Runnin' with the Devil

by Noel Monk

  We would get Warner Bros. to drop the option.

  “How exactly are we going to do that, Noel?”

  “By throwing a ton of sand in their eyes.”

  “Meaning what exactly?”

  I was making this up as I went along, but the gist of the tactic was that from now until the option was set to expire in the fall, I would devote a large chunk of my managerial time to pestering Warner Bros. for items large and small. And I would enlist the services of our attorney and accountant in this effort. It was all a desperate and elaborate smokescreen designed to make Warner Bros. forget all about the option on its contract with Van Halen. There was no way to win this battle in a courtroom. The only chance we had was to play a sneakier game. If Warner and its lawyers simply missed the option date because they weren’t paying close enough attention, then Van Halen would be out of its contract and free to negotiate a new deal.

  “We’ll throw all kinds of questions at them,” I explained. “We’ll ask for an accounting on everything, and we’ll ask for more support than they ever imagined. We’ll make them want to avoid answering the phone when we call. I know this record company well enough to know that this could work. I mean, it’s highly improbable, but it’s not impossible. If we throw enough sand in their eyes they’ll get distracted and miss the deadline for extending the option.”

  I shrugged. “It’s worth a shot.”

  It was, in fact, the only shot.

  9

  WHERE THE HELL IS VAN HALEN?

  Whatever concessions to time and creativity might have been made in the studio, they had little impact on the public reception to Van Halen II. While critical response was generally positive, if not quite as warm as it was for the debut album, fans scooped up Van Halen II so quickly that Warner’s faith in the band was immediately validated. Within a month the album was certified gold; within two months it was platinum. It peaked at number 6 on the Billboard album chart, and has sold more than 5 million copies to date, in part because of the popularity of the first single.

  More pop than metal, “Dance the Night Away” is one of those songs that sounds absolutely great coming out of a car radio or a high-end stereo system. With its hummable melody, sing-along chorus (inspired by Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way”), and just enough of Edward’s guitar flourishes to remind the listener that this was indeed a rock band, “Dance the Night Away” reached number 15 on the singles charts, but more importantly introduced the band to a broader audience. Van Halen was no longer just a hard rock band but a band that knew how to write and record songs filled with killer hooks and vocals.

  They were accessible.

  Most of all, they were fun.

  “Dance the Night Away,” after all, was a song inspired by the sight of a free-spirited young woman having sex with her boyfriend in the parking lot of a club while the band looked on. She later spent the night dancing in the club with her jeans on backward, which amused the boys no end. David wrote the lyrics, as he always did; this was his way of looking at things. He saw humor and titillation in virtually everything, and of course these were common musical refrains throughout the David Lee Roth era: get drunk, get laid, have a party.

  Really, though, it always came back to the live performance, and Van Halen in ’79 was even tighter and better than it was in the first year. In some ways the World Vacation tour, as the ’79 tour was known, was a transitional period for Van Halen, as they made the adjustment from supporting act to headliner. Set lists were expanded from forty minutes to an hour or more. Our spartan road crew mushroomed to nearly forty people, including two dozen technical staff and a security team. We employed three massive forty-four-foot trucks to haul more than twenty tons of sound equipment and ten tons of lighting. We traveled in custom coaches and on planes. If this paled in comparison to the bloated traveling circus we would become in a few more years, it was nonetheless a mind-boggling advance for a band that just one year earlier had been bouncing around the rutted back roads of England in an old commercial bus. Overnight, it seemed, we went from plastic spoons to gold-plated ones.

  And you know what? If that sounds like fun . . . well . . . it was.

