Runnin' with the Devil

by Noel Monk

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, although I knew the answer.

  She laughed.

  “Because I didn’t want my husband getting into a fistfight with one of his band members in the middle of an airplane. I didn’t want to be the reason you got fired or Van Halen broke up.”

  “Oh, come on. I wouldn’t have done that.”

  Again, Jan laughed. So did I.

  “You know me well,” I said.

  ON THAT SAME LEG OF THE TOUR, Jan and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary: April 24, 1984. We were in Winnipeg, Canada, and had the night off. After a beautiful meal in the lovely hotel restaurant, a cake magically appeared at our table (I never did find out who sent it), adorned in icing with the message “Happy First Anniversary, Jan and Noel.” It was a very nice gesture, but after a lavish meal and two bottles of wine, we had no room left for cake, so we decided to pack it up and take it back to our room.

  Along the way we passed several people in our entourage who were hanging out outside their rooms on our floor. Many of them had attended our wedding and now offered congratulations and reminisced about what a great party the wedding had been. A few also reminded Jan that my getting married was one of the all-time great upsets, so obviously she must be something special (which she was, and is).

  Before we went into our room we stopped to chat with Alex and his new girlfriend, Sherry, whom he had met recently on the road, and who was now traveling with him. She was a beautiful woman and they seemed rather taken with each other. Jan had spent some time with them backstage and liked Sherry. But, as with most of the women Alex met, she wasn’t around long after that evening. Alex was in a good mood that night, not excessively drunk, and was quick to wish us a happy anniversary. He had taken the time to send us some flowers, and it’s worth noting that he chose black orchids—sort of like our anniversary was a funeral rather than a celebration. Alex had a perverse sense of humor, so it wasn’t much of a surprise. At least he had taken the time to mark the day. Outside our room we saw Michael Anthony hanging around and shooting the breeze with some people. We invited him to hang out for a while. He was at least as drunk as we were and we were joking and laughing and having a great time, when Michael saw the vase containing the flowers and seemed curious.

  “Are those for your anniversary?”

  Jan nodded.

  “Who the hell sends black orchids as an anniversary gift?”

  “Take a guess,” Jan said.

  Michael laughed. “Alex, right?”

  We all started laughing about what a sick joke it was, but exactly what you’d expect from Alex. All of a sudden, Jan got up, opened a window, and tossed out the flowers, vase and all. Considering we were on the eighth floor, this was not a great idea. Fortunately, no one was hurt.

  Michael then spotted the box with the cake in it.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Our anniversary cake,” Jan said. “Want to see it?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Want to smell the flowers on the cake?”

  This was an old trick, but Michael was too drunk to notice. And probably too trusting. He leaned over the box, and Jan moved in for the kill, pushing Michael’s face down into the cake. As Jan laughed and ran toward the bathroom in retreat, Michael picked up a handful of cake and tossed it at her. For the next five minutes, an all-out cake war ensued, until both of them were covered in icing.

  It was one of the best nights we had on the entire tour.

  THE BIGGER THE TOUR, the harder it is to control everything; there are simply too many moving parts. This sometimes applied to the crew as well as the band members. Indeed, there were days when everything seemed to be falling apart at once. Like the day I was on the stage talking with David during sound check at a venue in the Southeast, when my walkie-talkie began to beep. On the other end was Eddie Anderson, talking a hundred miles an hour. Eddie rarely displayed much emotion, but now our chief of security was in panic mode, which both surprised and concerned me.

  “Noel, you have to come to room 632 at the hotel. We have a real problem.”

  “I’m just working with David on a few things,” I responded. “I’ll be up in a while.”

  “No, you have to come right now,” he insisted. “It can’t wait. The police are here and they’re going to arrest two of our roadies from the lighting crew.”

  “What? Slow down, Eddie. What happened?”

  “Just get over here,” he repeated. “Now!”

  I turned off the radio and headed for the stage exit. I could hear David say, “What the fuck?” as I left, but this was not the time to placate him.

