Runnin' with the Devil

by Noel Monk

  I retreated to the dressing room, counted out a thousand pounds in cash, and folded it into an envelope. Then I drew up a quick disclaimer to ensure that further extortion would not be an issue down the road.

  “Sign this,” I said to the kid, presenting the disclaimer.

  “Fuck off!” he said. “Why should I?”

  “Look, I don’t mind compensating you for injuries caused by my band’s stupidity, but this is a onetime offer. Sign it . . . or no money.”

  The kid scrawled his signature, I handed him the envelope, and we went our separate ways. All’s well that ends well. Or so I thought, until the bus pulled out of the parking lot and a brick went sailing over the roof. Moments later a second brick crashed into the side of the bus, narrowly missing a window.

  “What the hell was that?” David yelled.

  I laughed. “Just one of your biggest fans saying goodbye.”

  THE TWO BANDS got along so well through a serendipitous blend of mutual respect and craftsmanship. I don’t think any of the guys in Van Halen held Montrose or Journey in particularly high regard, but they were practically awestruck by Black Sabbath. True, the band had seen better days, and Ozzy was by then a thirty-year-old alcoholic and drug addict who could have passed for midforties—but none of that matters when you’re a legend. This guy was seasoned. He was a road warrior. Whether he was lucid enough to know it or not is another matter entirely. Either way, Sabbath remained an iconic presence whose music had inspired and informed the careers of countless younger artists, Van Halen among them. So, to find themselves warming up for their idols, then getting drunk together afterward, and swapping stories, . . . well, that was heady stuff. Even David could be quiet and humble in the presence of Ozzy, like a kid listening to his grandfather tell war stories (despite the fact that Ozzy was only six years older than David, he was infinitely more experienced, in ways related and unrelated to the music business).

  And, while Edward was a legitimate prodigy, he had enormous respect and admiration for Black Sabbath’s virtuoso lead guitarist and founding member, Tony Iommi. It wasn’t just talent and originality that separated Tony from his heavy metal and hard rock brethren; it was the backstory. When Tony was seventeen he was badly injured in an industrial accident while working at a sheet metal factory. The gruesome injury took the tips of the middle and ring fingers on Tony’s right hand. Since Tony was a left-handed guitar player, this meant he suffered catastrophic damage to his fretting hand, and it occurred at a time when he was preparing to give up the working-class world for good and embark on a full-time musical career. I suppose a lesser man—and a less driven artist—might have been discouraged to the point of depression and given up on that dream, but Tony rather famously overcame his disability with the help of prosthetic fingertips and became one of the greatest guitar players of his generation and a man widely recognized as a pioneer of heavy metal.

  I’ve heard stories over the years that Tony was saddened by Edward’s brilliance on that first tour—that he became mired in self-pity and envy, like Salieri in the presence of Mozart. Not so. I think he admired Edward and saw in him the same spark of genius and ambition that had fueled his own career a decade earlier. They got along great. And I still recall the night we were treated to a shortened version of Iommi’s inspiring story. We were sitting in our dressing room before a show when Tony came in and we all started shooting the shit. He was talking about what it was like early in his career, in the pre-Sabbath days, and how important it was to be focused and hungry, and how quickly things could slip away. At some point in the conversation Tony held up his right hand and removed the prosthetic tips, which were sheathed in leather, to reveal a pair of nubs cut down nearly to the first joint. Everyone who followed heavy metal closely knew about Tony’s story, but to see the evidence like this was at once sobering and inspiring. I couldn’t help but think, if this guy could play the guitar as well as he did with a mangled fret hand, imagine what Edward would one day accomplish.

  Still, it did provide for moments of dark humor, as well as inspiration. One night we left the theater late, well after Black Sabbath had already hit the road. I got a panicked call from Albert, the band’s road manager.

  “Noel, we have a little problem,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Tony can’t find his fingers. He thinks he left them on the dressing room table. Can you check?”

  So I rooted around the room a bit, and indeed Tony had left behind his prosthetic fingertips.

  “Yup, got them right here,” I said.