  But it was also hard work: more than one hundred performances in North America, Europe, and Asia, in a span of slightly more than five months. As manager, my job entailed much more than simply making sure the band got from one date to another and that each show went off without a hitch. The way I saw it, I was responsible for practically everything, and that included repairing some relationships that had been damaged under the previous regime. Specifically, I am talking about the Warner Bros. secretaries who had been traumatized by viewing Marshall’s Van Halen videos. They hadn’t asked to see these videos, and they certainly didn’t expect the wet and wild antics they witnessed. More than once after that incident I had walked through the offices and been confronted by a secretary who told me how much they liked me and appreciated my professionalism, but “I really don’t care for your band. Those guys are disgusting.” What could I say—that such high jinks were perfectly normal for a successful rock band? That life on the road naturally provoked one’s worst tendencies? That none of us had any idea the videos would ever surface, and certainly not in the presence of an unwitting female audience—in the offices of our record label, no less? All of this would have been true and yet woefully insufficient as an explanation. There was no excuse. But maybe an apology, coupled with a gesture of goodwill and friendship, could ease the sting.

  On April 8, 1979, just the fifth date of the tour, Van Halen took part in the California World Music Festival at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, a 90,000-seat outdoor stadium that at the time was home to both the University of Southern California and Los Angeles Rams football teams. The two-day festival featured nearly twenty bands playing for nearly as many hours. Van Halen was co-headliner (with Aerosmith) on the second day. Heady stuff for a band whose members just one year earlier probably would have been willing to pay for tickets to get a chance to see the likes of Cheap Trick, REO Speedwagon, and Ted Nugent; to say nothing of Aerosmith, a band, like Van Halen, built around a charismatic, somewhat androgynous lead singer (Steve Tyler) and a brilliant guitar player (Joe Perry) and a band that David and Edward in particular had grown up admiring. And now here they were, sharing top billing with that same band and playing for a fee of approximately $75,000; six months earlier they had been sweating it out in smaller venues all over the world for $750, and happy to get it. This is how far Van Halen had come in a ridiculously short time.

  Since the show was in our backyard, the audience included a couple hundred personally invited guests: friends, family members, industry executives. I made sure that the VIP list included all the secretaries in the Warner Bros. Burbank office, and that their experience would be one they wouldn’t soon forget—but this time in a good way. We were working at the time with a company called Pure Pleasure Limousines (I loved that name), so I called my friend Verne, who ran the company, and asked if he could arrange to have several limousines take care of the secretaries we had invited to the show.

  “Probably ten or eleven secretaries, and I want each of them to be able to bring a guest,” I said. “I just want to make sure they have a great time. I want a separate limo for each couple, and I want them picked up at their homes.”

  “No problem, Noel,” he said. “We’ll take care of them.”

  “One other thing,” I added. “I want all the limos to be white.”

  There was a pause. “I’m not sure we can get that many white limos on such short notice,” he said. “But we’ll try.”

  I arranged everything before running it by the band, and they approved everything, naturally.

  A couple days before the show, several of the secretaries came to me and offered to simplify the process by meeting at the Warner offices, where they could be picked up as a group. I balked.

  “Listen, that’s not what a limo is for,” I said. “A limo is so you can go to the show, get fucked u
p, fall into your limo, and be driven home. That’s the whole point—to be pampered and have fun.”

  Well, when you put it that way . . .

  The ladies had a terrific time. I was sure most of them had never been in a limousine before, and everything about the day was handled in an elegant, first-class manner. I wanted to change their opinion about the band; I wanted them to know that they were actually nice, fun-loving kids whose trust had been betrayed, and that together we would always treat everyone at Warner Bros. with respect and dignity. It was my opinion that the secretaries in both Burbank and New York were instrumental to our success; more important, they did hard and often tedious work that was often overlooked and undervalued. I wanted them to know we appreciated their efforts. So they traveled to the show by limo; they sat in a special section and had full backstage access. And I arranged for the limos to be festooned with roses and stocked with plenty of champagne and candy. They were appropriately impressed and grateful.

  “Thanks so much, Noel,” they all said. To which I replied: “Don’t thank me—it was the band’s idea.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely. They’re a nice bunch of guys and they feel terrible about what happened last year.”

