Everybody Wants Some

by Ian Christe

  When Van Halen retreated from South America at the end of February, Roth lingered below the equator for a few weeks of overachiever’s holiday. Renting a rickety riverboat named the Marcia, he launched a six-week jungle expedition up the Amazon River with his best friend, Van Halen security chief “Big” Ed Anderson. They requested a visa from the Brazilian government to visit protected Amazonian Indian tribes living in the densest rain forest near Peru. It was a reverse kind of missionary adventure—where Roth and Big Ed indoctrinated themselves in the ways of jungle survival. They hunted and fished in loincloths, and Roth got mosquito bites the size of golf balls. They happened upon a remote village where the locals threw a pinga and cachaça sugarcane alcohol party for their guests that Dave described as “Triple Christmas.”

  As Roth and Big Ed’s boat sputtered into the heart of darkness, the villages along the river were warned of the advance of the Americans by shortwave radio. The entourage was hard to miss. At their final stop, they were welcomed with the desperate message: “Call home!” Some kind of catastrophe had happened that needed immediate attention back in the States.

  As it turned out, Van Halen had been offered a million dollars to play a single show in front of half a million people, and they were freaking out because their singer was floating around a jungle out of contact. So Roth and Big Ed located a German geological expedition and were bivouacked out of the Amazon during a fierce rainstorm. They spent four more days traveling back to California. A week and a half later, after a brief hospital visit, Dave was cured of microbes, parasites, stings, dehydration, and was ready for Memorial Day.

  US Festival ’83 was a three-day confluence of music and new technology masterminded by multimillionaire benefactor Steve Wozniak, one of the two founders of Apple Computer. Wozniak had lost $5 million on US Festival ’82, and he was looking to lose a few million more for the sake of a breakthrough cultural event that would draw hundreds of thousands of people to the San Bernardino Valley over the holiday weekend of May 28 through May 30.

  Describing the event as a whole tour’s worth of work for one show, Van Halen needed to put together video and radio programs as part of the agreed package. Preparations began while the band was still sweating out the arrival of all of its equipment and its lead singer from South America. To promote their lucrative appearance, unofficial band photographer Neil Zlozower re-created the classic Iwo Jima photo, with the four soldiers of Van Halen raising an American flag over a pile of dirt while David Lee Roth gripped his rifle and gazed off into the great unknown.

  The paycheck for this gig would land Van Halen in the 1984 Guinness Book of World Records. The initial offer was for a scant million, but their contract called for a payday equal to or greater than any other band on the bill. When Wozniak offered David Bowie $1.5 million to appear the following day, Van Halen automatically got a $500,000 raise. If Eddie had taken his mother’s advice and studied computers at DeVry, he wouldn’t have earned as much in ten years as he brought home that evening. Roth joked that after paying for the production and giving the managers and agents their cut, he barely had enough money left to buy a dual-motor off-shore racing yacht. Asked if he thought the band had been overpaid, Roth laughed and said, “Honey, I always sing like a million bucks!”

  For their first show in over three months, Van Halen would play on Sunday—heavy metal day. The temperature reached ninety-five degrees by early afternoon on site at Glen Helen Regional Park by the time the music began. The $20 ticket also bought performances by Quiet Riot, Mötley Crüe, Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest, Triumph, and Scorpions. “I think the only way we really fit in was volume-wise,” Eddie told Guitar World.

  Quiet Riot and Mötley Crüe were still unknown L.A. club bands, while Ozzy Osbourne was finding his feet after the devastating loss of guitarist Randy Rhoads in an airplane accident. Judas Priest were a known quantity and delivered powerful, leather-clad British metal to the hot summer crowd. Triumph were the oddballs—a breather act, a mellow Canadian power trio whose best years were behind them. The adoring crowd loved them one and all—journalists reported that the applause at 1 P.M. for Quiet Riot was higher than for the headliners the previous day.