  Albert breathed a heavy sigh of relief. “Great, can you bring them along? We’ll get them tomorrow.”

  “Sure thing,” I said. The next day Tony and his fingertips were reunited and the show went on as scheduled. Why he didn’t have a backup set, I have no idea. Or maybe he did, and this was just a favorite pair. I only know that it was hard not to admire a guy who had overcome such adversity, and I hoped that it would have a positive impact on our band.

  Unfortunately, the most palpable influence Black Sabbath had on Van Halen had less to do with spirituality or art or ambition than it did with chemical experimentation. Obviously, we were hardly choirboys by the time we began touring the UK in ’78, but compared to Black Sabbath, Van Halen were a bunch of rank amateurs. Now, I’m not big on blaming one’s poor decisions or bad behavior on anyone else. We are all responsible for the lives we lead and the choices we make, and accountability is the ultimate reckoning. It’s quite possible (actually, it’s quite likely) that Van Halen would have sunk into the muck and mire of hard-core drug abuse and alcoholism without any exposure to the mess that Black Sabbath had become; but it’s fair to say that prolonged touring with Sabbath hastened the process by normalizing behavior that was in reality quite extreme—even by rock ’n’ roll standards.

  These guys were heavy drug users; by comparison, Journey and Montrose were lightweights, practically teetotalers. Through much of the ’78 tour, even as Van Halen hit platinum status, we were a band with little in the way of financial resources. We didn’t have the money to buy a lot of drugs. But Black Sabbath did, and once we began touring together in the States in the summer, a veritable blizzard of cocaine descended upon us. The drinking increased, as well, because, as any drunk will tell you, alcohol and cocaine complement each other perfectly. It’s a potentially deadly mix, but it is effective. For a serious drinker, the beauty of cocaine is that it so effectively extends the party. Alcohol is a depressant and eventually puts its user to sleep. Throw some coke into the mix, though, and suddenly you snap back to life. I was never more than a dabbler with cocaine, but I understand its insidious appeal.

  The toll this toxic combination takes on the mind and body can be catastrophic, and no more vivid example exists than that of Black Sabbath’s deeply damaged front man, Ozzy, a tough, streetwise kid with tattoos on his knuckles, a fondness for dripping mascara, and a fantastically creepy wail of a voice. He was the face of a band whose satanic bent terrified Middle America, and he played the role well (even though in reality he was kind of a sweetheart). By the time Van Halen began touring with Sabbath, however, it was hard to tell what was real and what was performance for Ozzy. Most of the time, I swear, he was too fucked up to know what he was doing, and certainly too much of an addict to be an effective or reliable performer.

  Our guys liked Ozzy, though, especially David, whose cocaine and alcohol use, by his own admission, escalated significantly when we were traveling across the States with Black Sabbath. David did a fair amount of partying with Ozzy. But whereas David, like everyone else in our band, was young and healthy enough to withstand the ravages of the road, Ozzy was in free fall. The inevitable crash occurred during a particularly memorable stop in Nashville, Tennessee, in November, near the end of the tour.

  We finished our forty-five-minute set and headed for the dressing room with the crowd typically whipped into a frenzy before Sabbath even took the stage. On this night, however, as the audience
stomped its feet and cheered for the impending appearance of the headliners, something went wrong. I was sitting with the band in the dressing room when the promoter walked in. He looked nervous as he gestured for me to join him outside.

  “Noel,” he said, “we can’t find Ozzy.”

  My initial reaction was twofold. First, what do you mean you can’t find Ozzy? And second, how is this my problem? But all I could manage to say was, “Excuse me?”

  The promoter nodded. His eyes were wide, a sure sign of panic.

  “Yeah, he’s not here, and no one knows where he is.”

  Contrary to romantic notions of brotherhood and shared experience, band members did not always arrive at the venue together. Especially in the case of artists of a particular longevity, or bands with a superstar front man, it wasn’t unusual for band members to make their own way from the hotel to the venue, or even from the bus to the dressing room. I figured Ozzy was probably either a little hungover or exercising his right to be a diva, and that he’d arrive momentarily and shamble out onstage. Sadly, that was not the case.

