Everybody Wants Some

by Ian Christe

  Funny that nobody in Van Halen had been born in California, because the band played the part perfectly, selling a bigger, better, and more liberated version of sun and fun. They were outsiders who had bridged the gap, and the great unwashed hordes would soon respond by the millions. After years in the trenches, now Van Halen could die happy. “My fondest memory of working with Van Halen is it was a group that was aimed in a single direction,” David Lee Roth later recalled. “We played a lot of different kinds of music in the bars for a number of years, and that was a great education. We didn’t do it for money. We did it because we really loved the music.”

  4. Bat Out of Hell

  For all their regional success, in 1977, Van Halen were still just a promising club act. They were gaudy, sweaty hard rockers in an era of sleek disco and fashionable punk rock. Refining the edges on these square pegs was now the job of producer Ted Templeman, who had wrangled rockers Montrose, cooked mellow hits for the Doobie Brothers, and harnessed the frenetic Captain Beefheart.

  Templeman sought the live excitement, beginning by bringing Van Halen to the studio to record demos of two to three dozen winners from their stage repertoire. Plenty of tough jams like “Young and Wild” and “We Die Young” from those sessions never made the grade, but “Runnin’ with the Devil,” “Atomic Punk,” and “On Fire” were perfect. Other early live favorites needed major tweaks and were set aside for the time being. “House of Pain” and “Voodoo Queen” would surface again in coming years. The giddy energy and humor on the demo recordings were evident—at the end of “Little Dreamer,” Roth mocked Alex’s trippy cymbal splashes, cooing, “Are you experienced?” in his best Hendrix baritone.

  Templeman soon installed Van Halen at Sunset Sound Recorders, where he had steered the Doobie Brothers to a slew of gold albums. There the band labored to record a white-hot debut loaded with unabashed charisma and a powerhouse of electricity. Usually Roth sang his lead vocals live in an isolation booth at the same time the band played the music in the main studio—an uncommon practice during an era when perfectionists like ELO and Boston were creating lush studio soundscapes one meticulous tape splice at a time.

  The band jumped around and put on a show for themselves in the studio. The brothers bickered often over whether Alex was keeping steady time, and he countered by accusing Eddie of playing out of tune. In fact, Eddie was tuned down a quarter step to somewhere between D-sharp and E, a sweet spot low enough for Roth’s vocal range but high enough so Michael Anthony’s bass sounded tight.

  Mike’s bass guitar was somewhat downplayed by Templeman, except for the “doomp doomp doomp doomp” at the start of “Runnin with the Devil,” a big-bottomed prelude that became iconic for Michael and the band. “When we recorded our first album, Ted Templeman was so into Eddie playing. Everything had to be oriented around the guitar,” Mike told Bass Frontier. “I had to be really basic. But from the first time I ever picked up a bass, everyone always said it’s not a glamorous instrument. You’re going to stand there like Bill Wyman in the back and just play. I don’t care. I love the way the bass felt, the way it makes your pants and everything else shake.”

  There was almost no studio magic behind the band’s flashy technique. Eddie pleaded with Templeman not to force him to relive the headaches of the Gene Simmons demo sessions. Of ten songs, Eddie claimed he recorded overdubs on only two or three, including the solos to the cover of John Brim’s “Ice Cream Man” and “Jamie’s Cryin’ ”—a song that was written in the studio. “When ‘Jamie’s Cryin’’ was picked,” Alex told the Album Network, “everybody’s memory of it now is ‘Oh, what a great song.’ And yes, it was a good song, or else it wouldn’t have made it on the record. But we were more into ‘I’m The One,’ the hyper-kinetic stuff. We were heavy.”

  Lacking time to hone the song on the Hollywood grindstone—the usual weekly club dates—Roth was unsure how to approach “Jamie’s Cryin.’ ” Not wanting to screw things up, he put down the Camel Filters and laid off drinking for a day beforehand, hoping to sweeten his raspy voice. After a couple takes, Templeman came down on him for sounding weak. When he heard Roth’s explanation, Templeman prescribed an immediate return to form—so the singer quickly applied the necessary medications, and soon his voice was suitably thrashed and ready to roar.

