Runnin' with the Devil

by Noel Monk

  One night late in the fall, David pulled me aside after a show. This in itself was unusual—most nights, David liked to get right into the party scene, lining up sexual partners and throwing back drinks or smoking weed. But now he was quiet and reserved, even in the afterglow of yet another great performance.

  “I have to talk to you, Noel,” he said.

  “Fine, David. What’s on your mind?”

  He led me into a utility room filled with maintenance equipment: paint, brushes, ladders, brooms, and the like, a sad little room with no windows and a heavy scent of petroleum products.

  “Better not stay in here long or we’ll get too high to talk coherently,” I joked. But David neither laughed nor smiled. Instead, he sat down on a bench and let his head fall into his hands. “Jesus, David, what’s wrong?” I was accustomed to seeing David in various extremes of emotion—happy, angry, manic. But I had rarely seen him sad.

  “We’ve done a lot of talking,” he began. “And we all agree that we have to make some changes.”

  I wasn’t quite sure where this was going. It almost felt like I was about to be fired. But that was preposterous. I had done a good job for the band and I knew that they believed in me and trusted me. Something else was happening.

  “Just spit it out,” I said. “You’ll feel better.”

  David nodded. “Okay, here it is. We want you to manage the band.”

  I was flattered and surprised, and at first didn’t know how to respond. First of all, Marshall was still the band’s manager, although his contract was due to expire at the end of the year. Second, I understood the magnitude of the task and knew the personalities involved. It was one thing to be Van Halen’s road manager; it was quite another to be the band’s personal manager.

  “You know, David . . . I have never been a manager before.”

  He nodded. “I don’t care.”

  “Well, I want to say it anyway, just so we’re clear. I have been a road manager, production manager, stage manager, and a security guy. But I have never managed in the big leagues, and I think next year you guys are going to be in the big leagues.”

  “Yeah, I think so, too,” David replied. “And I don’t care. None of us do. We want you to be our manager.”

  “Are you speaking for yourself or the band?”

  “We’ve talked it out,” he said. “We’re all in agreement. Everyone wants you.”

  “Let me think about this for a second.” I paused. “Okay, David, I would love to be your manager.”

  He clapped his hands together. “Fantastic, Noel!”

  “But first . . .”

  “Ah, shit.”

  “Let me finish, please. I would love nothing more than to take over the reins and run this band right up to the top. But with all due respect, I think it’s best that you guys go out and interview some other candidates to make sure you are comfortable with this decision.”

  David seemed surprised. I think he also was impressed. “Got any suggestions?” he said.

  “Sure, start with Bill Aucoin, KISS’s manager. Talk to all the big shots, let them show you their wares, listen to their business plan, and then go with your gut.”

  “Okay,” David said. “But you know . . . you could lose us.”

  I threw up my hands in surrender. “Maybe so, but I want you to get a fair deal. You owe it to yourselves to shop around, kick some tires. Meet the big shots and see what they can offer, because . . . all I can give you is fortitude and honesty and whatever knowledge I’ve gained over the years. I think that’s worth something, but we both know that I am not a big shot.”

  “Fair enough,” David said. We shook hands. I honestly figured that by the end of the year Van Halen would have a new and powerful management team, befitting an act so obviously on the upswing. I wasn’t even sure that I’d still be the road manager. But my dignity was intact; I would sleep well knowing that I hadn’t tried to steer the band in a particular direction based solely on my self-interest. If their due diligence told them that I was the best candidate, great. I was up for the job. If not, well, we’d all move on. No hard feelings.

  VAN HALEN FINISHED ITS TOUR in early December. Once off the road, the boys were left with considerable time on their hands, which was devoted primarily to preparing to record a new album and interviewing candidates for the job of manager, a process that galvanized the band in that it naturally included much discussion about why they needed a new manager in the first place. For all that his absence on the tour and his professional judgment were questionable, the deal breaker, as it often is in matters of business, was actually the discovery that Van Halen owed more than a million dollars to Warner Bros. for reimbursement of expenses. Again, let’s be clear: there was nothing illegal about any of this, and it could certainly be argued that David and the boys should have been paying closer attention. Nevertheless, they were pissed off. To them (and I felt the same way), this bill represented at the very least a breach of trust. So, in addition to methodically going about finding a suitable replacement for Marshall, they also decided to get even.

