by Noel Monk
If there was a downside to all of this, it was that carrying around vast sums of cash was risky business indeed. In addition to dealing with legitimate issues when passing through customs during international travel, there was the far more tangible threat of being mugged and robbed. This was a serious amount of money—the kind that bad people are willing to do very bad things to obtain. To protect our lives and our livelihood, I hired a security staff comprised of eight to ten men from a variety of backgrounds, but with one thing in common: they were physically intimidating and not even slightly averse to violence or confrontation. Trust me when I say this: you did not want to fuck with these guys. Hell, I didn’t want to fuck with them, and I was their boss (they also called me L’il Caesar, the nickname Edward had come up with a couple years earlier). Simply put, with these guys hovering nearby, if you tried to steal from Van Halen, you were going to pay a steep price.
It wasn’t just about guarding satchels of cash at the end of a long night, and it wasn’t merely about keeping crazed or deranged fans from getting too close to the band. A significant part of the job involved protecting the Van Halen brand at concert venues at home and abroad. You see, with ownership of our merchandising business came the responsibility of ridding ourselves of bootleggers who sought to cash in on the band’s fame and popularity through bootlegged merchandise. We did this with great vigor, harassing and squashing anyone who tried to infiltrate our turf. It was ugly and sometimes brutal work; a certain disposition was required. The guys I hired for security had the right temperament. Truth be told, so did I.
With a background in martial arts and a permit to carry a concealed weapon, I wasn’t new to these kinds of confrontations and they didn’t bother me. Years earlier, I had been made an honorary member of the NYPD after helping save the life of a police officer who had been attacked in the line of duty. All of this came in handy when dealing with large segments of the music business, where tenderness is usually rewarded with an ass kicking. Managing a band of Van Halen’s scale could be enormously stressful, and I have to admit that there were times when I relieved that stress by wandering out into the parking lot and confronting bootleggers. If the confrontation escalated into physicality, well, that was okay by me. The way I saw it, these guys were nothing more than thieves. If they were stupid enough to sell shitty, counterfeit T-shirts out of the back of a van at our shows and think they could get away with it, they were sorely misinformed. This was hallowed ground for us, and we guarded it with our lives.
It helped that we had the support of security at virtually every performance venue. For instance, the head of security at the Atlanta Omni, a former cop named Henry whom I had known for years—well before Van Halen—was more than happy to look the other way when we challenged the counterfeiters in his building.
“Noel, I know you’re pretty rough on these motherfuckers,” he said to me on the eve of a show. “I don’t like them either, so I understand where you’re coming from. Just do me a favor: I don’t want to find any bodies within three days of when you leave town.”
We both cracked up. “Don’t worry, Henry,” I said. “I promise it will take you at least four days to find any bodies.”
The Bootleg Wars, as I like to refer to this period in Van Halen history, was a vicious but essential stage of the band’s development, at least from a business perspective. Van Halen might have been a party band that espoused mainly the time-honored teenage pursuits of inebriation and sex, but behind the scenes, they were an entity seriously devoted to protecting and furthering their own brand. Merchandising was central to this pursuit, and we crushed anyone who attempted to illegally infringe upon our business.
There was no other option.
Eventually, through the help of Jules Zalon, a copyright infringement attorney, we were able to obtain a nationwide injunction against the bootleggers that resulted in our being assisted by US Marshals in the confiscation of counterfeit T-shirts at many concert venues. This naturally cut down on much of the head-banging we normally perpetrated on the bootleggers, which was a bit of a drag, but it did have a profound and lasting impact on their ability to undercut and interfere with our business. Bootlegging was then, and remains today, a slippery enterprise that is almost impossible to completely eradicate, but we certainly didn’t make it easy for them.
Over the years we confiscated tens of thousands of counterfeit T-shirts, all of which were collected as evidence to be used, if necessary, in the federal case against the bootleggers. In 1984 I finally went to Jules and said, “For crying out loud, what the hell am I going to do with all these shirts?”
“Let’s ask the judge,” Jules suggested.
The judge’s response was, in essence, “Do whatever you want with them. They’re yours now.”
Our accountant wanted us to write them off as a business loss on our taxes, but that didn’t seem right. Nor did it seem appropriate to sell the merchandise, even at bargain basement prices. I don’t believe in profiting from ill-gotten gains; besides, the shirts were of low quality and I didn’t want anyone paying for something like that when it represented their love for Van Halen. These were lousy polyester shirts mass-produced in some third world country, probably on the backs of child labor. Our licensed T-shirts were a 50/50 cotton blend, manufactured in the USA. In the end, I made a unilateral decision to donate all the counterfeit T-shirts to charity. I gave a thousand or more T-shirts to every police department with which we worked on a regular basis, and they in turn donated the shirts to their local Police Athletic League. (There were other charities, as well, that received shipments of free T-shirts that they could sell or auction to support their endeavors.)
