by Ian Christe
Though MTV was heavily pushing British new wave and new romantic bands like the Eurythmics, the Police, and Duran Duran, the channel also adored Van Halen’s flashy, campy video clips. Prior to the Diver Down album in 1982, the band nodded to MTV by filming “the most lavish home movie ever made” at a Malibu movie set for their update of Roy Orbison’s “(Oh) Pretty Woman.” The video had the magic touch, with a storyline scooped out of little kids’ minds in the middle of the night when they’re dreaming in their bedrooms. Basically, when two midgets are spotted abusing a damsel in distress, Van Halen come to the rescue—Michael Anthony in samurai armor on horseback, Alex in a loincloth with a bone necklace, and Eddie done up as Billy the Kid. Roth poked fun at his own egomania, dressing as a campy Napoleon Bonaparte, the quintessential costume of a megalomaniac nut.
Incredibly, programmers in Japan were offended by the samurai likeness, and Australia thought the woman in distress was a blow against women’s rights—even though the supposedly pretty woman is unwigged at the climax and revealed to be a transvestite. After a few dozen showings, deluged by irate cards and letters, MTV pulled the video from rotation, another notch on the band’s outlaw record.
Van Halen’s funny, charismatic screen presence terrified the 1970s rock generation, visually moribund with their beards and beer bellies. The band had nearly owned the live arena, and now it totally took over television. They weren’t really competing with rock and roll bands anymore, but with video games and all thirty-two channels of cable television. “I’m sorry, I’m stoned—hey, why do you think I’m wearing sunglasses?” Roth said with a laugh during a televised interview, and the audience laughed along with him. He brought the party culture nationwide, just as Dean Martin had once made an older generation chuckle knowingly at his ever-present cocktail tumbler.
While the band sought a break from one another in early 1982, Warner Bros. released the toss-off cover of “(Oh) Pretty Woman” as a single. Unexpectedly, the song strutted up the Top 40 catwalk to number 12 on the singles chart. Van Halen rushed to Amigo Studios to make Diver Down, the first album recorded outside the hallowed rooms of Sunset Sound Recorders. Warner Bros. owned Amigo, so they could make it available on short notice, and it was cheaper for them, only costing about $46,000.
Diver Down was created one song at a time over twelve days, collecting little pop vignettes instead of presenting an overarching statement like Fair Warning. The cover was equally simple, a deep-sea semaphore flag marking where divers are swimming beneath the waves—an invitation to go more than skin deep with the band, signaling all kinds of activity under the pleasant surface.
Included in the song list were a slew of covers. Besides Orbison’s “(Oh) Pretty Woman,” another Kinks number appeared, “Where Have All the Good Times Gone?” The band had learned it during the cover band days along with “You Really Got Me” and a few others after Dave bought a K-Tel collection of Kinks songs for research purposes.
The band pointed toward Roth and Ted Templeman to explain why so many other people’s songs were on Diver Down. Originally done by Martha and the Vandellas, “Dancing in the Street” was one of Roth’s musical inspirations as a boy listening to the radio. The keyboard line, played on a Minimoog, was something Eddie had first written for “(Oh) Pretty Woman.” Though Alex defended the choice—“It’s not so much the song as the way you play it”—his gut feeling was that the song was not right for Van Halen.
“They’re rather like send-ups, which is why there are words missing and choruses missing,” Roth told Creem. True—somehow the most watched guitarist in the United States, Eddie Van Halen, allowed “(Oh) Pretty Woman” on the street without a guitar solo, an oversight that bothered him afterward.
Among the originals was a revamped version of “Last Night” from the 1977 demo session with Templeman. Musically, the song was virtually unchanged in five years. It had never made the cut before due to its lame dialogue, with Roth endlessly nagging a girlfriend, “Where were you last night?” Rewritten with epic western horse rustler lyrics, “Hang ’Em High” befittingly became a legend.
“Secrets” was a more recent leftover from the Fair Warning sessions, and it featured all the layered melodies and rhythmic motion of that hallmark album. Roth reportedly wrote the words using taglines from postcards and greeting cards he found at a truck stop in New Mexico. On this song, Eddie expanded the “brown sound” with a growing arsenal of guitars. Among them was a heavy double-necked Gibson, the polar opposite of the light wood models Eddie favored. “No wonder Jimmy Page has a slouch!” he joked to Guitar World.