  Creating a stupendous buildup, Scorpions played a well-choreographed and cataclysmic set, culminating in a human pigpile with the guitarists scraping their strings and squalling feedback for at least ten minutes. The German band brought the day to an explosive close. Before Van Halen could begin, however, announcements and proclamations for world peace on the stage ate up more than an hour. And while the band waited, naturally they partied.

  The previous day, headliners the Clash had made much ado about their own $500,000 payday, scraping their consciences loudly while a band spokesman hilariously denounced fellow performers Sting, Stevie Nicks, and “Van Halen and his moron music.” They petulantly agreed at the last minute to play, saying, “Van Halen will call us Commies if we don’t.” A later conversation between Eddie Van Halen and the Clash’s Joe Strummer reputedly cleared the air, but there was a line drawn in the sand between them. As it was, many rival bands already felt like Van Halen used up all the oxygen in the room.

  While everyone else choked on dust, Van Halen lived it up like pashas in their own private casbah—a tent city with arcade games, girls galore, champagne, and confetti. The contract rider included a hundred cases of beer, two cases of Jack Daniel’s, and twenty-five pounds of M&M’s—of course stipulating “no brown ones!” Requiring a staff and crew of over three dozen and a private security force numbering twenty, the Memorial Day invasion disintegrated into a never-ending quagmire of production demands and escalating costs.

  Van Halen had always harnessed their nervous energy with the help of alcohol, and the anticipation being off the charts for US ’83, so was the liquor intake. Roth barely finished a backstage interview with MTV’s Mark Goodman: “I’m proud to say that after all these years of loud music, bright lights, and loud noise, I still don’t need glasses—I drink right out of the bottle.”

  At the appointed hour, a special film of the backstage party beamed over the giant Diamondvision television screens. The three-minute fea-turette had been produced ahead of time in the Van Halen compound. It was a self-portrait caricature of the Van Halen reality, with Michael Anthony confusing a Space Invaders machine for a portable bar, Alex dodging a midget pulling a saddled sheep, Roth interrupted having sex on a piano, and Eddie popping party balloons with his cigarette. The cut back to reality was only slightly less surreal.

  While giant VH logos flickered on the screens, Van Halen fired into “Romeo Delight.” Eddie wore red-and-white overalls that matched his striped guitar, and Dave was sporting a sparkling purple housecoat, white gloves, and giant hair—all designed to dazzle back to the five hundreth row. They took a minute to get their bearings on the 435-foot stage. As their eyes adjusted to almost half a million screaming people, Eddie uncharacteristically flopped a couple notes. Roth lost his place halfway through the second verse and bellowed, “I forgot the fucking words!”

  The band was explosive but unstable, with Dave occasionally weaving and distracted. He produced a harmonica during set-filler “The Full Bug” and gaffed the world’s most torturous harp solo, then proceeded to invent a whole new set of lyrics. He staggered offstage bellowing, “I need a drink!” and the band vamped into a very active instrumental, a tune would later surface on 1984 as “Girl Gone Bad.”

  While giant television screens beamed the intimate details to fans encamped in the back of the crowd, nearly half a mile away, the band ran amok—force-feeding Jack Daniel’s to a dwarf, twirling around the little guitar, and baiting the crowd’s resentment of self-serious bands like the Clash.

  Roth had reportedly been gobbed on repeatedly by a punk girl at a Clash show the previous year, and tonight he exacted his revenge—modifying one of his standard stage raps about whether he was really drinking whiskey from his ever-present bottle of Jack Daniel’s. “The only people who drink iced tea out of Jac
k Daniel’s bottles is the Clash, baby!” A weird insult, sure, but it didn’t take much to turn the earth dogs in the audience against the British punk rockers.

  Roth mocked the religious protesters handing out pamphlets outside the event, and then the banned “(Oh) Pretty Woman” video went up on the large screens, complete with crunchy synth opening “Intruder.” Funnily enough, synth founding father Bob Moog had given a demonstration on the grounds the previous day.