  I ran to the hotel, jumped into the elevator, and punched the sixth floor. At the far end of the hall I could see Eddie pacing back and forth. When I got to him, I was shocked to see that he was actually sweating.

  “Okay, spit it out,” I said.

  Eddie shook his head. “The best way to explain this is to show you.” With that he opened the door. I was met with the strong smell of marijuana. I quickly glanced around the room and could barely believe my eyes. There were two uniformed police officers standing with two roadies whom I barely knew—that’s how big our crew had gotten. Both of them had stupid, shit-eating grins on their faces. The room was completely trashed: lamps on the floor, tables turned upside down, television ripped out of the wall. It was a fine example of hotel trashing; I almost wanted to congratulate them—if not for one small thing.

  As I took two steps into the room, I slipped on a piece of paper and wound up on my ass, staring at the ceiling. All around me were other pieces of paper, which I recognized as pages that had been ripped from a book. I picked up one of the pages and looked at it. Instantly I realized the problem: the pages had been torn from a Bible.

  “Are you out of your fucking minds?” I said to the roadies, who suddenly stopped smiling. “You can’t tear up a Bible!” Especially in the South, where folks tend to take these matters rather seriously.

  “Are you ready to arrest them?” I asked the officers.

  One of the officers nodded grimly. “You’ve got that right.”

  “Well, I’m the manager of Van Halen and these pieces of shit are my responsibility. Do you think I could talk to you in the hall for a moment?”

  Once outside, I apologized profusely on behalf of the entire organization, and then asked the cops for permission to handle the situation internally.

  “I think my solution will be harsher than what you might do,” I said. “They will be fired immediately. We’ll drop them off at the bus station and give them just enough money to pay for a ticket home. Getting any work in the future in this business will be almost impossible.” I paused to gauge the reaction of the officers. They wanted to hear more. “And obviously we will pay for all the damages, and then we will charge it back to these two assholes.”

  “Okay,” one of the cops said. “You do that and they are all yours.”

  I went back into the hotel room and ordered the roadies to begin cleaning up the mess.

  “And forget about the crew meal,” I said. “You’re going to work the show tonight, but you can do it on an empty stomach. And then you’re gone.”

  Patrick, our production manager, made sure everyone knew what had happened. Two hours later I went down to the crew meal to see how everyone would react. To my surprise, I got a round of applause. They understood: there is a line you don’t cross, and these guys had crossed it. They had to go.

  THE WHINING was driving me crazy.

  Edward whining about David; David whining about Edward and Alex; Alex whining about Michael (of all people). Michael . . . well, he didn’t whine about anything or anyone. To the very end, he remained grateful for the gift that was Van Halen. Maybe it was his natural personality, or maybe he was simply capable of greater perspective than everyone else. Maybe he wasn’t quite as addled by drugs and alcohol. For whatever reason, Michael stayed on the sidelines as the rest of the band fought like a pack of star
ving wolves who have come across a carcass in the wilderness.

  Previous tours, especially in the first couple of years, had always featured a fair amount of ball-busting and the occasional argument that was required simply to clear the air. For the most part, though, we had a blast on the road. It was a nonstop party punctuated by spectacularly energetic concerts. There had been a lightness to it all, a sense of being part of something special, and of wanting to enjoy every minute. But now the levity was gone. Even though they spent hardly any time together offstage, the boys were at each other’s throats constantly, either directly or through a conduit—usually me.

  Two more quick stories, both involving Al. We were all sitting outside by the hotel pool one day. A guy named Mike had been flown in for a couple days to take care of the boys’ grooming needs. Mike was a hairdresser or stylist or whatever you want to call him. Point is, he was really good at his job, an artistic young man with a good sense of humor and the patience to deal with a bunch of egotistical rock stars. On this particular day, as he fussed over a grumpy Alex, Mike decided to lighten the mood by giving Al a little kiss. Now, I have no idea whether Mike was gay or straight, and it really doesn’t matter in the least. The point is, Al took this humorous gesture as an affront to his manhood, and got seriously pissed off. He didn’t try to hurt Mike or anything, but he did go on a rant that was far out of proportion to what had happened.

