by Ian Christe
Borrowing liberally from his inspirations, Roth built his singing voice from an articulate palette of screams, including the primal roar of Ian Gillan from Deep Purple, the orgiastic squeals of the Ohio Players and Cold Blood, and a whole bag of tricks from obscure midwestern soul singers like Major Lance. Jim Dandy Mangrum of Black Oak Arkansas, a godfather of cock rock, claims that Roth asked permission to film his shows at a Hollywood club. If true, Roth was learning stagecraft from a lurid master. “It’s better to steal,” Roth later told MTV. “Inspiration doesn’t come from nowhere. You don’t lie in a dark black room and a burst of light appears with the hand of the Lord offering you a song. It doesn’t happen like that. You have to steal it from somebody. You change this and you change that—if it was good enough for Beethoven, it’s good enough for me.”
Reconsidering his early rejection, Alex Van Halen sensed a fellow warrior in Roth. Besides, his brother was struggling as lead vocalist of Mammoth. Though his voice would have been adequate in any other local act, compared to the wunderkind’s magical guitar his singing sounded dodgy. Not only did Eddie’s playing shame other guitarists, it shamed his efforts as a frontman. Alex started to envision a whole package. Besides his boundless drive, Roth came with a rehearsal space, an Opal Kadett station wagon for transportation, plus the PA system that was currently costing Mammoth plenty of dough. So in late 1973, David Lee Roth joined Mammoth, and the band ditched the Blue Cheer/Cream power-trio configuration that had gone out of style in the late 1960s, becoming a quartet like Led Zeppelin—the template for the 1970s.
As Eddie’s reputation spread, his picture-perfect renditions of the guitar gods gave way to a fluid yet unpredictable style he described as “falling down the stairs and hoping I land on my feet.” “I sometimes wonder myself when it was that I turned the corner and went my own way in playing,” he told Musician, “because the last thing I remember was playing ‘Crossroads’ and being Eric Clapton. All of a sudden, I just changed.”
Shortly after David Lee Roth joined Mammoth, their hapless keyboard player was given the boot. The next business was a name change—“Mammoth” sounded too ponderous. Roth suggested “Van Halen,” a cool, memorable moniker like Santana that would stand out on a poster next to other local bands like Snatch or Kuperszyth. Next, Van Halen devised their first band logo—loopy, with descending lines that looked like musical notes.
Graduating from high school auditoriums, the next step for a fledgling hard rock band was playing the informal backyard party scene. Rock ruled for California teens in 1974, and massive crews of kids in tank tops and cutoff jean shorts passed the hot summer nights with kegs of beer and ample opportunity to score cheap grass. By the time Van Halen played their first backyard party, they were already able to muster nine hundred paying heads.
In demand from the start, Van Halen played everywhere they could draw electricity—outdoor parks, the backyards of mansions, and roller rinks. Where extension cords couldn’t reach, they took electric generators. The locations became familiar—Huntington Drive, Arden Road, Colorado Avenue, Hamilton Park, and Madison Avenue—all announced on mimeographed party flyers with hand-drawn maps. Friends remember an early flair for showmanship, like Eddie sticking his cigarette in the headstock of his guitar in emulation of Keith Richards. Eddie’s lead guitar playing was unrivaled. He usually closed shows with an extended firestorm based perfectly on the electric blues boogie “Goin’ Home” by Ten Years After—no easy task, as their guitarist Alvin Lee had been billed the “fastest guitar in Britain.”
Inevitably the police arrived to bust the backyard parties, sometimes in helicopters, to keep the revelry from going too far over the edge. For the kids, it was all part of the light show, and “crime scene” videotapes made by the police remain the ultimate unseen early documents of Van Halen. When the cops broke up the show, the kids would scatter, spreading out into suburban neighborhoods, scrambling in their sneakers through culverts and vacant lots, evading the long arm of the law, hoping to regroup before night’s end. If they were lucky, Van Halen would arrive at the next party, and Eddie would seize whatever guitar was available and reel off a few choice tunes in the living room.