  And, just so you know where my allegiance stood, I helped them do it.

  When the bill came due and David discovered the staggering sum that would have to be repaid to Warner Bros., he was enraged. Besides the pittance they were making per show, album royalties had not yet begun pouring in, and even when they did, the deal Van Halen had struck with the label was so bad, it failed to alleviate the sting of a million-dollar debt.

  “We have to do something about this,” David kept saying. “We can’t just let them get away with it.”

  I figured that since the guys had already decided that Marshall was going to be replaced (although they hadn’t told him yet), there was no point in getting in a pissing war. But David wanted to exact a pound of flesh; failing that, he suggested retrieving from Marshall’s office everything that could be construed as “belonging” to Van Halen. I knew this was risky, but what the hell? I disliked Marshall at least as much as the guys in the band did, and they were right to feel aggrieved. Plus, it sounded like fun.

  So, late one night, when Marshall was out of town, we all broke into his office and took everything that pertained to Van Halen: files, posters, albums, and all sorts of memorabilia—basically anything the guys thought was rightfully the property of Van Halen. I even recall a few gold records being peeled from the wall.

  A few weeks later, while staying at the Sunset Marquis in West Hollywood, I returned from a show at the Roxy and noticed instantly that my briefcase was missing; the sliding glass door leading to a first floor patio was slightly ajar. I know for a fact that it had been closed and locked when I left, so obviously the intruder had broken in through the patio. Among the items in that briefcase—never recovered—were about five thousand dollars in equipment, a Krugerrand (a one-ounce gold coin from South Africa), and roughly a thousand dollars in cash. Oh, and a small assortment of high-quality mood-altering substances.

  A coincidence? Karma? Who knows? But in the future I avoided ever taking a room on the ground floor.

  The next day I went to my office. There was a box sitting on my desk; I recognized it as one that we had pilfered from Marshall’s office. The band had already gone through it and taken everything they wanted. The rest was left for me, but I felt weird about it now, especially in light of recent events, and so I simply picked up the box without checking the contents and stuffed it in the bottom of a closet. As often happens with items stashed away in this manner, some time passed before I even remembered that it was there. Must have been around 1981, I would guess, I was cleaning up my office and found the box buried beneath a pile of shit in the back of the closet. Curious, I pulled it out and began rummaging through the contents. Among the items, folded multiple times, was a poster of Jimi Hendrix playing his guitar. I had never seen this particular image before; more importantly, I had never seen the logo that accompanied the image: the initials JH in large letters, with sharp angles, almost like lightning
bolts. I started at it for a moment.

  Man, that looks familiar . . .

  Then it hit me: with a few slight variations, the Hendrix logo was nearly identical to the iconic winged Van Halen logo that first appeared on the band’s debut album. I knew there had been a bit of a dispute over the artwork for that album, that the band and Marshall had rejected the original artwork proposed by Warner Bros. I always loved the Van Halen logo and presumed it had been a purely original work of art. But now? Well, either someone had been greatly inspired by the Hendrix logo that I now held in my hands, or this was the most remarkable coincidence in the history of rock ’n’ roll artwork. Either way, it was quite the eye-opening experience. And I never did tell anyone about it.

  Until now.

  BY EARLY JANUARY 1979, Marshall was gone and the band had finished interviewing candidates for his replacement. The process apparently had been less than inspiring, which is why David called me one day and suggested we all get together at the Riot House, where I was staying.

  “We’ve been to everyone,” David said. Naturally, he didn’t mean “everyone” but rather, a handful of people who represented top-line management. “Our opinion hasn’t changed—”

  I interrupted him.

