by Noel Monk
“Officer,” I began, “the last part of that is true. We did take his film, as we are entitled to do. But we did not hurt the kid.”
“Well, he claims differently. Get in the car.”
The smart thing to do in that situation is to behave with complete and utter capitulation. Right or wrong, you don’t fuck with a cop. Ever. I knew that. But for some reason my temper got the best of me.
“This is bullshit,” I said. “The kid is lying. It didn’t happen.”
With that the cop got out of the car and walked up to me. His demeanor became hostile and aggressive. I knew I was in trouble.
“Don’t give me that,” he said. “You guys are always pulling shit like this. You think you can get away with harassing people and doing whatever you want.”
“No, I didn’t say—”
“Shut the fuck up and put your hands on the car. You’re under arrest.”
With that he pushed me against the squad car, cuffed my hands behind my back, and steered me into the backseat of the cruiser. Then he turned on the lights and roared through the parking lot, like he had John Dillinger under arrest or something.
We ended up in a holding area with about a hundred others who had been busted for various drug offenses. I later found out that one of our truck drivers had narrowly escaped this scene, after having been investigated for possession of drugs and drug paraphernalia. What did he have? A sewing needle that he was using to fix a tear in his pants leg while sitting in the cab of his truck. Turns out the cops had been using binoculars to survey the entire area and had seen the driver doing something “suspicious.” The guy had been pulling the needle through the fabric, leaning forward and drawing it closer to his face, so he could see what he was doing. Over and over. The cops thought that each time he bent over, he was snorting cocaine or some other illicit substance (perhaps because of the glint of the needle). Four of them descended on the poor guy, dragged him out of the truck. After searching him and his truck for a good hour, the cops let him go with a half-assed apology and a warning not to look so damned guilty. Whatever that means.
Meanwhile, I was pulled from the squad car and my cuffs were removed as a booking sergeant began his interview.
“Let’s see if you’re one of the bad guys or the good guys,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“Turn your pockets out and take off your shoes. Let me see what you’ve got.”
I did as instructed. He patted me down, basically executed a strip search with my clothes on, and then complimented me sarcastically for not being a “druggie.”
“However,” he continued, “you are being charged with assault and battery.”
He cuffed me again, put me in the squad car, and there I sat for some time, until Bill and Mickey pulled up in another cop car.
Great! They’re here to get me out.
No, they were not. Bill and Mickey were also cuffed, and about to join me on a trip to the San Diego County Jail. Hey, at least I’d have company. If you have to go to jail, it’s best not to do it alone. We spent the night in a holding tank before getting bailed out at five in the morning. All charges were dropped because the kid, under questioning about the apparent lack of injuries he had sustained after such a vicious beating, admitted that we did not touch him, and that he had lied in an effort to impress his girlfriend (I’m sure that worked like a fucking charm).
The band got a huge kick out of the whole thing. Here I was, the guy who supposedly knew how to keep the cops off their backs in every city in the country, and I was the one who ended up getting arrested.
“You don’t mess with the cops in San Diego,” David said with a laugh. “Everybody knows that. These guys are real pricks down here.”
“Thanks, David,” I said. “You could have warned me ahead of time. That might have been a little more helpful.”
He shrugged. “Hey, man, I would have, but . . . you know. I didn’t think you were going to end up in jail.”
“Well, in the future,” I said, “please don’t keep such vital information to yourself. We’re all in this together.”
11
THE GIRL NEXT DOOR
She fell for him the way every other girl in America did: from a distance, while staring at the jacket of a record album.
That album was Van Halen’s Women and Children First. Released on March 26, 1980, it was the band’s third album, and while it didn’t exactly break new ground, there were subtle differences from Van Halen’s first two albums, indicating just enough growth to impress critics, while staying mostly true to a hard-rocking party formula that fans had come to know and love.
For one thing, this was the first Van Halen record to be comprised entirely of original material. No breezy covers of well-known songs to increase the likelihood of a hit single. This was, from start to finish, a Van Halen album, and while it was recorded in the usual Van Halen time frame (less than three weeks), the writing and preparation took considerably longer, as this time the band did not have a couple dozen demos sitting around just waiting to be put on vinyl.
It was also, as I recall, the first album on which you could feel the growing musical rift between David and Edward. This was a heavier album, and also one on which Edward’s experimentation with other musical styles and influences could be noted. A dash of electric piano here, a synthesizer there. Ted Templeman oversaw the production again, but this was the first album to feel like it belonged more to Edward than anyone else in the band, a shift that surely did not please David, and that would lead to greater friction between the two of them as time went on. Edward would sometimes come into the studio and work alone, noodling with every piece of equipment at his disposal. At heart he was still a guitar player who loved heavy and hard music, but he was branching out and pushing himself.
David, meanwhile, did what he always did. He would wait for Edward to write the music and then throw together some lyrics in a fit of creative energy—frequently great lyrics, too, or at least lyrics that perfectly fit the tone of the song Edward had composed. The formula still worked, but I could see and feel that they were starting to be pulled in different directions. While David could put words to any melody that Edward wrote (and sometimes create or modify the melody himself), and howl appropriately onstage, he began to express a fondness for lighter and more melodic compositions. Nothing wrong with that. David’s pop sensibilities were acute and helped Van Halen enormously. But, as his tastes continued to lighten, the less he had in common with everyone else in the band.
