by Noel Monk
“I’m sorry, sir,” I said. “Don’t worry, I will pay for all the damage, and I will pay for all the work time that you’ll miss if you can’t use your limo. Whatever it costs, the band will take care of it.”
“Really?” he said. “You can make that happen?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s only fair. If you need five or six days to get the car fixed and painted and detailed, and you can’t accept customers during that time, then we should compensate you, because it’s our fault.”
I paused. “And I apologize for our behavior.”
As we shook hands, the driver said, “That’s very nice of you, Mr. Monk.”
“Not really. It’s just the right thing to do.”
I don’t recall exactly how much it cost to repair the man’s limo, but I’m sure it was comfortably into five figures. This was just another example of why Van Halen had trouble making money on the road: our expenses always seemed to outstrip revenue, in part because of the size of our entourage and equipment, but also because of the destruction so often left in the band’s wake.
Although both shows at the Tangerine Bowl were terrific, the limousine incident left a bad taste in my mouth. Sometimes the guys could be very sweet, but other times, especially when they drank heavily, they could be not just inconsiderate but downright mean. And I had no control over any of it.
A few hours after the show I was sitting alone in the dressing room, just relaxing and sipping a beer, when Edward walked in. Limousine incident notwithstanding, I was in a pretty good mood—it’s hard not to feel a giant sense of relief and accomplishment when a tour comes to an end, especially one as successful as this one.
“How’s it going, Ed?” I asked. From the look on his face, I could tell that this was not the right question. For some reason, Edward was in a foul mood. He got that way sometimes, usually after drinking heavily. I found out later that he’d been hanging with some of his buddies out on the green, putting away copious amounts of vodka; no doubt smoking weed and doing coke as well. Whatever the cocktail, Edward was by now obviously wasted, and when he was drunk and mean, it was painful to be around him; the transformation was too sad and dramatic.
He took a seat next to me on the couch. I tried to make small talk but got only half-formed slurred responses. Having seen this routine before, I knew it wouldn’t end well, so I decided to leave.
“Edward, you know what?” I said, pulling myself up from the couch. “I’m going for a walk.”
Before I could take a step, Edward yelled at me. “Yeah, walk away, you fuckin’ drunk.”
With my back to Edward, I started to form a response, which was probably not a great idea. But before the words came out of my mouth, I felt a hand in the middle of my back. Edward gave me a big, drunken shove, causing me to instantly lose my balance. The floor of the dressing room (located in a trailer) was slick with a variety of liquids—water, beer, sweat, and soda, to name just a few—so I was basically put on skates by Edward’s shove. And let me tell you—Edward might have looked like a skinny guitar geek onstage, but he was not a weakling. He was a tough kid who was deceptively strong. Combine that fact with his orneriness and my overly trusting nature (I should not have turned my back on him), and the result was a nasty injury. I careened across the trailer and slammed headfirst into a doorknob. And by headfirst, I mean that most sensitive ridge along the eyebrow. The spot that always seems to burst open in boxing matches.
I hit the floor and just sat there for a moment in stunned silence. Then I felt a steady trickle of warmth as blood poured into my eye and down my cheek. Edward stood up from the couch and looked at me. He put a hand to his mouth.
“Oh, man. Noel . . . I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for that to happen.”
I didn’t even respond. I was too dazed. My ears were ringing and my head throbbed. As Eddie ran out the door, a couple other people came in and helped clean me up and get me into a limo. I ran a hand along the cut. It was nearly wide and deep enough for me to insert a finger.
“Better take me to the hospital,” I said.
Several hours and nine stitches later I was back at my hotel room. I saw Ed briefly the next day, before we left, but neither of us mentioned the incident, despite the fact that I had a black eye and a bandage on my head. In fact, weird as it might sound, we never spoke of it again. When I got home, my girlfriend Jan, whom I lived with, was there to greet me.
“What the hell happened to you?” she asked.
“Ah, nothing. Just a little run-in with a doorknob.”
She ran a sympathetic hand along my cheek and smiled. “You’re in a tough fucking business, aren’t you?”
I laughed. “Honey, you have no idea.”
13
THE MIDAS TOUCH
Nobody knows anything,” the great novelist and screenwriter William Goldman famously wrote. He was referring to the fickle and forever fucked-up movie industry in which he often toiled, but he might just as well have been talking about the music business. Brilliant albums sometimes fail, while shitty albums go platinum. Sometimes there are performers making music so wonderful and yet obscure that their work never sees the light of day. And even for those that do “make it,” the music industry often remains mystifying; just when you think you’ve got everything figured out, they throw you another curveball.
As 1981 gave way to 1982, my goal for Van Halen was to do exactly what I said I would do: provide the band enough time and space to craft a truly great album. No more jumping off the road and straight into the studio, and then right back out on the road to support an album that had been furiously cobbled together in the span of a few weeks. Maybe there wouldn’t even be an album in 1982, and if there wasn’t an album, maybe there wouldn’t be a tour, or not much of one, anyway. We would rest and recharge our batteries, and take the time to write and record a masterpiece.