Diver Down abandoned a long-standing Van Halen production quirk. On the first four albums, Eddie’s guitar was hard-panned to one side, to create a realistic impression that he was playing live on one side of a stage. Eddie hated that. He reckoned that half the kids driving around in Ford Pintos only had one speaker connected, so there was a fifty-fifty chance they were missing almost all of his playing. On the other hand, plenty of junior Eddies were turning the balance control to the max and jamming in their bedrooms with the other three-fourths of the band—the same trick he had used to learn Cream songs.
“Intruder,” the drum, synth, and guitar-noise intro to “(Oh) Pretty Woman,” picked up where “Sunday Afternoon in the Park” left off: a paranoid electronic soundscape for a generation just getting hooked on Space Invaders, Gorf, and Defender. According to Roth, he wrote it on an Electro-Harmonix membrane synthesizer in about an hour as a filler preamble for “(Oh) Pretty Woman,” because the video ran three minutes longer than the song.
Outside a hotel in Memphis on the Fair Warning tour, a fan named David Petschulat gave Eddie a one-third-scale miniature replica of a Les Paul. Spotting a good stage gag, Eddie wrote “Little Guitars,” and its Spanish feel inspired Roth to write a love song to a señorita. “Little Guitars” was one of Eddie’s self-professed finest moments. Along with “Cathedral,” it was a rare example of his needing ten takes to get a perfect performance.
Usually, what came down on record was exactly what Eddie played live in the studio. The process was not meticulous, though—before Eddie ripped into “Little Guitars (Intro),” Templeman asked if he wanted to “do the electric thing first?” Eddie was prepared for a virtuoso performance of any kind, but was still incredibly hard on himself. “I’m fucking nervous,” he squeaked before completing “Little Guitars” with a stellar take.
Only slightly beneath the surface, “Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now)” allowed Roth to ride Edward’s marriage, singing about Big Bad Bill’s conversion from wild child to pussy-whipped husband, doing the dishes and mopping the kitchen floor. The song, a hit from 1924 by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen, also featured guest Jan Van Halen playing clarinet. Probably the only recording of Mr. Van Halen as a soloist, the playful woodwind lines are a brief glance into the whimsical hand that guided two of the modern era’s best-known musicians. Mr. Van Halen hadn’t even played clarinet in ten years, after losing one of his fingers in an accident. The band sat in a circle with sheet music during the session, and Eddie remembered his father being extremely nervous. “My dad would get tears in his eyes every time he saw us play. He loved it. He lived through us because he never really made it.”
The TV sugar rush came with “Happy Trails,” a sing-along from The Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Show in the early 1960s. “If you laugh, don’t worry,” Roth instructed the others when the tape started rolling. “If you hit a flat note don’t worry—as long as there’s exuberance.” The lighthearted breather was one of dozens of songs—including the Mounds and Almond Joy candy bar commercials—the band could sing in four-part harmony, and “Happy Trails” became a heralded and beloved show-closer.
Diver Down’s back cover showed a photograph of the band leaping to greet 150,000 fans while opening for the Rolling Stones in Orlando, Florida, one week before Halloween 1981. The triumphant performance was one that nearly didn’t happen—Alex had broken his hand in four places, and affixed a drumstick
to his arm with tape and shoelaces so the show could go on.
Diver Down was like soft colorful Lycra compared to the leather gloves of Fair Warning, but held together with the same robust stitching. The few overdubs were done mostly for quiet sounds like Dave’s harmonica. The whole episode was barely over thirty minutes long, slightly longer than a TV sitcom—the band pleaded with the press to accept their argument that higher audio fidelity demanded wider grooves and a shorter playing time. Eddie claimed they had even dropped two old club days originals recorded for the album, “Big Trouble” and “House of Pain.”
The way the producer and the singer ran roughshod over this rush job did not sit well with the musical members. “What Eddie and I do is we argue,” Roth told Creem. “We come from different backgrounds, musically, philosophically, socially, our hobbies. I have trouble understanding, more times than not, why he does what he does. There are meeting grounds, of course. But on the musical end, there is no meeting ground. We’re arguing. Somehow we reach a compromise. No one is ever happy except the public.”