  At the end of the day, everyone felt a little better about Van Halen, including the band members themselves. This, too, was a manager’s job: to repair the relationships that invariably fray as a band climbs the ladder of success, often oblivious of the people who get trampled along the way. But it was also a practical gesture: secretaries were the gatekeepers to the VIPS; without their assistance, a band could be derailed at any moment. At the very least, their support would make my job easier. So it became standard practice that whenever Van Halen played a big show in LA or New York, the Warner Bros. secretaries received special transportation and VIP privileges. I always considered it money well spent. It made people happy and my life easier.

  As for the California World Music Festival itself . . . while it wasn’t Van Halen’s first performance in the World Vacation tour, it served as an unofficial kickoff, in that most of the music industry was watching, and the band not only performed flawlessly and energetically but demonstrated the flair for fun-loving self-promotion that I had seen from the outset. There were just more eyes on them this time around. Backstage visitors would have witnessed the usual bantering, self-medicating and pre-show ball-busting, as well as the presence of some politically incorrect guests representing questionable taste, including a pair of little people wearing black bowler hats and T-shirts emblazoned with the words Van Halen Security, and a chimpanzee dressed like David Lee Roth.

  As if this scene weren’t enough, once again David had devised an interesting stunt to punctuate Van Halen’s entrance into a major music festival. Throughout the day a yellow Volkswagen Beetle was parked on a grassy area near the stage; periodically an announcer would bellow over the public address system something about the car belonging to Aerosmith, and asking the band to please move it. The joke behind all of this was that David thought it would be hilarious for the band to enter the Coliseum in a Sherman tank and crush the “Aerosmith Volkswagen” en route to the stage. Then the guys would jump out and play their set, thereby kicking Aerosmith’s ass both musically and symbolically. We even did a test run the day before the festival, with a professional driver operating the tank and the boys going along for a ride. They seemed to be pumped about it.

  Personally, I worried that something could go wrong either with the actual stunt or with the rush to the stage, down a flight of approximately one hundred stairs, that would follow. Hell, Alex had managed to sprain his ankle without even jumping out of a plane. This time they would actually be in the stunt vehicle. As it turned out, David pulled the plug on the whole thing the following day, when he learned that Aerosmith had apparently gotten wind of the plan and might be plotting some sort of counterattack. So the tank remained on the premises, under a tarp, and the Volkswagen sat there all day, without explanation, save for the announcements over the PA system, which, without context, must have seemed pretty ridiculous to the sweat-soaked throng at the Coliseum. Not that they would have cared. Hell, with Aerosmith and Van Halen at the top of the bill, they more than got their money’s worth.

  THE EUROPEAN LEG of the World Vacation tour lasted a mere two weeks at the end of June, but it came right on the heels of three months of practically nonstop touring in North America. A few days off would have been nice prior to returning to the States for another leg, but, as the band was discovering, with stardom and success came greater expectations and responsibilities.

  I was lounging on my bed in London, which was sort of my office away from home, when the phone rattled me out of an endless stream of thoughts about business, mayhem, and promotion, promotion, promotion. When I picked up the phone, I instantly recognized the voice on the other end as that of Tom Ruffino, head of the international department at Warner Bros. More than just a capable business associate, Tom was a good friend. I enjoyed working with him and appreciated everything he had done to help make Van Halen more than just a domestic success, including sending the band overseas on several occasions for both promotional and video work to advance our foreign presence.

  Tom was very much a “big picture” kind of guy, and you ignored his advice at your own peril. That said, I could tell by the tone of his voice and the late hour of the call that the break between tour legs was about to be cut short, and that one or more of us would likely be heading to some location other than Los Angeles.

  “Things are happening,” Tom said, his voice reflecting both seriousness and excitement. “Big things. I hope you have your bags packed.”