It was important for us to maintain at least a cordial relationship with police departments throughout the country. After all, we needed cops to get our job done. Every concert involved heavy interaction with the local police force, as they were responsible for traffic management, crowd control, security, and a dozen other issues. At every show, the cops could make your job harder or easier, so it only made sense to develop an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect. I liked cops and appreciated the fact that they had a difficult and dangerous mission. I also understood that if they wanted to make our lives miserable—ours, after all, was a business in which illicit activity of one type or another was an everyday occurrence—they could easily do that.
Getting this point across to the band was sometimes a bit of a challenge.
Wait a minute . . . Noel likes cops? What’s that about? We fucking hate cops.
In time, they came to understand and appreciate these relationships as being crucial to their success and enjoyment on the road. It’s worth noting that despite all the drugs that the band carried with them from city to city, and ingested on buses and airplanes and in hotel rooms and backstage, only once in seven years did their behavior result in an arrest, when David stupidly tossed a lit joint into the crowd in Cincinnati. The reason they so often avoided prosecution is because I always greased the cops. Except in the Northeast, where a gratuity was far more likely to be misconstrued as a bribe. But in the South, where we usually started our tours, the cops who were assigned to the venue made nothing, so I would tip every one of them fifty bucks, and I’d give the manager of the facility and the head of the precinct a hundred bucks. To a working-class police officer in 1980, this was not a small sum. It demonstrated our appreciation for their efforts, and helped lessened the chances of their busting our balls about smoking weed backstage. In general, it just lightened the mood for everyone: band members, crew, fans.
Still, my chummy relationship with law enforcement did sometimes lead to awkward encounters. I used to invite all the officers—uniformed, undercover, narcotics—backstage during the show, while the band was performing. We always had an abundance of food leftover, so rather than let it go to waste, I encouraged the cops to stop in and make sandwiches, have a cold drink or a coffee. It was a small and inexpensive gesture that went a long way to ingratiate ourselves with
the cops.
I would always time it so that the officers exited the hospitality area at least twenty minutes before the end of the show. They were at their busiest before and after the show, so it wasn’t usually a problem. Well, one night in Los Angeles I screwed up the timing. The show ended while a bunch of the cops were still backstage, eating their sandwiches. As the boys burst through the door, sweat-soaked and ready for a postconcert party, they ran smack into a roomful of cops—some in blue uniforms, some in undercover garb, and all carrying badges and guns.
The boys stopped dead in their tracks; their faces turned white. They didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. All they knew was that their manager was standing backstage with a bunch of cops, in a time and place where this did not typically happen. I could almost read their minds.
Holy fucking Christ—we’re getting busted!
Nothing could have been further from the truth. The officers said hello to the band, politely excused themselves, and then left the room. I half expected the band to chew me out for this mistake in timing, but instead they were chastened.
“Why were they here?” David asked, his voice betraying both concern and legitimate curiosity.
“I was just giving them some food, making nice. This is the way it works, David. Don’t you know that by now?”
He nodded. The rest of the guys said nothing, just went about the usual postconcert routine of drying off and changing clothes. The mood was somber.
“Okay, well . . . thanks,” David said.
And that was the end of the lesson.
NO AMOUNT OF FREE SANDWICHES AND COFFEE, or even fifty-dollar tips, could shield us from the occasional unpleasant encounter with law enforcement. Smoking weed (or even snorting cocaine) backstage was one thing; kicking the ever-loving shit out of bootleggers or harassing unlicensed photographers was more visible and therefore potentially more problematic. The cops and marshals were generally sympathetic to our plight, but they couldn’t just completely ignore confrontations that turned violent and chaotic. We knew this but we rolled the dice anyway.
At a show in Fort Wayne, Indiana, we got into a bit of a roughhouse with some bootleggers, and as happened sometimes, they actually fought back. You have to remember, we were a security force of less than a dozen men, trying to constrict a bootleg operation that often involved forty to fifty vendors and clerks scattered throughout the arena and parking lot. Usually the bootleggers would scatter when they saw us coming, but sometimes they stood their ground, if only for a short time. Well, on this night things quickly got ugly. We slapped a bunch of guys around, took their merchandise, threw the keys to their cars and vans into a nearby lake, and then went backstage to let the commotion die down. Well, a few minutes later, local law enforcement officers joined us, along with some bootleggers who were surprisingly eager to press charges.
“They beat us up!” yelled one of the bootleggers, a kid in his early twenties whose eye was already turning black.
Okay, if that’s the way you want to play it . . .
I pointed to a welt that was rising on my cheek. “No, officer, they attacked us. We responded. It’s called mutual combat.”
Much yelling and screaming ensued, until the cops grew weary and disgusted and decided simply to bring in everyone involved in the fracas. So we all went downtown, had our mug shots taken, and got tossed into the Fort Wayne drunk tank for the night.
Now, I loved my security staff. These guys would have risked their health for me and the band, and in fact did precisely that on numerous occasions. But some of them were not the brightest of bulbs. I mean, they were hired primarily for their balls, not their brains, so that’s okay, but occasionally they looked at things from an almost comically simplistic vantage point.