  “I need a favor from you,” the promoter said.

  “What’s that?” I responded warily, knowing that under these circumstances, any favor would involve me or my band doing something unpleasant, if not downright unsafe.

  “We’ve got to cancel the show,” he said. “And we’ve got to tell the audience.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, that’s going to be a tough thing.”

  “Tough? They’ll fucking kill us. We’d like your guys to back us up while we make the announcement. That should help soften the blow.”

  This struck me as an unreasonable request—to ask Edward, Alex, and Michael to return to the stage and play behind a promoter while he informed a few thousand Black Sabbath metal heads that the concert they had paid to see, and which probably had been on their calendar for months, was not going to happen.

  “Why the hell should we do that?” I said.

  The promoter shrugged. He looked desperate. “Hey, we’re all in this together, right? Your guys are so good that if they just come out and vamp around a little while we break the bad news . . .” He paused. “I don’t know . . . it might just help.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It might help.”

  Or it might put my guys in front of an angry mob throwing about nine hundred bottles at their heads.

  “Tell you what . . . I have to run it by the guys, but I’m sure it won’t be a problem.”

  “Thanks, Noel.”

  I walked back into the dressing room and called the band together.

  “Okay’s here’s the deal,” I began. “Ozzy didn’t show up, and the promoter wants us to vamp while he tells the audience that Sabbath isn’t going to play.”

  Predictably, this explanation was met first with utter silence, and then disbelief. Alex was the first to speak.

  “What, is he out of his fucking mind? The crowd will kill us.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “So let’s pack up and get the hell out of here. I told him I’d run it by you just to get him off my back, but I’m not putting you guys at risk.”

  So we packed up really quickly, jumped in the limo, and went back to the hotel, leaving the promoter to fend for himself (and, indeed, the crowd responded precisely as we anticipated, by howling and tossing all manner of garbage onto the stage; for us, avoiding this scene rather than fanning the flame of disappointment was unquestionably the right call).

  The topic of conversation, naturally, was: Where the hell is Ozzy? There was talk of getting the police involved, and of investigating the possibility that Ozzy had been kidnapped or otherwise waylaid through interaction with nefarious types. I did not believe this for a moment. We knew that Ozzy, like the rest of the band (and our band), had made it to the hotel early that morning. For some reason, though, he did not answer his wake-up call in the afternoon. When the road manager checked his room, there was no sign of Ozzy. So it was natural that people would be worried, given his sorry condition in those days. I just figured that Ozzy had wandered into a conference room or something and fallen asleep, but it turned out to be a much better story than that.

  What I did not know at the time was that David and Ozzy had not merely been hanging out and partying together but had engaged over the previous few days in something they referred to as the Krell Wars. This was basically a nonstop party (with breaks only for performances, since we were playing practically every night), with a heavy emphasis on cocaine use. The previous night, Ozzy and David had stayed up all night, burying themselves, like Tony Montana, in mountains of coke. The party, David said, went on until nine o’clock in the morning, when our caravan left for Nashville. Keys were distributed upon check-in, and everyone grabbed a nap before wake-up calls were issued and the bands were summoned to the arena for sound check.

  David was hungover but bounced back quickly in those days. Ozzy? Not so much. It turned out that he had neglected to look at the room number of his key, and instead dredged up from his barely conscious mind the number of the room he had stayed in the night before, when we were in Memphis (or perhaps the previous night’s key was in his pocket; I’ve heard conflicting reports). Regardless, through fate or dumb luck, Ozzy wound up on the wrong floor, wobbling toward the wrong room, in a hotel that no doubt looked exactly like the one he had been in the previous night. When he arrived, as luck would have it, the door was open and a maid was busily completing the task of cleaning the room. Ozzy politely excused the housekeeper and said he wanted to take a nap. She wasn’t about to ask for evidence that he was indeed the proper tenant—Ozzy cut far too intimidating a figure for that, even when he was shitfaced (or maybe especially when he was shitfaced). He closed the door, fell onto the bed, and passed out.