There were minimal distractions at that time—no video games, no VCRs, no Internet chat rooms, and no cable TV. There were barely even any skateboards. When they outgrew GI Joe dolls and Evel Knievel action figures, live rock bands gave kids a setting to entertain one another. While the adults of California partied with cocaine in hot tubs, the children got wild in the streets with cheap beer and little plastic sandwich baggies stuffed with green grass. Not only was AIDS not an issue, there was no War on Drugs, and the drinking age was for all practical purposes nonexistent. “Back in 1972 I OD’d on PCP, thinking it was cocaine,” Eddie later told radio interviewer Mark Razz. “That’s when I first got exposed to that stuff, and I didn’t know what it was.”
Along with neighborhood divisions came territorial rivalries. Van Halen represented the San Gabriel Valley and fought for turf against the San Fernando Valley’s Quiet Riot, who dressed in polka dots and showcased their own guitar prodigy, Randy Rhoads. Innocent but extremely headstrong, Van Halen weren’t above a bit of sabotage, unplugging amps to steal the thunder of opening bands and hurry themselves onto the stage. “What’s a party without any guests?” Dave taunted from the stage. “A Quiet Riot concert!”
As wild Pasadena parties and Eddie’s guitar wizardry put the band in demand, Van Halen’s repertoire of cover songs grew to a hefty two hundred tunes—three hundred if you count blatant hack jobs. Their set list ranged from pounding proto-metal by Deep Purple, Queen, Black Sabbath, and the little-known Captain Beyond, to boogie rock by ZZ Top and Grand Funk Railroad. To broaden their appeal beyond Pasadena, Roth insisted they learn soul jams that could move the dance floor, like James Brown’s “Cold Sweat” and KC & the Sunshine Band’s “Get Down Tonight.” As late as 1976, Van Halen would still pull off a left-hand turn like Stevie Wonder’s “Superstitious.”
Eddie still felt frustrated when the covers sounded too much like Van Halen, not enough like the originals. Part of the problem was that Roth never bothered to learn the words—he faked the rhythms pho-netically and improvised the rest. As he recalled one of his colorful uncles telling him, “Dave, the key to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made!” The band would fight over the set list outside the venue until the last minute, but when they hit the stage it was all smiles and high fives.
Sensing opportunity in upscale San Marino near Pasadena, they struck up a band business spray-painting house numbers onto curbs for five bucks a pop. Appearing on doorsteps in blue overalls holding stencils, they informed housewives of an obscure and imaginary city requirement for visible street addresses. The proceeds from this quasi-scam went straight back into the band to buy gas, drumsticks, and guitar strings.
Van Halen never heard of a basketball court or a basement too small to jam. They played in a parking lot to publicize the opening of a new supermarket. This around-the-clock commitment became a pain in the ass for bassist Mark Stone. Unlike the Van Halen brothers, for whom school was a promotional opportunity, Stone was a straight-A student with career aspirations beyond this backyard rock band. Obviously, he had to go. The fall from local celebrity to face in the crowd was difficult for him. “For a long time, it really hurt,” Stone said.
During the spring of 1974, Mike Sobolewski was invited to become part of the Van Halen gang. He apologized to his bandmates from Snake, and then bounded away to join the offputting Roth and the friendly Van Halen brothers. Sometime between leaving the high school marching band and meeting David Lee Roth, good-natured Mike Sobolewski became known as Michael Anthony, a crazy bass wildman, one step closer to the musical all-star team. “When my father found out I’d joined, he got really angry and kicked me out of the house for dropping out of school,” Michael said.
Besides bringing a rumbling bottom-end sound that complemented Alex’s thunder perfectly, Mi
ke was also an unrivaled backup singer. His uncanny high-end harmonies expanded the available range of cover songs, and eventually crafted the Van Halen sound significantly. More coveted for the time being, however, was a system of light pedals he rigged to play using his feet. He met the requirement to help the band’s career by advancing their stage show.
With the addition of Dave Roth from Red Ball Jets and Michael Anthony from Snake, Eddie and Alex had swallowed the local competition. Van Halen now featured the main guys from the three most happening bands in the region. Possessing more than just musical ability, they were outgoing people who knew how to use a telephone, how to draw a crowd, and how to put on a great show. Plus they all had great smiles.
Billing themselves as “the pride and joy of Southern California,” Van Halen were a homegrown grassroots phenomenon whose popularity grew by word of mouth. As it was for the local hardcore punk bands Black Flag and the Germs, and later Sunset Strip glamsters Guns N’ Roses and Poison, the grapevine was all-important in the spread of the band. They ruthlessly promoted their appearances with cheap ads in local news cir-culars, and especially through flyers and handbills. Before a show, the hustling Van Halen would put thousands of hand-drawn flyers printed for a penny apiece into every locker in local high schools—and not just their high schools but also the dozens of others within an hour’s drive.