  “Did you meet with the guy from KISS?” I figured if anyone seemed a likely candidate, it was Bill Aucoin, who was nothing if not a starmaker. He’d shot KISS into the stratosphere of popularity practically overnight; imagine what he could have done with Van Halen.

  “Yeah, we did,” David said. He shook his head. “He kind of talked down to us, spent the whole meeting talking about himself. But that wasn’t the worst part. In the middle of the meeting, he called a guy into his office and had him shine his shoes. While we were talking!”

  “I guess he was trying to show you what a big and powerful man he is,” I said.

  “Well, it didn’t work,” David said with a laugh. Then he proceeded to tell me about some other managers they had interviewed, and how they all basically just recited their résumés and offered nothing in the way of a practical plan for taking Van Halen to the proverbial “next level.”

  “So . . .” David said, looking around the room at his bandmates. “Here’s the thing, Noel: we’ve come to the conclusion that we would like you to be our manager.”

  “All of you?” I said, looking first at Edward, then Alex, and finally Michael. They all nodded.

  “Okay . . . I’ll give it a shot.”

  I’d like to say that after nearly two decades in the business, and after a year on the road with the boys, I knew what I was getting into. But that wouldn’t be quite true. It was, in every way, more than I had envisioned. More work, more fun, and ultimately, more pain. But in that moment, as we stood in the middle of the room and shook hands, I saw and felt only the limitless potential of friendship and the transformative power of music.

  8

  DUMPSTER DIVIN’ & CHART CLIMBIN’

  The machinery of stardom requires vast amounts of fuel in order to operate at peak efficiency. When it came to the music industry in the late 1970s, that fuel was a potent mix consisting of equal parts product, promotion, and performance. There was no rest for the weary. A band on the rise was an immensely valuable commodity, from which every ounce of revenue was extracted at the quickest possible rate. The hell with art. Fuck creativity and the patience it often requires. Once an act distanced itself from the slag heap of mediocrity, there was pressure to work harder, faster, smarter.

  Put out a new album, like clockwork, every year. Get out on the road for months at a time, touring tirelessly in support of the album. And hope the record label did its job by promoting the hell out of the album, to ensure ticket sales, which in turn drove concert revenue. It was a brutal cycle that chewed up even the most energetic and ambitious artists. As Van Halen discovered, the integrity of the product was often the last consideration. Schedule was paramount. Whatever it took to get the record done and into the hands of the public was perfectly acceptable.

  Van Halen finished its exhausting 1978 world tour on December 5, in Phoenix, Arizona. You would think that merely surviving that tour (to say nothing of owning it, the way Van Halen did) might have merited a prolonged and well-earned vacation. But you would be wrong. Just six days after that tour ended, the boys went back into the studio to begin work on Van Halen II. A prosaic title, to be sure, but what the hell? It had worked on the debut. Why waste time fussing over an album title when you have only a few weeks to record the damn thing?

  Fortunately, many of the songs that appeared on Van Halen II were written far in advance, and demos in some cases had already been recorded. Because they had played for several years before getting their first record deal, they already had a catalog of songs waiting to be recorded. That is not an unusual story for a band, which is why it’s so challenging to produce a second record that lives up to the standard set by a debut. Van Halen had cultivated a unique sound and style anchored by Edward’s guitar and David’s howling vocals; they had written and performed scores of original songs, the best of which (presumably) were chosen for inclusion on Van Halen. In fact, the only “new” song on Van Halen II was “Dance the Night Away,” an infectious tune that highlighted Van Halen’s pop tendencies, and became the band’s first Top 20 single (and the vehicle for its first foray into the burgeoning world of MTV and music videos). Interestingly, like the debut album, Van Halen II contained exactly one cover song, which speaks to just how prolific these guys were in the early days.

  Still, the production schedule was demanding, if not downright crazy, regardless of how much material the band had at the ready.