  “They always are, Tom,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  Tom’s grand plan, he explained, was for me to take two members of Van Halen to South Africa for a promotional visit. My stomach churned at the very thought of it. I had already turned down several lucrative offers to play in Sun City, the playground of the South African white elite, and I had no intention of going there anytime soon. South Africa at the time was a country deeply divided by apartheid and abuse, a violent and repressive society—repugnant in its racial segregation and dangerously stubborn in its refusal to change. Philosophically, it was hard for me to rationalize supporting any of this, and having Van Halen play in South Africa was certainly a form of support. Moreover, it wasn’t the safest place to take the band.

  But Tom was nothing if not persuasive. This wasn’t a performance, he said, just a promotional appearance. Furthermore, Warner’s South Africa division was a bastion of integration within the music industry. The company was headed by a guy named Derek Hanna, whom I had spoken to on the phone and had found to be an intelligent, knowledgeable straight shooter.

  “This is important, Noel,” Tom said. “Van Halen is selling a lot of records in South Africa. We need to have a presence.”

  I wasn’t happy about it, but I understood Tom’s point. There was a difference between playing Sun City and promoting the band to a broad and multicultural audience. I told Tom I would take care of it and hung up the phone. Now all I had to do was pitch the idea to the lads and hope that two of them would find it reasonably palatable. If not, I’d look like a rather foolish and ineffectual manager to Tom and the rest of the Warner Bros. brass.

  I called the band together for a quick meeting and explained what was in the works. “I need two volunteers,” I said. “Who’s up for it?”

  The result was entirely predictable. David and Alex were all in—David because he never missed an opportunity to promote both himself and the Van Halen brand, and Alex because he genuinely liked to travel and see different places. Edward, on the other hand, declined immediately. Even after a year of adjusting to touring and travel, Edward still preferred the comfort and familiarity of home to life on the road. Typical of bass players, Michael was the quiet and reclusive one of the group and rarely conducted interviews. Expecting Michael to do a promotional visit to South Africa would
have been unrealistic, but I threw it out there, just for the sake of diplomacy. He politely declined.

  The next morning, David, Alex, and I boarded a flight bound for Johannesburg. As the doors of the jet closed we looked at each other, suddenly realizing just how long a trip lay ahead, and how mysterious the destination would be. I saw that David’s grip on the armrests was even tighter than usual. After having flown thousands of miles with David, I could measure the intensity of a particular journey by the whiteness of his knuckles. This one was going to be a nasty trip.

  Or maybe not. Alex, in his cool manner, had swept two bottles of vodka off the flight attendant’s tray before we even taxied away from the gate. This was not uncommon for Al, and not because he needed to calm his nerves while flying—he just liked to drink. And while his “hobby” became a compulsion and ultimately a crippling addiction, it also at times made him an interesting traveling companion. London to Johannesburg is an eleven-hour flight, nonstop, so there would be plenty of time to get inebriated and still catch some rest. In fact, Al calculated this to be a “two-drunk” flight. Meaning there was time to get drunk, eat dinner, get some sleep, and then do it all over again—before we hit the ground.

  We were on our first sleep when we were startled awake by the plane’s rapid descent into what we would later learn was Nairobi. This was supposed to be a nonstop flight, so the interruption was surprising and somewhat alarming. Apparently, we were short on fuel, so a change in flight plan had been requested. Once on the tarmac, to our utter amazement, two men clad in what appeared to be HAZMAT suits quickly boarded the plane. I was still half asleep and more than a little tipsy as their forms came into focus. For a moment I thought we’d been hijacked by a UFO and were about to be kidnapped. The fear only intensified when the intruders pulled out “guns” and began spraying the cabin with some alien mist. They moved from stem to stern with great efficiency, filling the fuselage with a thick white cloud. We didn’t have time to spit or cough, let alone voice any objection. As quickly as they had appeared, the spacemen were gone, leaving behind a couple hundred gasping passengers; presumably, though, any uninvited guests—six-legged or microbial—had been vanquished.