Unlike the first two albums, Women and Children First spawned only one single, the crowd-pleasing anthem “And the Cradle Will Rock.” But two other songs, “Everybody Wants Some” and “Romeo Delight,” became concert staples, with the latter usually opening the band’s set. Despite a lack of singles and Top 40 airplay, the album was an immediate commercial success, going gold in its first week, platinum within a couple months, and triple platinum by summertime, in the middle of what was known as the World Invasion tour.
It was around that same time that one of the more famous celebrity couplings of the decade—and one of the more unusual in the annals of rock—was born, for that was when Edward Van Halen was introduced to Valerie Bertinelli.
Well, actually, he was introduced to her from afar, when she picked up her brother’s copy of Women and Children First. While her brother might have been a fan of the band’s music, Valerie was drawn more to the angular cheekbones and long hair of one of the young men depicted on the album’s back cover (photographed by the great Norman Seeff). And it wasn’t David Lee Roth, a half-naked poster of whom (photographed by Helmut Newton, no slouch himself) accompanied the album. Nope, it was Eddie Van Halen who caught the young starlet’s attention.
Now, personally, I always thought it was a bit strange that this was the way she fell for Edward, but if it could happen to a million other pretty young women, then why not Valerie Bertinelli? But surely this was not a match anyone would have predicted. Valerie at the time was
America’s Sweetheart, barely twenty years old and the star of One Day at a Time, a massively popular network television sitcom. On the show, Valerie had for five years played an innocent, straight-arrow teenager named Barbara Cooper; by most public accounts, there wasn’t a great divide between the actress and the character she portrayed. As it turned out, however, this wasn’t quite true. Valerie would later admit that she, like her more infamous costar, Mackenzie Phillips, had used drugs and experimented with a wilder lifestyle than her viewing public might have realized or appreciated. Big shock for the seventies, huh?
Valerie was very pretty and very sweet, and perhaps tired of being viewed that way. Hell, she wouldn’t be the first celebrity kid to rebel against the constraints of almost puritanical expectations. But her pursuit of, and eventual marriage to, Edward Van Halen, was a head slapper to millions of Americans—on both sides of the cultural aisle.
What does she see in him?
And why in the name of God is he willing to give up hot- and cold-running groupies for her—or any woman, for that matter?
For Valerie, I think the attraction was a combination of things: Edward was an attractive, gifted, superstar musician. He was also a genuinely nice guy, which obviously she could not know from an album cover. What she did know was that Van Halen had a reputation for wildness, and I don’t doubt that all those things factored into her infatuation.
The trickier question is . . . what did Edward see in Valerie? Oh, I don’t mean that to sound as disrespectful as it probably does. She was young and pretty and charming, and he certainly didn’t have to worry about her pursuing him for his money; at that point in time, Valerie was surely the wealthier half of the couple. I’ll float a theory that goes beyond the likelihood that they actually liked each other and fell quickly in love. You see, it was David who was supposed to marry the Hollywood starlet. He used to talk about it with some frequency, in fact, and I don’t think he was kidding.
“Just watch, boys,” he would say. “I’m going to find myself a fuckin’ movie star.”
It made sense that David would seek a partner who could help expand his own fame; someone who would attract paparazzi. A lot of rock stars have an uncomfortable relationship with celebrity: they want it only on their own terms. They love being onstage and they love the money and sex and power that come with being successful and famous. But they despise the machinery of fame—the reporters and the photo sessions and the chat show interviews. David was different. He loved all of it—anything that nudged him closer to the center of the universe was perfectly acceptable. It’s what made him simultaneously a marketing dream and a personal nightmare. In the end, though, David’s personality seemed to preclude any relationship lasting more than a few weeks, and I can’t imagine that he would have wanted to fight another celebrity for space on the red carpet.
Edward was a different story. He was genuinely happy just writing and playing music, and getting fucked up in his free time. I never would have had him pegged as someone who would be remotely attracted to the idea of a celebrity girlfriend (or wife). But maybe it was precisely the fact that David had bragged for so long about marrying a movie star that encouraged Eddie to choose this path instead. They were competitive, after all; and at times they legitimately disliked each other. So maybe Edward’s relationship to Valerie was on some level triggered by a desire to issue a public “fuck you” to David.
But here’s the real question: what would possess a stunningly talented, attractive, famous rock star, nearing the height of his popularity, to get involved in an ostensibly monogamous relationship at the age of twenty-five, while living a lifestyle that could not possibly have been less consistent with the values traditionally associated with such a relationship? Van Halen was a band whose sexual output was unsurpassed in rock ’n’ roll. Was I keeping score? No, but since I had seen some exploits in my time, I could honestly say that no band had more fun than Van Halen.