Though Diver Down lacked the impact of the first four albums, MTV and the fun song selection successfully goosed record sales. It inched slightly higher up the charts than its four older siblings, peaking at number 3 during a lengthy sixty-five-week run in Billboard. “Dancing in the Street” joined “(Oh) Pretty Woman” in the American Top 40. Though the record rang in platinum status after just ten weeks, for at least ten years it remained Eddie’s least favorite Van Halen album.
When 1982’s “Hide Your Sheep” tour began that July, Eddie was still mostly playing souped-up “Frankenstrat” guitars that were hot-rodded in the truest sense: jimmied for a weekend run in the mud, not carefully polished to look good in a magazine. Even when officially sponsored by Kramer Guitars starting in 1984—making Kramer the top-selling guitar of 1985—Eddie continued to use his old guitars under some subterfuge, sticking Kramer necks on the old Charvel Strat bodies for appearance’s sake. He used other fine touches to his technique—like boiling his strings to break them in quicker, or lightly sanding the parts of the guitar where stage sweat tended to make the surface slick.
At the end of 1982, Kramer swapped out the whammy bars in its guitars, ditching the old Rockinger units in favor of the Van Halen–supported Floyd Rose tremolo. Floyd Rose had patented a number of improvements to guitar whammies that required licenses and royalties in all units sold, and Eddie had been integral in the development of the system, testing and finessing the system from prototype to polished product. “I’ve never asked Floyd for anything for my help,” Eddie told Musician, feeling he deserved more than a thank-you after tens of thousands of Rose-licensed tremolos had been sold. “I was very involved in development on that thing. I don’t care what he says. He kind of threw me a bone, but I’m a bit ticked.”
A 1982 Los Angeles Examiner article contained shocking allegations that the band had gotten mellower backstage, and that Eddie had begun spending more time alone with his guitar behind the little red door marked “Tuning,” slinking out occasionally long enough to grab a sandwich and a bottle of Blue Nun.
There were gritted teeth some nights as the others became less enthused about Roth’s backstage three-panty operas. His credo remained as ever: “What you see onstage with Van Halen is probably what you’ll find underneath the stage. And what you see backstage is probably what you’re going to find upstairs in the hotel.” He proclaimed that vigorous parties were the nightly payoff for a life increasingly spent in the back of limousines and radio station hospitality rooms.
Dave’s entourage expanded to include Danny Rodgers and Jimmy Briscoe, two little people with a big wardrobe, waist-high circus clowns recently escaped from the Ringling Bros. Their tough-guy outfits poked fun at the growing security around the band, and they played a major part of the permanent ongoing photo op Roth called normal. “When you look out of your bedroom door and a midget goes by in a bath towel, you know you’re not in life insurance,” he told the London Times. “I believe in leaving the door open and letting everyone take a look. A fantasy is no fun unless everybody shares it.”
So when Life magazine arrived in Detroit to photograph the band in September, Roth insisted that the band wives stay at home. He claimed the constantly bickering married couples were a distraction. The others complained that Roth was overdoing Van Halen’s party-boy image. In any case, at least one high-profile wife, Valerie Bertinelli, had her feelings hurt. The rifts in the band widened, yet the gambit worked: Life wrote that “the most ferocious rock band on the road in America today” was performing “joyful rituals of excess,” while readers gorged on photos of Roth examining a pair of panties thrown onstage and nearly having his snakeskin spandex ripped off by an open-mouthed admirer.
Van Halen’s Life photo spread appeared in the same issue as a sad report on primates at a run-down animal farm. Wrote one disgusted reader afterward, “I found myself contemplating who the animals really were—the gorillas or the Van Halen rock band. It is my hope that Van Halen and others like them are soon the endangered species.”
The fans could have used a little protection from the band after Dave streamlined his system for ordering sex at shows. The security team had drawn up a grid to help them identify troublemakers, dividing the floor of the concert hall into regions, so bouncers on headsets could quickly point out someone who needed attention: “Aerosmith shirt, hunting knife, sector C-5.”