The backyards were better than the bars for building a fan base—you didn’t have to be twenty-one to get loaded underneath a palm tree and pass out on the lawn. But eventually Van Halen landed gigs playing as many as four sets a night at beer bars like Walter Mitty’s Rock N Roll Emporium. “To me that was the epitome of a rock and roll club,” Alex said. “And every night we played there I had this vision that we were playing some sort of large arena.”
Los Angeles is a big city with a lot of neighborhoods. Several nights a week Van Halen played at Perkins Palace, Walter Mitty’s, the Proud Bird, the Civic Auditorium, Barnacle Bill’s, the Swiss Park, or the occasional pizza parlor. And as the band grew up and started playing more clubs, its audience came of age or got fake IDs and followed. For some reason, Van Halen still couldn’t get booked in Pasadena bars. “We couldn’t even get work at the local club, the Handlebar Saloon!” Eddie later told Creem.
After failing the audition at least once, Van Halen won a regular spot beginning in April 1974 at Gazzari’s Teen Dance Club in Hollywood, playing cover songs for over three hours a night. Eddie bought platform shoes for the occasion and nearly broke his ankles. As documented in The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization 2, Gazzari’s was a bawdy, go-go scene relic that survived into the 1970s with rock excess and a touch of vaudeville. The best dancer in the crowd won thirty dollars—incentive to copy the moves on Soul Train and American Bandstand and hopefully bump into the girls standing nearby.
Roth honed his stagecraft by emceeing the dance contest between singing songs. His joining the band had opened the door to Hollywood—club owner Bill Gazzari famously called him “Van,” assuming the band was named after the singer. Though considered by many to be obnoxious, the band’s only impediment to sure success, Roth was already choreographing stage and lighting moves that made every little lick memorable. The Van Halens handled the music, and he took care of the rest.
“We’re playing dance music for people who like to party tonight,” Roth chatted up a Pasadena crowd. From his earliest moments onstage, he was riffing on song titles, talking a mile a minute, looking to burn through his awkwardness as fast as possible and become a seasoned stage master. “No sense trying to be high-class and play nonsense shit. We’ll play something maybe you can relate to. At least you can get up and dance, man, find out if that honey you’ve been looking at wants to look at you.”
With his windblown hair and hairy exposed chest thrust outward, Roth was a fusion of pop icons Farrah Fawcett-Majors and Burt Reynolds—but he wasn’t hanging next to Robert Plant on bedroom walls just yet. In 1975 he was still a loose, chatty kid, rattling off stage raps just to hold back the hecklers. He taunted rocker boys to “get mellow and imitate Soul Train,” then laughed when they shouted their disdain for soul music. Nevertheless, while the strong bass lines and Alex’s drums punctuated the California air, the young ones danced boldly.
Even as the band scored entry-level Hollywood showcase gigs at Gazzari’s—a glamorous position compared to the bowling alleys of Pasadena—they were taking home less than a hundred bucks a night, hardly enough for four guys in their twenties to keep their enterprise rolling. Eddie’s mother badgered her baby to take his future more seriously. With her musician husband cheering the boys’ progress with every step, it was up to Mrs. Van Halen to think sensibly. She insisted that Edward allow her to sign him up for computer classes at the DeVry Institute of Technology in Phoenix, Arizona.
If Eugenia Van Halen had won that family fight and Eddie had applied his talents elsewhere, Phoenix might have become the center of some kind of unorthodox revolution in personal computing. Instead, under Eddie Van Halen’s influence, Southern California would soon become the holy land of hotshot guitarists and big hair, and he would be the messiah.
Combining New World ambition with Old World discipline, Eddie spent hours every day practicing guitar. He sat with a six-pack of Schlitz while his older brother went out to party, and he’d still be hitting the strings when Alex came home in the wee hours of the morning. Eddie’s style was ultramodern but deeply musical. He fired off familiar lead guitar licks so fast that they sounded new, without pause, a torrent of sounds and musical ideas that kept listeners pinned to the wall. He appeared to be mentally three steps ahead of his instrument, wailing and flailing his way to mastery.