  The band bashed out an old favorite, Cream’s “I’m So Glad,” running into “Somebody Get Me a Doctor.” At the end of the song, Eddie took a wicked knee dive and came up shredding. Taking a breather, Dave bebopped to the crowd. Out of the spotlight, Mike brought his bass tech, Kevin Dugan, to the edge of the stage to survey the scene, sharing the moment with his valet. Shortly afterward, Dugan began wearing a T-shirt that read, “My two best friends are Jack Daniel’s & Michael Anthony.”

  Mike accidentally unplugged his bass during his solo. When the cord popped out, he chucked his bass guitar into the air and let it drop with a 100,000-watt thud. The crowd adored the senseless destruction, which afterward remained part of his act for decades. “Since I’ve been dropping my bass, I can’t believe the compliments I’ve been getting from people,” he later said with a shrug.

  Behind the band stood a wall of scores of speaker cabinets, while a pointed light spelled out the flying VH logo. If they were nervous performing before the pilgrims, it didn’t look like it. If they were drunk, it wouldn’t be a surprise. If they were having fun, it showed. They treated the crowd to the biggest backyard party of their lives.

  The set lasted just under two hours. Meanwhile, heat, dehydration, lack of bathrooms, and metal fatigue thinned the crowd considerably before its end. “More people were arrested here today than the whole last year,” Dave congratulated the crowd to uproarious approval. In fact, two people died. According to the New York Times, concertgoers were so fired up on their way home that they tore down the fences surrounding the event and rammed their cars into police cruisers. “They even hit a horse,” a deputy said. The local sheriff told the press he hoped Van Halen would “never come back” to his county, a tin-plated recommendation for any outlaw.

  The entire event was broadcast on the Westwood One radio network throughout the summer, and an edited television special with three Van Halen hits was featured on the fledgling premium cable channel Showtime. When the dust cleared, heavy metal day at the US Festival had cleared 375,000 paid admissions, and easily 25,000 more snuck into the site. That was twice as many tickets as the two other days of the festival—a statistic that proved hard rock had arrived. For all their bluster, it appeared the Clash weren’t worth $500,000.

  Back at Gazzari’s on the Sunset Strip, a lengthy text message appeared on the marquee: “Congratulations, Van Halen, one and a half million a night isn’t what I paid you eight years ago. I’m really proud of you.”

  Also in 1983, Eddie got a call from Brian May of Queen, who wanted some quick help on a recording session. The two had met during Van Halen’s late-1970s UK tour with Black Sabbath, years after Van Halen had covered Queen in the clubs. Dubbed the Starfleet Project, May wanted to create a guitar-driven update of the theme to a sci-fi puppet show from British television. May would hold down a melodic rhythm guitar while Eddie provided high-end fireworks—a rare chance for Eddie to play in a dual-guitar setting.

  Dabbling for a couple of days, the band nabbed two tracks and the seven-minute jam “Bluesbreaker,” which they dedicated to Eric Clapton. Eddie told Guitar that during the recording he broke a string and continued playing out of tune. So when May sent the finished record to Clapton, Eddie was slightly mortified. Clapton was too, and reportedly pooh-poohed the song as very unblueslike. Eddie still used Clapton’s solos as pre-concert warm-ups, but when he met his idol in 1983, according to Rolling Stone, “He was so nervous that he got drunk and blew the whole thing.”

  The kudos from on high far outnumbered the complaints. Frank Zappa thanked Eddie for “reinventing the guitar,” and Pete Townshend quipped to Rolling Stone, “That incredible virtuosity combined with that beautiful grin allows me to forgive him for letting David Lee Roth stand in front of him.”

  Eddie’s guitar signified the brave new world. He owned the very concept of guitar in the 1980s as much as Les Paul when he added electricity to the instrument in the 1950s. Eddie could cherry-pick his favorite musical heavyweights for any kind of band or side project—yet he chose to remain loyal to his brother and boyhood friends, valuing the group spirit over the refined chops of the celebrated greats. There was one high-profile exception, although it only took him away from Van Halen for an afternoon.

  One unbreakable pop dreadnought overshadowed the rise of hard rock in 1983—Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Ultimately touted, perhaps correctly, as the best-selling album of all time, the utterly of-the-moment record reigned all music charts throughout 1983, stymieing Def Leppard’s Pyromania in the number 2 spot, despite that album’s selling six million copies.