  Slowed way down, a tape of three of Alex’s car horns became the special-effect intro to the record. Eddie recorded a cheap electric sitar to faintly fill out the sound of the guitar solo on “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love,” the band’s manifesto to being young, dumb, and full of cum. The song’s simplicity made a mockery of punk rock, using a complicated picking strategy to rip two chords wide open. At the same time, the feel-good vocal harmonies of “Feel Your Love Tonight” put a more racy sexual thrust into the good vibrations of the Beach Boys, the older generation’s consummate California crew.

  The dynamics of Van Halen were fantastic, power rising from a hushed whisper to a full-on blaring wall of guitars, often within one song. On the soft side was “Ice Cream Man,” an old blues song of John Brim’s by way of Elmore James. Though out of place, the tune was a throwback to Dave’s days playing guitar in the high school parking lot. A dexterous picker in his own right, he played the acoustic first verse, and he played it live.

  Eddie was awakening the higher brains of a generation with its feet stuck in the primeval mud of heavy rock. His archetypical guitar solo, “Eruption,” was done in two or three takes. Basically a showcase of his live soloing, “Eruption” was a slight variation on a composed solo piece for electric guitar. He would flash his chops throughout the live set, wiggling them between songs. Once committed to vinyl, “Eruption” became associated indelibly with Van Halen’s crunchy stop-start version of the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me.” Eddie thanked Templeman for even including “Eruption”—the producer heard him practicing it in the studio and demanded he cut a version for the album. A slight fade in the middle muted a squall of amp feedback—otherwise the unedited ninety-second stroke of genius appeared as performed.

  The end of “Eruption” burst into a decimating boom that threw down the gauntlet to all other musicians calling themselves guitar players. The solo elevated electric guitar wankery from its slavish devotion to the blues. The middle finger-tapping section was almost like a flowing saxophone riff—maybe gigging with Jan Van Halen had rubbed off. Eddie’s sound was aggressive but natural. His guitar tone became known as the “brown sound,” a description Alex originally coined to describe his specifically tuned snare drum. Eddie wasn’t shooting for silvery robotic aggression—he wanted earthy noise. “I want my guitar to sound like Al’s snare,” Eddie said with shrug. “Warm, big and majestic.”

  Not having heard “Eruption,” you could argue that music is more than just an athletic competition. You could talk about feeling, and how good music isn’t how many notes you play, but about which ones you really feel. You could look at Eddie Van Halen in his shag haircut and shiny pants and say that he was everything wrong with music. But Eddie wasn’t a nascent guitar god because his pick moved faster. He put more ideas together quicker but still poured more feeling into his playing, expressing a higher level of excitement and euphoria than anyone before him.

  After twenty-one days in Sunset Sound, Van Halen rested. The band left the sessions with dozens of songs remaining from the preproduction demo, including “Peace of Mind” and “Babe Don’t Leave Me Alone.” Not many of them stayed on the shelf for long, as the band would tap the creative well of their club days several times over the course of Van Halen’s first six albums.

  The photos for the album sleeve that introduced the band members to the big bad world beyond Southern California were shot at the Whisky a Go Go. The guitar on the album cover was one of Eddie’s $200 specials cobbled together from a pile of cheap guitars—what he called a Frankenstrat. The front pickup was just for show, to fill the hole—only the rear, bridge pickup was actually wired for sound, because after all his hot-rodding, Eddie couldn�
�t figure out how to solder the switch back in place. The guitar also had bike reflectors attached to the back to throw lights around onstage, like something from an episode of The Little Rascals.

  For “Runnin’ with the Devil” and a couple other songs, the band filmed flashy music videos at the Whisky, hoping to capture the dazzle of their live show so the videotape could travel places they couldn’t. In the clip for “You Really Got Me,” Eddie wielded an Ibanez Destroyer he had crudely sawed some chunks out of to make a star shape, in the process ruining the guitar for actual music. For the band’s press bio, David convinced the others to shave two years off their age in order to seem younger. As if the old guard didn’t have enough cause for jealousy, Van Halen wanted to kill them completely.

