardt, Tal Farlow, Charlie Christian, Jim Hall, and Jimi Hendrix. Eddie can play thirty-second-note melodic lines with a complexity that rivals Bach, and I haven’t heard
anybody
who can phrase like him since Charlie Parker. Believe me, Eddie is a killer.”

Eddie, though, winces at any mention of praise. “I don’t know shit about scales or music theory,” he says, “and I don’t want to be seen as the fastest guitar in town, ready and willing to gun down the competition. All I know is that rock & roll guitar, like blues guitar, should have melody, speed, and taste, but more important, it should have emotion. I just want my guitar playing to make people feel something: happy, sad, even horny.”

Eddie smiles slightly, then pours himself a final glass of bourbon. “Actually, I hate people telling me how good I am. All that really says to me is that I have a lot of friends these days who aren’t really friends. I mean, if we stopped selling records tomorrow, bye-bye friends and bye-bye compliments.

“I guess that doesn’t
really
bother me—it’s just that it’s the one thing I never expected.”

THE AFTERNOON of the second Cobo Arena show, Van Halen and a small entourage of security and promotion personnel pile into two limousines standing outside the Detroit Plaza Hotel. The band members are slated to make a round of radio interviews, but judging from their bedraggled faces, they would probably prefer using the time to make up for lost sleep.

Moods brighten measurably, though, when the band sees the bevy of fans—most of them female—waiting outside the first station. Roth and Alex fix in on a pair of silk-stockinged, milk-skinned twins and spirit them off to the radio booth. “Welcome to the top,” chuckles Roth, snuggling between them, his large hands cuddling their backsides. “You’ve finally hit the big time.” The twins float off to one of the booth’s corners, where members of the entourage cajole them into displaying their bare breasts. The band, fully revivified now, settles down for the startled D.J.’s first question.

As it happens, he never gets to ask it. Van Halen quickly turns the proceedings into a chaotic, comic slingfest, tossing out more sexual innuendoes, ethnic slurs, and harmonized burps in two minutes than the Marx Brothers probably managed in their entire careers. “I’d like to present Al with the “Most Incredible Performance Back at the Hotel Award’ for last night,” sniggers Roth. “It was definitely a
nine
on the sphincter scale.” The band chortles knowingly, and the D.J. blanches.

To celebrate his award, Alex grabs an open beer bottle, jams it in his mouth, tilts his head back so the bottle stands fully upended, and drains its contents in two awe-inspiring gulps. Then he ejects the bottle with a thrust of his tongue and repeats the ritual with a new bottle. The twins squeal admiringly.

“Hey, I got an idea,” says Roth, moving over to a picture window. Catching sight of him, the fans in the parking lot below emit a volley of whoops and whistles. Roth turns back to the anxious D.J.: “Why don’t you play ’Everybody Wants Some!!’ from the new album.” As the sound of Alex’s undulating jungle beat and Roth’s Tarzan yodel booms out of the studio monitors, Roth pulls a chair over to the window and has one of the twins stand on it, her back to the kids in the parking lot.

When the song gets to its tawdry spoken passage, Roth lip-syncs the words and handles the twin like a prop: “I like the way the line runs up the back of the stockings,” he mouths, hoisting the woman’s skirt above her hips and tracing the seam on her left leg, from ankle to ass. Miming to the lyric, he tells the young woman to leave on her heels, turn a provocative pose, and show her legs from the side, up to her hip bone. The fans outside, including the females, greet every motion with clamorous, assenting hoots.

At the display’s end, the grimacing D.J. swallows hard and tries to think of something to ask. After a few minutes, he says, “Uh, that reminds me. It was unbelievable at your show last night. The response was so enormous, you couldn’t even hear yourself think.”

Roth grins back triumphantly, then notes, “Would it be worth listening in the first place?”