  For roughly the next twenty hours.

  Ozzy finally emerged from an elevator the next morning, wondering what had happened and why no one had bothered to wake him up. In the world of Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne, this constituted a happy ending, but there were, unfortunately, some loose ends that required tying. You see, it’s not a small deal when a headlining band cancels a gig, especially for reasons that can charitably be called negligent. If the lead singer trips over a cable onstage and breaks his ankle during sound check, necessitating the cancellation of a show, then the band is not responsible for covering the cost of that show. But if a show is canceled because one of the band members did something stupid and entirely preventable—like getting in a fight or sleeping off a three-day coke jag—then there is a liability issue to address. The promoter of the Nashville show had two choices: offer refunds to everyone who had left the Nashville Municipal Auditorium feeling understandably cheated . . . or reschedule the concert for a later date.

  This wasn’t really our problem; Van Halen had held up its end of the deal by playing its customary set, per the terms of our contract. But we were locked into a tour as a supporting act for Black Sabbath, and if they wanted to reschedule the gig, then protocol dictated that we behave like good soldiers. We were off that night, November 17, but had another show scheduled in Midland, Texas, the following night. When we arrived in Texas that evening, I got a call from Mark Forster, Black Sabbath’s tour director (and Albert’s assistant).

  “Noel, listen, I know you’re not the manager but you’re a Warner Brothers person. You have some pull there. And we need a favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, we rebooked the Nashville date on the one day off we had.” He paused. “The nineteenth.”

  “Day after tomorrow?” I said. “That’s just fucking great. I’m sure my band will love it.”

  “I’m sorry, Noel. We had no choice. We have to make up the show, and we need your guys on the bill. So here’s my problem. If I call Marshall Berle, I know he’s going to try to fuck me over; he’ll want two or three thousand dollars.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, probably true.”

  “We can’t do that. It’s not in the budget. I need to know if you’ll do
it for the usual fee.”

  The “usual fee,” as previously noted, was $750. By this point it was almost a joke. After agents’ fees and manager fees, the guys in Van Halen were taking home roughly one hundred bucks per gig. And yet, here they were, a platinum-selling band. But that was the deal and we accepted it without complaint. Who would have guessed that while we were out on the road, the band would “break” in spectacular fashion? Sure, I could have asked for more money to make up the Nashville gig, but Sabbath had been good for our careers and we had mostly had a great time on the tour. I was not averse to playing hardball once in a while, but on this occasion, taking one for the team seemed like the right thing to do.

  Besides, I liked the fact that they were coming to me instead of Marshall. So I agreed to the $750, and the guys in the band, while unhappy about losing a night of rest, played their asses off once again for the fans in Nashville. A few days later Marshall called to ask about the negotiation.

  “Noel, we could have gotten a lot more money for that show.”

  “Oh, really?” I replied. “That’s too bad, Marshall. I didn’t realize.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. I imagine Marshall wanted to tell me I was an asshole, or to fuck off. But he didn’t. He said absolutely nothing. Marshall didn’t know it at the time—or maybe he did, and that’s why he chose his words carefully—but his days as the manager of Van Halen were numbered. Shit, after all, has a way of catching up with you.

  7

  HOW VAN HALEN’S HARD WORK AND HIGH TIMES WERE CHRONICLED

  Let’s first give credit where credit is due. While I felt that Marshall Berle was overwhelmingly unsuited for the job, he did execute one exceptionally cool publicity stunt during his brief tenure as the manager of Van Halen.

  On September 23, 1978, Van Halen participated in a massive one-day music event at Anaheim Stadium known as Summerfest. Not a particularly creative moniker (and not really accurate, either, since it was no longer technically “summer”), but in spirit and size, Summerfest was exactly what it purported to be: a long day of music featuring some of the biggest bands of that era, including Van Halen, Black Sabbath, Boston, and future Van Halen front man Sammy Hagar, performing as a solo artist. Nine hours of heavy rock ’n’ roll under the blistering California sun.