And they had the doctors’ visits to prove it. In the first few years they made frequent trips to local clinics for penicillin shots to clear up doses of the clap, both real and anticipated. Sometimes we would find a local doc who would come to the show to administer antibiotics or B12 supplements, or sleeping pills, if disrupted circadian rhythm was a problem (which it often was on the road). Eventually it became part of the road manager’s job to find a doc who would fill any of the myriad prescriptions the guys needed to get through the tour, from codeine to Percodan, all heaped on top of the various street drugs and alcohol they were using. It was, by then, a party that had turned spectacularly messy.
The sex never stopped, and the groupies never went away, although partners were chosen with more care, and the quality improved dramatically. Fewer women were allowed backstage, and many of them looked and dressed like they had just stepped off the pages of Playboy or Penthouse. At the same time, the number of women who were desperate to meet the band grew exponentially, and they were willing to do just about anything to fulfill this fantasy.
Here’s a scene from one of the later years . . .
It’s late afternoon on the day of a show. I’m traveling with my wife, Jan. We’ve been married a relatively short time, but she’s been on the road enough to have seen some unusual behavior. Nevertheless, what she sees on this day is somewhat startling. There is a long line stretching from the back of the road crew bus across the parking lot—maybe forty to fifty guys, all nearly finished with the business of setting up the stage for the evening.
“What’s going on?” Jan asks. “Are they waiting for their paychecks or something? Is there food in there? Are they eating? Can we get a sandwich? I’m starving.”
I stifle a laugh. “They’re not eating . . . not in the normal sense of the word.”
“Then what’s going on?”
I lead Jan into the venue and away from the bus. There we run into Denise, one of the band’s bus drivers.
“Would you mind explaining the line outside to Jan?” I ask Denise. An uncomfortable expression crosses her face.
“No, I don’t think so, Noel. Why don’t you do it?”
“Because I don’t want to. That’s what I pay you for.”
“No, you pay me to drive the bus.”
I smile. In a voice barely above a whisper, I say, “Please, Denise. Get me out of this.”
And so she does, pulling Jan aside and explaining to her exactly why so many men are waiting at the crew bus. Inside the bus are two girls so eager to gain backstage access that they are willing to fellate the entire crew in order to make it happen. That’s right, a couple dozen blow jobs apiece, distributed quickly and dispassionately, in exchange for a chance to meet the band.
Talk about taking one for the team.
I realize how this sounds, but you have to understand that there was no coercion here. These were young women (of legal age) who volunteered for this duty. And they were at virtually every stop on the tour. Not the same women, of course, but the same basic profile—devoted fans (that’s putting it mildly) who would do anything to make their Van Halen experience a memorable one. So they suck the entire crew and are compensated with preferred seating, backstage access, and just about anything else they want. It’s not prostitution, and it’s not sexual abuse. It’s just a deal.
More than once I had been invited to jump the train: “Noel, she’s done eight and you can be number nine, if you’d like.”
“Thanks, but I’ll pass.”
So this was the world in which we all lived; a world of “trickle-down sexonomics,” in which everyone occasionally benefited—from David Lee Roth and Edward Van Halen to the lowest-ranking member of the road crew. And while Van Halen might have been unique in its level of excess, it certainly was not unique in its overall pursuit of sex and drugs. Behavior that almost any normal person would consider depraved was part of the musical landscape and could be found on every tour of every notable rock ’n’ roll band of this era. Indeed, never was the term “Wham, bam, thank you ma’am” more appropria
te than it was in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Before AIDS.
Before cocaine was considered addictive or dangerous.
For Van Halen, it was a time of both unchecked hedonism and enormous creativity and success. Into this vortex of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll walked Valerie Bertinelli. She could not possibly have known what she was getting into; then again, I suppose the same could be said of Edward.
THEY MET FOR THE FIRST TIME IN AUGUST 1980, after a Van Halen concert in Valerie’s hometown, Shreveport, Louisiana, where she was visiting her parents. Eventually I’d get to know the whole family. Valerie’s mother struck me as a typical stage mom—a little too invested in her daughter’s life and livelihood—while the father, an ex-boxer who managed an auto plant, was a nice enough guy who didn’t say too much but projected an air of toughness; he seemed comfortable in his own skin, which I admired. Prior to the show that night I was walking around with the promoter. He mentioned Valerie’s name, said she was at the show, and that he was going to meet her backstage shortly.
“I guess she’s got a little crush on Edward,” he explained. “I’d like to introduce them after the concert.”
I didn’t think much of this at the time—it wasn’t unusual, after all, for celebrities to stop backstage to meet the band. But the promoter hinted that Miss Bertinelli was not just a casual fan.
“She really likes him,” he said.
“Okay.”
Then he paused and smiled conspiratorially.
“You ever see this chick?”
“Uh, sure. Not in person, but yeah.”
He smacked his lips. “Man, I’d eat a mile of her shit just to get to her ass.”
Whoa . . .
“You are quite the romantic, aren’t you?”
Edward had no idea that a beautiful network television star was in the audience that night, or that she was waiting backstage for him after the show, until he walked offstage and headed to the dressing room. I caught him as he went by.