  “I don’t ever want that fucker working here again!” he screamed at one point.

  Poor Mike was scared, bewildered, and disappointed. He liked Al; he liked all the guys in Van Halen. He simply hadn’t realized that the band had mostly lost its collective sense of humor.

  Another story, another hotel, midway through the tour, on the night of a show. What city? I don’t know. Doesn’t really matter; could’ve been anywhere. In a throwback to earlier and more innocent times, David decided to play a practical joke on Alex. Actually, it wasn’t much of a joke, and it required little ingenuity. It was more a case of David just fucking with his bandmate by inserting the nozzle of a fire extinguisher under his door and setting it off. The ensuing noise, and the accompanying blizzard of white powder, provoked a response from Alex that was probably a bit more heated than David had anticipated. Or maybe it was exactly the response he expected and hoped for.

  Regardless, when I heard the commotion in the hallway, I left my room, and what I saw was at once comical and pathetic. There was Alex, naked (I presume he had a girl in his room), screaming at David, promising to rip his fucking head off, and David laughing in response. Between them, trying to deescalate the situation, was Eddie Anderson, our chief of security and David’s personal bodyguard.

  “I’m gonna fucking kill you, David!” Al kept screaming.

  Emboldened by Eddie Anderson’s presence, David would press forward, laugh a little, then toss off a threat in response.

  “I’ll kick your ass, Al. You’re a fucking pussy.”

  But he didn’t mean it. David was not a tough guy. He was all show. This was a man who once signed up for karate lessons and paid in advance for enough schooling to take him all the way through to a black belt, but I doubt that he went more than a few times. He liked to fashion himself as something of a martial artist, but it was all style and no substance. The best example of this? After a show at Madison Square Garden in New York, someone tried to break into the luggage compartment of our bus. We caught the guy—a skinny little Hispanic kid; must have weighed ninety-five pounds—before he could get away, and he wound up hiding under the back of the bus. David found out what was happening, and instead of letting security take care of the matter, decided to play the role of enforcer.

  “I’ll handle it,” he said.

  So, holding on to the back bumper, he slid beneath the rear of the bus and tried to kick at the poor kid while the rest of us stood around watching. We let this go on for about ten minutes, until David became exhausted and pulled himself out from the under the bus, his chest heaving, his legs covered with dirt. After he walked away, we coaxed the kid out. He was just a street kid, obviously poor and maybe homeless, so it was hard not to pity him.

  “Don’t be stupid,” I told the kid. “Next time we’ll send someone after you who knows what they’re doing, and you might get hurt. Understand?”

  The kid nodded and we sent him on his way.

  So that was David. In a physical matchup against Alex Van Halen, he was a decided underdog. And he knew it. Had Eddie Anderson not been there to intervene, David would have been in serious trouble. Instead, with Eddie holding Alex at bay, David was able to scramble safely back to his room, shouting “Fuck you, Al,” as he slammed the door.

  “Fuck you, David!” Al responded before disappearing into his room. I looked at Eddie, who merely shrugged and walked away. He might have been thinking the same thing that I was thinking. In 1978, or even in 1982, spraying a fire extinguisher under a hotel door would have been viewed as an offense so minor it might have gone unnoticed. But now? In the middle of the biggest and most expensive tour in the history of Van Halen? It was, apparently, a crime punishable by death.

  As the door of my room closed behind me and I staggered back to bed, all I could think was . . . Jesus, these guys hate each other.

  ON THE 1984 TOUR, there were two parts of the day that I grew to dread: sound check and the postconcert meal. David ruled both of these events in a bilious and petulant manner: ordering everyone around during sound check, and then pointing out every little mistake after the show. Granted, he had long used these situations as a forum for flexing his muscle as the de facto band leader, but drug and alcohol use, combined with the Van Halen brothers’ growing resistance to David’s dictatorial preening, made for a much more hostile environment all the way around. Being a natural bully, David began focusing his harangues less on Edward and Alex, and more on Michael. But the saddest part, to me, was that neither Alex nor Edward would stick up for Michael. It was like Lord of the Flies: the weak were destined to be destroyed.