Or, at least, that was the plan.
Instead, here’s what happened. When the Fair Warning tour ended in late October, everyone took a well-deserved break, one that carried over until the end of the year. There were no plans whatsoever to put together a new album for release in the first quarter of the new year, as we had done the previous four years. My job was to protect the band from outside interference and coercion, to shield them from the usual pressure to crank out another album and another tour. On a personal level, I had no desire to put out a product under the Van Halen brand that would require another late infusion of cash to ensure a platinum sales performance. The way I saw it, the band had been working hard enough and fast enough, and had earned the right to take a more leisurely and artistic approach to the recording process this time around.
Leave it to David to scuttle the entire plan, not that it was exactly his intent. David was an anxious and restless sort by nature, and after a couple months passed he became concerned about the possibility that Van Halen was beginning to fade from the public consciousness. I found this absurd. They were one of the biggest bands in the world, and a short respite—or even a long one—wasn’t going to do anything to compromise that position, at least not in my view. If anything, a hiatus might have fueled an even greater hunger for the next album or tour. David generally agreed with this line of thinking, but only to a point. Rather than disappear completely (as if that was possible), he suggested the band record and release just one song early in the new year, and release it as a stand-alone single. Theoretically, this would keep both fans and critics at bay for a while, while Edward continued to craft brilliant and ambitious songs and everyone recovered from the brutal schedule of the previous years.
Opting for the path of least resistance, as he often did, David suggested the band simply cover a popular song, putting a Van Halen spin on an established product. If this was lazy thinking, it also was somewhat shrewd. After all, Van Halen’s first hit single was a cover of the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me.” If the strategy worked in 1978, why wouldn’t it work in 1982? It was simply a matter of finding the right vehicle. David was a cynica
l bastard, as his later musical direction would prove, but sometimes cynicism can be a highly effective marketing tool.
At least in the short term.
Dave’s first suggestion for a cover was “Dancing in the Street,” which had been a huge hit for Motown stars Martha Reeves and the Vandellas in 1964, and had been covered multiple times since. Dave gave Edward a copy of the song, and while he knew and liked it, he said he couldn’t quite figure out a way to turn it into a Van Halen song. I get that. Edward was too creative an artist to simply replicate a song, no matter how great it might already have been. He had to personalize it. David’s shrieking vocals were a signature, obviously, but to Edward, it was about recasting the song in such a way that it would be unmistakably Van Halen. And that started with the guitar. For whatever reason, Edward rejected “Dancing in the Street” as a stand-alone single, and instead suggested another staple from that same year: Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman.”
The song was recorded in a single day at Sunset Sound, again with Ted Templeman producing, and heaved into the marketplace virtually overnight. I had no expectations for this song, and I’m not sure the band did, either. It was intended as merely a diversion, a chance to have some fun with an old song and keep fans satisfied while they waited for a new album of great original material. But a funny thing happened: “Pretty Woman” quickly gained a foothold on radio stations across the country (and we didn’t even have to pay for it!), and soon became one of the band’s biggest hits, reaching number 12 on the Billboard singles chart.
Along with the single, the band also released its first concept video. And what a concept: Picture the four guys from Van Halen dressed as . . . well . . . an assortment of fictional types—David as Napoleon, Michael as a samurai warrior, Alex as Tarzan, and Edward as a cowboy (looking a lot like the Lone Ranger). Together this fearsome foursome rescues a damsel in distress from the evil clutches of two little people. (Think about that for a moment, and try to remember that political correctness was of little concern to the band in those days.) Adding another layer of controversy was the fact the fair maiden in question was actually a female impersonator. For the boys, it was all meant to be in good fun, but it was a head slapper for many who saw it, in particular MTV brass, who eventually deemed the video to be of such questionable taste that it was banned by the network. Fans, however, seemed to like it, and it certainly didn’t hurt the single in any way.
On some level, I suppose, the success of “Pretty Woman” was cause for celebration. On another level, however, it was something of a disaster. Why? Because a stand-alone hit single is a lonely beast; it practically begs for companionship. As “Pretty Woman” climbed the charts, Warner Bros. responded with predictable greed and shortsightedness, saying, in effect: Hey! We need an album to go along with this single!
At first we all resisted, but the label kept pressuring the band, and eventually they relented. A compromise of sorts was reached: since the first single had been a cover, and since the guys hadn’t written any new material, then why not do an album consisting primarily of cover songs? In theory, this would take some of the pressure off David and (especially) Edward to come up with new songs on such short notice. In practice, it was a venal decision that would compromise the band’s integrity, make them look a bit too much like money-grubbing whores, and result in an album that has long been the most maligned in the band’s catalog (at least from the David Lee Roth era).
In short, that album, Diver Down, was everything that the band hadn’t wanted, and it was created in a pressure-packed atmosphere that I had promised to help prevent. Frankly, it made me kind of sick.