Roth subverted this system for his own lascivious reasons, distributing laminated backstage passes to the security staff, each marked with their initials, then from the stage calling out, “Blonde, pink top, sector A-4,” pointing out the girls he wanted to see after the show. Whatever crew member’s name Dave saw flapping around on his favorite girl’s neck backstage at the end of the night would get a hundred-dollar bonus at breakfast the next morning. As far as intimacy went, it was a little like the invention of the drive-through window at McDonald’s, but the morale of tour staff remained high.
David Letterman confronted Roth on this practice, expressing his disbelief at the apparent callousness toward sex. “Well, this is the eighties, Dave,” Roth said drolly. “We want to interact with the audience as closely as possible, because music is a sharing experience. I feel that we can use technology to bring ourselves closer to each other.”
When tickets went on sale in Las Vegas, at least two thousand fans flew into a frenzy, causing more mayhem than the four members of the band could manage. As the fans on line grew impatient, they began pushing and fighting, smashing glass bottles, and eventually tearing down a security fence and shoving a mobile trailer used as a box office off its foundation. Some things were just simply worth fighting for.
Standards of decency were defined and defied community by community, however, and in October 1982, Worcester, Massachusetts, celebrated the band with “Van Halen Day.” “I’m dealing with all parts of the body,” Roth explained the band to TV’s Nightwatch. “You pay $8.50, and it’s not enough to just hit up your ears. You gotta hit up your ears, you gotta hit up your eyes, and then work your way down.”
On the road with the lightweight band After the Fire in 1982, Van Halen were routinely selling out 14,000- to 30,000-capacity venues almost every night of the week, grossing nearly $100,000 on average. The real money was in merchandise—if only 8,000 kids bought a $15 concert T-shirt, Van Halen were still leaving the venues with an extra $100,000 per night in small bills.
As Roth described in his book Crazy from the Heat, this action drew highly organized bootleggers who sold low-quality Pakistani shirts for $5 outside the shows. The shirts had hilariously bad designs, they were inked with a substance that immediately crumbled off like dried egg, and they shrunk to infant-size if washed. Van Halen’s merchandise team went to war against the black marketeers, battling over turf in arena parking lots across the country, with victory going to whichever team had the most muscle, law enforcement clout, or extralegal allies in their corner. They even copied the shi
rts, selling low-quality knock-offs of their own, printed in Day-Glo colors with Roth’s approval.
The tour romped into 1983, starting with a victory lap through Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay—well-planned warm locations to play during January. The band’s decadence continued unabated, with cases of booze, crates of beer, and untamed rivers of wild, willing fans. Fresh from military dictatorships in several stops, the South American rock scene was still a fly-by-night business, where unsavory characters were eager to take full advantage of freedom. Van Halen loved the adventure—they were recharging their own youthful enthusiasm, the wild spirit that dies when portioned out only in marketable pieces.
They were among the first Yankee marauders to leap off the pages of magazines onto South American stages. The gesture was appreciated, especially as golden-haired Roth rapped to crowds in Spanish, Eddie ripped through “Spanish Fly,” and Alex’s drum solo adopted Latin-inspired licks. “We sold 140,000 tickets and maybe 15,000 albums,” Roth told Faces. “We had motorcades, escorts, we were treated like national heroes. Now I know how to fight for the right to do this the right way—to tour when we want to, in the right way.”
“Turn off the goddamn bass amplifiers, will ya? Shut ’em down,” Dave shouted in Buenos Aires before winging the four-minute Spanish version of “Oh, Argentina,” accompanying himself on acoustic guitar. He unfurled a large Argentine flag before launching into “Ice Cream Man,” and at that moment he probably could have been elected president.
While the tour continued, Eddie unfortunately lost the chance to produce a record for one of his influences, the British jazz fusion stylist Allan Holdsworth. Now a powerful protégé, Eddie had paved the way for Holdsworth’s I.O.U. Band to sign with Warner Bros. He wanted to work with a player he had already declared a guitar hero’s guitar hero. Unfortunately, Holdsworth grew tired of waiting for Van Halen and forged ahead with producer Ted Templeman. Eddie was disgruntled—especially since he wanted to play with guest vocalist Jack Bruce from Cream. But Holdsworth had underestimated the value of Eddie’s fingers—he found himself back on an indie record label within a year.