After seeing Led Zeppelin play in 1971, Eddie began experimenting with a finger-tapping technique, inspired by the fluttery noises of Jimmy Page flopping his violin bow against his Les Paul. Eddie held his pick between his thumb and middle finger, where most guitar players use their thumb and first finger, like holding a pencil. When he played a fast solo, he would tuck his middle finger underneath and extend his index finger to tap out high notes on the guitar neck. He could play high- and low-note combinations or triads, using the fingertips of both hands. As he built up speed, the effect was dazzling—completely ballistic and brand-new sounding, yet undeniably musical.
Though years of piano prepared him for the technique, Eddie Van Halen did not invent the finger-tapping approach to guitar. Back in 1971, Steve Hackett of the English band Genesis tapped on several songs on the album Nursery Cryme. Electric blues player Harvey “the Snake” Mandel tried two-handed tapping in 1973 on his Shangrenade album. Brian May of Queen made finger-tapping motions in a 1975 video for “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Even more concretely, Emmett Chapman invented a two-handed tapping instrument called the Chapman Stick in 1969—an electric ten-stringed curiosity played without strumming, just using fingertip pressure like Eddie did in his solos.
But none of the forerunners pushed tapping to Eddie Van Halen’s precision and velocity. Eddie was self-critical and extremely hard on himself and his playing. His mind was wrapped so tightly around the electric guitar that he was thinking holes straight through his instrument—how the strings were twisted, where to apply oil, what kinds of frets gave the right sound. He kept his low-grade arsenal in a constant state of reinvention, accidentally destroying many guitars by ripping out their frets or trying to alter their body shape with a saw. For a while he played a Fender Strat in honor of Jimi Hendrix, rewired with a Gibson PAF humbucker pickup to fatten the sound. He also cut the vibrato bar on his Gibson ES-335 in half, so only the top three strings whammied. After the solo break, he could finish the song with the bottom three strings still in tune—a clever modification.
Like Hendrix before him, Eddie was a technical innovator who reconfigured the instrument to suit his needs. Unsatisfied with stock instruments, he essentially invented the modern shredder guitar by taping together various parts to create a lightweight, high-output weapon suitable for his s
oon-to-be trademark attack. In 1975 he bought a budget Boogie guitar body for fifty dollars and a maple neck for eighty dollars, stamped in some Gibson frets stripped from a less fortunate donor axe, and Krazy-Glued a single humbucker pickup at the bridge position for maximum sustain and resonance. He also rewound pickups with extra copper wire, to balance the sounds from the sharp rear pickup and the mellow front pickup until they suited his ear.
Eddie’s cobbled-together guitars could be as temperamental as they were innovative. Roth called these creations “Dennis the Menace bits of trouble.” To minimize problems while performing, in 1975 Eddie took on guitar tech Robin “Rudy” Leiren, a junior high school friend who remained his six-string valet for more than a decade. Eddie delighted in throwing his guitars around, however, horrifying onlookers who expected the guitar whiz to treat his instruments gingerly.
One ongoing problem was volume—Eddie only liked the sound of his amp when it was pushed to full output, which created countless problems. He tried aiming the amp at the wall, stuffing it with padding, and covering it with a plastic hood before discovering that he could overdrive it at a lower volume if he starved it for voltage using a Variac variable power supply. Eddie dialed the Variac well below the standard 110 volts to artificially overload the vacuum tubes, allowing him to reach his favorite resonant feedback tones without deafening clubgoers or his parents. “Those amps used to blow like every other gig, and you have to retube them every other day, but they crank!” he told Guitar Player. An earlier experiment with variable voltage using a light-switch dimmer blew out the power in his parents’ house.
Through a friend of Michael Anthony’s, Eddie met a guitar maker named Wayne Charvel in San Dimas, California. Operating a small custom shop, Charvel was one of many kindred spirits Eddie would find among instrument makers. His shapes were especially light and sounded rich. Eddie ordered a body, specifying where he needed holes to be routed for one single humbucker pickup and a tremolo bar. From Charvel, Eddie also learned how to reduce feedback by dipping his pickups in hot paraffin—the same substance used to wax surfboards. In fact, Charvel and tinkerers like him were a unique product of Southern California garage culture, joined by surfboard shapers, hot-rod mechanics, electronic keyboard makers, and the nascent home computing kit scene. Like Eddie, they all believed there were crazy reasons at the end of the rainbow to do things perfectly—they were all trailblazing per-sonalized directions to paradise.