  Still, what happened one night roughly halfway through the tour caught me completely by surprise, not just because of the extent of the meanness but because of what it foreshadowed.

  We were gathered in a hospitality suite, loading plates with food from a buffet table, while David did his usual critique. I had learned to tune him out by this point, and in fact often just left the room altogether. But on this night I was there for every word of David’s postmortem, and for Edward’s sudden and unexpected interjection. When he began to speak, I thought for sure that he would lash out at David. But he didn’t. Instead, he began taking shots at Michael. And not just about his performance onstage, but about his role in the band.

  Michael doesn’t contribute as much as the rest of us, Edward observed. Michael doesn’t write music or lyrics. He might as well have said that Michael was just taking up space, and that his role could be fulfilled by virtually anyone. Now, this may or may not have been a valid point. Michael was not a songwriter and thus contributed little to Van Halen from a composing standpoint. But the same could be said of Alex. Edward and David had always done most of the writing, and everyone was fine with the arrangement. Songwriting credits notwithstanding, royalties were split equally among the band members. For some reason, Edward now felt compelled to challenge that arrangement.

  “Why does Michael get the same share as the rest of us?” Edward asked, and as he said this, he looked at me, like I had anything to do with an arrangement that predated my arrival and that supposedly was based on friendship and egalitarianism. I had no answer for this; frankly, I had no idea what was going on, or why suddenly everyone seemed to be ganging up on the one member of the band who meant no ill will toward anyone.

  Al jumped in behind Edward, asking the same sorts of questions and offering similar observations about Michael’s value—or lack thereof—to the band. For the most part Michael just sat there quietly and took it—until David stood up from his seat, a plate of food in hand, and walked around th
e table. He stopped when he reached Michael’s seat and stood over him for a moment, glaring menacingly but saying nothing. The entire scene reminded me of a junior high school cafeteria, with the cool kids picking on the shy and sensitive. My hope was that Michael would stand up for himself. But he didn’t. He just sat there with David standing over him, until, finally, David exploded in a manner that was extreme even by his lofty standards. Without saying a word, David slammed his full plate of food down on top of Michael’s full plate. The effect was startling. Food went flying everywhere. Glasses tipped over and shattered. Silverware fell to the floor.

  And all conversation stopped.

  We all stared at Michael and awaited his reaction. This is it, I thought. Here is the moment the quiet kid fights back. But he didn’t. Instead, he simply pushed his chair back from the table and stood up. He lightly brushed at some of the food stains on his shirt, gave David a hard stare, and walked out of the room.

  That was the end of it . . . until two weeks later, when Alex, Edward, and David all came to my room. Without Michael.

  “What’s up guys?” I asked.

  Alex was the first to speak, but it was clear they were united in purpose.

  “We have a problem with Michael,” he said.

  “How can you have a problem with Michael?” I said. “He’s the nicest guy on earth.”

  No one disagreed with that sentiment; they also claimed it was beside the point. This wasn’t a popularity contest. The criticisms leveled at Michael the night David destroyed his meal had apparently intensified. No longer were Alex, Edward, and David content to merely complain about Michael’s contributions. Now they wanted to take action. Severe, punitive, life-changing action.

  “We want to cut Michael out of the royalties,” Alex said.

  “You mean, in the future?” I asked.

  No, they explained. Not just moving forward, but for 1984, as well. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. First of all, this was an incredibly cold and callous thing to do to someone who had been with your band all along. Second, Michael had a contract with the band that covered the current album, which, by the way, had already sold a couple million copies. I tried to explain this to the guys, but they were adamant about changing the parameters of the band’s structure, effective not just immediately but backdated to a point prior to the release of 1984.