The title and album cover (which depicts the red and white “diver down” flag used to identify scuba excursions on the open water) had little to do with anything happening on the album from a musical standpoint, although David cleverly claimed otherwise. “[The flag] means there’s something going on that’s not apparent to your eyes,” he told reporters in the wake of the album’s release. “You put up the red flag with the white slash. Well, a lot of people approach Van Halen as sort of the abyss. It means, it’s not immediately apparent to your eyes what is going on underneath the surface.”
Personally, I don’t think it was all that deep, but I admire David for putting a positive spin on a lousy situation. You had to give the guy credit for being a gifted slinger of bullshit. The same aptitude that was evident onstage, while delivering impromptu monologues or patter, made David a natural promoter, too. Maybe there was something to the whole “seen versus unseen” nonsense, but I also know the title of the album was basically just a sophomoric bit of double entendre:
Diver Down.
Dive . . . Her . . . Down.
See what I did there?
Anyway, in the wake of the album’s release, and the accompanying bad press, I was busy getting reacquainted with my old friend Valium.
The best that can be said about Diver Down is that it is a “fun” and at times interesting album, and something of a miracle, given how quickly it was assembled. Most of the work was done in less than two weeks, in the winter of ’82, a ridiculous schedule that resulted in an album that runs just a scant thirty-one minutes. Of the tracks, only four are full-length original songs. The rest are either covers (including “Dancing in the Street” and a silly little version of the Dale Evans cowpoke standard “Happy Trails,” along with a version of “Big Bad Bill” on which Jan Van Halen was recruited to play clarinet), or instrumental tunes that serve primarily as a chance for Edward to demonstrate what everyone already knew: that he was the most mesmerizing guitarist in the world. Unfortunately, blistering solos tend to work better in live performance than on vinyl. There was nothing wrong with any of the new material, which included a pair of balls-out rockers (“The Full Bug” and “Hang ’Em High”) as well as the more nuanced and ambitious songs “Secrets” and “Little Guitars.”
Still, there was no getting around the fact that Diver Down seemed sparse and rushed, a sentiment expressed by no small percentage of critics upon the album’s April release. Consider this dagger from Rolling Stone:
“Strip away the four cover versions, the three brief instrumentals and the minute-long goof on ‘Happy Trails’ and Van Halen’s fifth album, Diver Down, suddenly seems like a cogent case for consumer fraud. Van Halen, it appears, is running out of ideas: there’s more excelsior here than in a shipment of glassware.”
Harsh, but not inaccurate. And yet . . . Diver Down was a huge commercial success. Propelled by the singles success of “Pretty Woman” and the synth-pop of “Dancing in the Street” (a sound that would be expanded and refined on Van Halen’s subsequent album, the masterful 1984), Diver Down reached number 3 on the Billboard charts and went on to sell more than 4 million albums.
Quadruple platinum—not bad for something knocked off in less than two weeks.
Still, despite the album’s success, or perhaps because of it, Diver Down contributed significantly to the steady erosion of the band’s fragile chemistry. While David was perfectly content to belt out vocals of cover songs, so long as they became hits, Edward was unhappy with the impression that the band had compromised its principles. He would have preferred a less successful album of original material to a less inventive commercial album like Diver Down. And I don’t blame him. As for me, I wanted the band to have both: commercial success and brilliant originality. And I knew that Van Halen, at its best, was more than up to the task.
FOR EVERY GIGANTIC TASK that came my way as manager of Van Halen, there were a hundred smaller ones, often of a much more personal nature. Some were annoying, some were humorous, some were fulfilling. I never minded because it was all part of the job. In some ways, it was as important to be there to lend a shoulder to cry on as it was to help renegotiate a new record deal. I was a facilitator of opportunities large and small; a fixer of problems trivial and catastrophic. It was all in a day’s work.
In ’82, I helped David with a couple different issues that illustrate t
his point. The first involved a young lady who had somehow managed to hold David’s attention for more than the usual two or three “dates.” By this time our entire group had begun either to embrace or seriously consider the idea of commitment and monogamy (well, commitment anyway). Edward had married Valerie Bertinelli; Alex had fallen for a well-known and admittedly gorgeous groupie named Valerie Kendall; they were engaged and would soon embark on a short and tumultuous marriage. And Michael Anthony, of course, was married to his high school sweetheart, Susan Hendry, who was every bit his match in the niceness category and who seemed always to have only her husband’s best interests at heart. They were an adorable couple and it’s no surprise that their marriage endures to this day. As for me . . . well, that same year I got engaged to Jan. We were married in ’83, and have been together ever since. I’m a lucky guy and I know it.
David, meanwhile, remained a tireless whore, fucking anything that moved, night or day, on the road or at home. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t begrudge him this. Hell, I think he’d agree with me. He might even take it as a compliment—he worked very hard at it, after all. David didn’t want a relationship and seemed to understand that he would have made for a restless and roguish partner.
Imagine my surprise, then, when David showed up at the house I shared with Jan one day, insisting on talking to me about a particular problem. He was completely lathered up, and not merely because he had made the twenty-mile trip from his home by bicycle. It seemed that David had fallen for a young lady and wanted to extend their courtship. There was, however, one problem.