  Ted Templeman returned as the producer, and Van Halen II was recorded in a drug and alcohol fueled frenzy over the course of less than three weeks at Sunset Sound Recorders. I wasn’t witness to very much of it—I never considered it my business to be involved in the creative side of band life, preferring instead to focus my energy on their more concrete, tangible needs. Not that they needed me; David and Edward were both never-ending fountains of creative energy, and—fueled by copious amounts of illicit substances—the two of them were rarely short on ideas. It was an interesting way of doing things: burning the candle at both ends for weeks at a time, spit balling something—a note here, a lyric or two there—into a full-fledged record, but if I knew anything about Van Halen (and I knew a few things) I knew they loved to bang it out. So to speak.

  The couple of times I did hang out around the studio, I felt completely out of my element. I’ll be honest, I don’t know how David and Edward worked with each other. They had two very different visions for what they wanted, artistically speaking, and I witnessed them at each other’s throats more often than not. I’m pretty sure the coke-weed-alcohol cocktail made their nerves that much more frayed, but maybe that tension translated into Van Halen’s raw signature sound. Hell, if I knew.

  I just didn’t feel like going down the rabbit hole with them, despite David’s urging, preferring to limit myself to a line or two, here and there. It was far from a regular thing.

  “Come on, Noel. Are you one of the guys or not?” he’d say, in a way that strongly implied I wasn’t holding up my end.

  “Sure, David . . . I’m one of the guys,” I’d say, placating him.

  “Then have a line. It’s not going to kill you.”

  And it didn’t. It did, however, make me needlessly agitated by the time I left the studio and headed home—come to think of it, maybe that wasn’t the coke.

  BY JANUARY the album was in the can and I was the new manager of Van Halen. In the beginning we had no money—just a lot of debt and royalties caught up in accounting, and a shitty contract with Warner Bros. that would last for at least one more year. To save money I set up shop in my room at the Riot House. That’s right—I was the manager of one of the hottest bands in the world, and my office was a hotel room on Sunset Strip, and it was here that we conducted much of Van Halen’s business. In a way it was kind of fun—it helpe
d keep us grounded and fostered an us-against-the-world mentality that always makes work more enjoyable.

  We had almost no staff. I hired a secretary I knew from Warner Bros. She would knock on my door at 8:30 every morning, and I would take a quick shower, throw on my T-shirt and blue jeans, and start working. In retrospect, the whole situation was quite laughable, but what could I do? I couldn’t take over Marshall’s office, since he hadn’t quite moved out yet and there was concern he was contemplating a lawsuit against the band.

  I did what I could. I was a new manager with almost nothing to work with except my own knowledge of the business and a good working relationship with Warner Bros. With help from Peter Angelus, I worked very closely with the Warner Bros. art department to create the new album cover. I mean, I don’t want to make it sound like I was a lone wolf, because that really wasn’t the case. The band was excited about a new start, and I did have strong relationships with people within the industry. Nevertheless, reality stared me in the face every morning when I got out of bed: I might have been the manager of a platinum-selling band, but I was still working out of a fucking hotel room with a skeleton crew.

  David, at this point, was instrumental. For all his quirks and emotional immaturity, David was a very bright man with a lot of good ideas, and even though he was one of the most difficult people I had ever worked with, I realized that he was the go-to guy for all things Van Halen. David was the smartest guy in the band by a wide margin—and he knew it. Look, here’s the honest truth: most artists—musicians, anyway—are not particularly bright. David was the only member of the Fantastic Four who would read eclectic material, which made him more interesting, and a credible lyricist, as well.

  Ed would do the music and David would write the lyrics. David would always wait until the last minute, then come running into the studio with the lyrics written on the back of a paper bag or something. It was obvious he’d written them in a wild, untamed flurry, using deadline pressure as the primary motivation. You’d want to smack him for being so apparently cavalier, but then you’d listen to the words, and you’d see David perform the song . . . and it was often brilliant. So what could you do?