“Listen, Noel,” one of them said while we awaited bail. “These cops are little. We can take over the jail!”
I stared at him and tried not to laugh.
“I’m serious, man,” he said, this time more forcefully. “We can disarm these motherfuckers!”
“Oh yeah?” I said. “And then what?”
He shrugged, apparently realizing suddenly that he hadn’t thought the plan through.
“Just relax,” I said. “We’ll be out of here soon enough.”
For the next several hours we passed the time by pitching quarters in a corner of the cell. The agreement was this: each time someone was bailed out, he would leave his quarters behind. The last person to get bailed out would get the entire pot, which amounted to only a few dollars, but nevertheless the exercise helped the clock move more quickly. By morning we were all out and back on the road. We ended up just being released, which did nothing to dissuade us from continuing to fight the Bootleg Wars.
It’s funny—prior to working with Van Halen I had been arrested only once in my entire life, when I was a teenager, and I beat the rap on that one. But I spent time in jail twice during my time as the manager of Van Halen. The other time occurred in San Diego, in the summer of 1980, and resulted, once again, from our security staff zealously guarding the Van Halen brand. This included not just confronting bootleggers but also amateur photographers and videographers. Times have changed, to put it mildly. Today, with smartphones putting high-quality video and photographic (and even audio) content in the hands of virtually every concertgoer, there is no way to prevent fans from capturing the experience for themselves. Thirty or forty years ago, however, it was much easier to shut down this practice, as it required some fairly sophisticated and unwieldy equipment. Typically, the people who owned this sort of gear, and who were willing to try to sneak it into a show, did so not because they were interested only in a simple souvenir but because they hoped to sell the images or video or audio recordings. Really this was just another type of bootlegging, and we challenged it righteously. Cameras and recording equipment were not permitted at Van Halen shows (or at any shows, for that matter); if a camera-toting fan managed to slip through the cracks, and we caught them, wandering through the venue, we would confiscate their film or tape and then return their equipment.
In San Diego, one particularly brazen young man stood outside the door to the VIP area as I exited before the show with two of my security staff, Bill and Mickey. The young man squared himself in the doorway, held his camera aloft, and began snapping away. I have no idea how he thought he would capture any image of significance, but I guess he figured this was his one shot at getting a photo of the inner sanctum. Next to him was a petite young woman, very pretty and excited. It dawned on me then that he probably wasn’t a freelance photographer but rather just a kid showing off for his girlfriend; nevertheless, I wasn’t about to let him flout the rules, especially right in front of us.
I stepped into the kid’s path. Without any provocation or direction, Bill and Mickey went into action, flanking him and holding their positions until he finally took notice.
“Okay, man, give us your film,” Bill said, holding out a meaty palm.
The kid instinctively tucked the camera under his arm. He gave his girlfriend a quick look, then smiled nervously.
“No,” he said. “You can’t have it.”
I could see where this was headed and tried to stave off an altercation that all of us would likely regret—especially this young man, who was about six feet tall but couldn’t have weighed more than 130 pounds. Bill was roughly twice his size. Mickey, while not quite that big, was even more intimidating. He had the square jaw, wide shoulders, and steely squint you might associate with a military veteran, which in fact is exactly what he was—Mickey had served in Vietnam as a member of the Green Berets. He didn’t talk about it much, but Mickey had seen and done some shit. You don’t mess with a guy like that unless you have a death wish.
“Listen to me carefully, son,” I began. “There are signs all over the place around here that very carefully spell out the restrictions against taking pictures or taping our shows. No pictures—anywhere. Not inside, outside, backstage, onstage, in the toilet . . . anywhere. I
’m sure you can read, because you don’t look stupid. But right now you’re acting stupid, and you need to think very carefully about what you’re doing.”
As his girlfriend, perhaps out of self-preservation, subtly moved a step or two away, the kid shrugged. The veneer of toughness, though, was falling. He looked like he was about to shit himself.
“Can’t have my film,” he said. “Sorry.”
With that Bill inched closer to the kid, further violating his personal space and surely tightening the kid’s sphincter.
“Hand me the fucking camera right now, shit brain.”
Finally realizing that discretion is indeed the better part of valor—even when your girlfriend is standing nearby—the kid laughed nervously and handed his camera to Bill, who popped open the back, removed the roll of film, and then handed the camera back to the kid.
“Enjoy the show,” Bill said. And that was it. As quickly as the incident happened, it was forgotten. No one got hurt, we prevented the kid from taking any pictures, and we went on our way. This happened in every town, at every concert. It was no big deal. Or so we thought.
A short time later, as I was walking through the parking lot, a squad car bearing the logo of the San Diego Police Department rolled up alongside me. By this time Bill and Mickey had gone off in another direction, so I was alone. The cop knew who I was because we had held meetings prior to the show, as we always did, to express our willingness to work with the local cops, as well as the federal marshals assisting in our efforts to interrupt the bootlegging traffic. This particular officer was polite but firm.
“We have a complaint against you and a couple of your guys,” he said. “Some kid says you beat him up and took the film out of his camera.”