  Warner Bros. chose “You Really Got Me” to herald the coming of the new colossus. Bummed that their first single would be a cover instead of an original, Eddie recalled playing a tape of the finished album for drummer Barry Brandt from the rival Sunset Strip club act Angel, only to learn a week later that Angel were in the studio bashing out their own hard rock version of the Kinks’ song. Templeman and Warner Bros. scrambled to rush Van Halen’s single into stores first.

  Standing atop the Hollywood rock club scene, Van Halen crowned 1977 with a New Year’s Eve date at the Whisky a Go Go, playing a best-of club days set, including “On Fire,” “Bottoms Up!,” “Summertime Blues,” a three-and-a-half-minute version of “Eruption,” and several unreleased songs like “No More Waiting” and “Bullethead.” Dave polled the audience about how 1977 had been for them, then drawled: “I judge the year on how good the Thai sticks were, and they were pretty good this year! Let’s hear it for Thailand! Let’s hear it for Colombia! Let’s hear it for Mexico! Let’s hear it for Edward!”

  Wasting no time, in January 1978, Warner Bros. sent radio stations five songs from Van Halen pressed on a special red vinyl record. The standard cardboard sleeve pictured a pointy Van Halen logo that looked like a mountain range, while the flip-side label on the record featured Elmer Fudd climbing out of the famous Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies spirals used by Warner Bros. cartoons. “You Really Got Me” snuck up on a few rock radio stations and soon took hold nationally. Angel had been smart to try to snake the song—the precision-tooled cover took Van Halen into the Top 40 pop charts in United States and the United Kingdom, a sort of American invasion. Eddie was at home when he heard the song on the radio for the first time at 2 A.M. He ran into his parents’ bedroom and woke them up shouting, “Mom! Dad! We’re on the radio!”

  The full album hit the new-release shelf in record stores nationwide on February 10, 1978, complete with a fetching new VH inverted tri-angle logo. Van Halen sold the California lifestyle and the world bought it. “We celebrate all the sex and violence of the television, all the rocking on the radio, the movies, the cars, and everything about being young or semi-young or young at heart. That’s Van Halen,” David Lee Roth told Waxpaper shortly afterward.

  The album was not an instant hit but a slow and continuously rising success. At the end of May, it was certified gold. After a thousand nights in the beer halls, the cover band from Pasadena was finally about to be taken seriously.

  Warner Bros. found Van Halen a production manager, Noel Monk, fresh off the road wrangling the previous year’s self-destructive great white hope, the Sex Pistols. He and acting manager Marshall Berle arranged an eight-man team to get the Van Halen convoy rolling. On March 3, Van Halen hit the road opening for Journey, a light rock band from San Francisco whose audience ranks were swollen with females. “People say this is Van Halen’s first world tour,” Roth cackled. “This is our first world vacation, man!”

  At first they felt out of their element, no longer basking in the approval of thousands of hometown fans. They left home wearing three-inch platform shoes, pushing Eddie and Michael up toward six feet, where Roth stood in his socks. Alex decked himself out in a black-studded leather jumpsuit, his hair a nappy UFO that jived with his reputation as the wildest banana in the bunch. The whole band wanted so badly to look ace that observers remember even the crew wearing platforms. Before the first month was over, it was back to more practical sneakers for the band and Capezio dance slippers for the high-leaping Roth.

  Everyone thought that Van Halen should consider themselves lucky to be earning a few hundred dollars a night, playing brief thirty-minute sets with dodgy sound, but they were used to raking in thousands selling out clubs back in Hollywood. The desire to succeed had brought them to the top of the barrel—now they flopped over into the very bottom of a much bigger pool. With sets as short as six songs some nights, no catering or sound check, the band soothed themselves by stealing food and girls from Journey’s backstage area while the host band was onstage. Eddie, out from under his parents’ watchful eyes for virtually the first time in his life, later admitted to “squeezing everything that walked” in 1978.