ALEX VAN HALEN props himself on the edge of a dressing-room table and offers me a lenient smile. “Why
should
rock & roll be meaningful?” he asks in reply to a question about the seemingly slight themes of Van Halen’s songs. “I mean, is
sex . . .
He pauses, and a wistful smile curls his lips. “I was going to say, is sex meaningful, but I guess that’s the whole point: If something feels good, then it’s meaningful. And since our music is designed to make people feel good, it is meaningful.”

Just then, the door swings wide and Roth struts in, pulling a tall, moon-eyed blond by the hand. “Go to another room,” he directs us in a bearish voice. “Me and this lady got to talk.”

Alex looks the woman up and down savoringly, then snickers. “Yeah, I bet you want to talk.”

“There’s an empty room across the hall,” replies Roth, undaunted. “You guys can go over there.” Then Roth spies my tape recorder and an inspired look crosses his face. “Okay, wait a minute. We’ll give you an in
-depth
perspective of Van Halen.” He turns back to the young woman. “What was your name again? Okay, look, darling, this guy is from a magazine and . . . ”

The young woman sends a befuddled look in our direction and shakes her head. “You can’t fool me. I know who that guy is. That’s
Alex.”

Alex laughs like a firecracker, and Roth looks embarrassed. “No, this guy
here—
he’s from a magazine and is doing a story about us.” Roth picks up the tape recorder and holds it up to the woman’s face. “Just tell him what you think of us.”

She looks even more confused. “You mean what I think of
Alex
?”

Alex erupts in laughter again, and Roth stares at the woman disgustedly. “No.
Not
Alex. Us. Tell the tape recorder what you think of
us.”

“You want me to talk into this thing and say what I think about the band?”

“C’mon, babe, don’t waste the man’s time.”

The young woman gives a shaky look, then takes the recorder. “Okay, here I am and they’re asking me about Van Halen,” she says with a quivery Midwestern accent. “What I think of Van Halen is that I enjoy the show very much, and they rock & roll definitely all the way. It’s hard core, makes you want to move, makes you want to groove, makes you do anything you want to do. And for another thing,” she adds, smiling broadly at Alex and Roth, “every
one
of the guys in this band knows how to get
down—
that’s for
god
damn sure.”

Roth pulls the recorder from her hand and gives it back to me with an uncertain smile. “I think maybe I just put my neck on the line.”

Alex, still laughing hard, takes me by the elbow and steers me out of the room. “Can you believe,” he says in a titillated whisper, “the mentality of some of these girls?”

WOMEN—SERVILE WOMEN, that is—are a matter of endless fascination to the members of Van Halen, as they are, indeed, to many male musicians. But during my stay with Van Halen, I’ve seen enough nude women and heard enough graphic, abasing morning-after anecdotes to fuel an article about porn-rock—or a diatribe against sexism. It doesn’t seem, I tell Roth at one point, that Van Halen holds women in very high regard.

Roth looks surprised by the comment. “What are you talking about? I like women
very
much.”

After pausing to hoot over his latest witticism, Roth continues: “I suppose you mean that rap earlier with the girl in the silk stockings? Well,
she
wore the stockings, I was merely complimenting her. That ain’t sexist. What
you’re
talking about is sexy feelings, and that’s what Van Halen’s striving to create. I mean, we don’t have songs about
forcing
women to do anything. It takes two to tango, let us remember.

“As for me personally, I feel sexy a whole lot of the time. That’s one of the reasons I’m in this job: to exercise my sexual fantasies. When I’m onstage, it’s like doing it with twenty thousand of your closest friends. And that’s a great relationship, because you never have to ask them, ’Did you come?’ They’ll let you know.”

IN A SENSE, the intercourse that takes place between Van Halen and their audience may be more political than sexual. Whether the musicians accept it or not, Van Halen is a massive success because the band represents the real ideals of a massive audience. Or, to put it another way, the members of Van Halen may live the life they sing about, but they also sing about a life their audience reveres, even aspires to.