  For half an hour each night, Van Halen bounced across the stage as if they were weightless on the surface of the moon. David Lee Roth worked his body into contortions and then sprang airborne with vertical splits. And those legs were straight—the corrective braces he had worn on his legs for two years as a toddler did their job. Roth allowed no resistance to his existence, except the tiny internal pilot light that told him it was all turbulence ahead. His was an ever-renewing energy that could be toxic when pointed in certain directions, but there is no underplaying how high his hyperactivity lifted the band upward.

  At the time, few people thought rock would still exist in five years. Yet Van Halen played as if they didn’t yet realize that in rock and roll, nobody expected them to be this consistently good. Eddie traveled with a suitcase of guitar parts, often found open and scattered across motel rooms as his compulsive search for the perfect weapon continued. He continued composing new song parts into the wee hours, though he admitted to Jas Obrecht that often he was jamming just for the sake of it. “Most of the time I’m so high I forget them!” he said, laughing.

  The stage effects in the Army-surplus bomb guaranteed chaos as the round, heavy, unstable war artifact toppled over and rolled around during nearly every show. That torpedo, a strobe light on Roth’s spinning scarf, and a logo banner fit for announcing a half-price pizza sale were the sum total of the production value for that tour.

  The name Alex Van Halen soon dominated damage reports issued by band management, detailing lamps that had been drummed to pieces, smashed hotel room mirrors, bathroom doors off their hinges, toilet seats found in the parking lot, telephones hanging out the window, and room service carts wrecked from Mississippi to California. The rest of the band and their support staff and road crew made frequent guest appearances on the deduction sheets as well—Roth traveled with a wrench to open windows in hotels that tried to exercise climate control. He claimed he needed fresh air.

  In Wisconsin, the touring menagerie trashed the seventh floor of the Madison Sheraton. There were no girls on the scene, nothing but a band of California wildmen set loose in the snow, tossing furniture out of a window several stories above ground. When Eddie found his room empty, he snuck into Roth’s room and swiped the table and chairs to replace his own. The adventure led to an apology of sorts in the liner notes for the next album, a gesture that also extended to “all the hall managers who waded through the rubble of Van Halenized backstages across the world.”

  It paid to remain alert around the Van Halen encampment, especially after someone figured out how to build rockets by stuffing aluminum hotel towel rods with firecrackers. One uneventful evening, Alex was inspired to re-create one of his famous pyro displays in a motel parking lot. He found a pile of black rubber tires and, salivating at the idea of filling the sky with wretched black smoke, tried to light them on fire with a pack of matches, oblivious to the policeman waiting nearby with his gun drawn. “Finally, he says ‘what are you doing?’ ” Alex recalled, and the stunt was thwarted.

  After Alex finally lit his hair on fire by accident onstage, he
no longer doused his sticks and entire drum set with burning lighter fluid. The band decided to leave pyrotechnics to the professionals. His drum hardware also needed to be welded together, to support the weight of the singer jumping off the kit. “Drummers are people who make their living beating things with sticks,” Roth said admiringly. “Alex has got to be the main spirit of Van Halen—we named the band after him.”

  Hitting Holland that May—where record shops couldn’t decide whether to file Van Halen under “V” or “H”—the California quartet with two Dutch-Indo brothers was welcomed with curiosity. They appeared on DJ Alfred Lagarde’s influential “Concrete Hour” show on national VARA radio, speaking Dutch with marked American accents. At the Amsterdam-area concert, the band added a cover of “Summetime Blues,” and won over an audience heavily populated by aunts, uncles, and proud cousins.

  Van Halen were so good opening for Black Sabbath in England in 1978 that Sabbath toppled and broke apart immediately afterward. Their singer, Ozzy Osbourne, became completely demoralized and left the group. Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler later quipped sardonically that it was the first time after eight albums that Warner Bros., their American label, had ever bothered to come see the band—and then only for the sake of catching Van Halen.

  To Sabbath’s credit, the metal forefathers recognized they were imploding on their own problems, and they bore the Californians no grudge. There was none of the sabotage that Van Halen had come to expect as an upstart opening act—in fact, Osbourne invited them to his home after a Birmingham show for a night of madman-style drinking. Roth recalled seeing Ozzy’s wife bring out his children in the morning to kiss their father good night, the helpless Ozzy sprawled unconscious on the couch.