  Yet even Michael Jackson moonwalked under the electric hands of Eddie Van Halen, whose effortless guitar solo to the twice-Grammy-winning “Beat It” from Thriller was legendarily donated without payment. Maybe Eddie saw the chance to play for a new audience. Maybe he thought so little of Jackson that he didn’t want a penny. Maybe he simply liked the song. “Everybody was out of town and I figured who’s gonna know if I play on this kid’s record?” Eddie said.

  Using his battered red guitar and a hot-rodded Hartley Thompson amp borrowed from Allan Holdsworth, in under an hour he improvised a cavalcade of trademark finger tapping, whammy-bar dives, and legato touches for “Beat It.” Afterward, Michael Jackson arrived and complimented Eddie’s playing. Winking and nodding behind the door was Eddie’s buddy Steve Lukather of Toto, who recorded the rhythm guitar and bass on the song.

  “I really like that high fast stuff you do!” Jackson squealed to Eddie.

  Embarrassed to ask for anything, Eddie shrugged, shook hands with producer Quincy Jones, and walked away from the session. “Maybe Michael will give me dance lessons someday,” he told Musician afterward.

  Roth claimed he learned of the collaboration for the first time in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven, where some Mexican girls were listening on a portable radio. Eddie’s participation helped “Beat It” cross over to rock radio, and it became the single of the year. In a way, the pairing set the stage for what would soon be Van Halen’s biggest album.

  From convenience stores in Southern California to wooded English estates, the song reached people whose ears were only triggered by giant ripples. “The first time I heard Eddie Van Halen was on ‘Beat It,’ ” former Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page told Kerrang! “I thought ‘Christ, what’s he doing?’ I couldn’t do what he does—and I’ve tried.”

  Eddie swore he was always barely in command of his own powers. “It’s not really a talent, it’s an obsession,” he insisted repeatedly, as the world begged for his magic secrets. “I’m just a medium. Nothing I do is impossible. To me, music is about personal expression, anyway. It’s not about how proficient you are.” After he won the readers’ poll for best guitarist in Guitar Player in 1983 for the fifth straight year, Eddie’s name was permanently retired from the ballots.

  By September 1983, vocals were done for the next album, but families and competing interests continued to slow the process down. Though they appeared frequently in the media, Eddie and Valerie remained homebodies, not socialites. Eddie could no longer be an anonymous presence, and hanging out in the Hollywood clubs was out of the question. The couple claimed their favorite tiny little dinner spot was Eddie’s parents’ house down in Pasadena. “I love it when Edward’s home,” Valerie told Entertainment Tonight, while the couple sat cozily on their couch, fireplace burning comically in the background. “Home sweet home is just very special.”

  On June 11, 1983, Alex was looking to learn what his brother liked about monogamy, marrying Valeri Kenda
ll, a backstage lurker who had been a featured skater in Linda Blair’s late-1970s skatesploitation flick Roller Boogie. Eddie was the best man at the wedding, lending support as his brother single-handedly doubled the world’s population of women named Val Van Halen. Now Roth was the odd man out, the only bachelor of the group—though for how long remained anyone’s guess.

  Dave joined VJ Martha Quinn to ring in 1984 on MTV’s Rock and Roll Ball, an ambitious production simulcast between New York and London. With one minute until midnight, they toasted the next Van Halen album as Roth proclaimed the night Van Halen’s favorite holiday. He later told Creem that he had “this black chick and this white chick” in his bathtub singing “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” at seven thirty the next morning. In contrast, Alex spent the night at Eddie’s house, getting wasted and jamming. As giddy as the band’s rise to this point had been, in the next twelve months they would all have many more reasons to celebrate.

  8. Kings of Rock

  Delayed by the US Festival, the process of making the next VH album grew into the longest yet. The record was the first produced at 5150, Eddie Van Halen’s new home studio in the hills just beyond Hollywood. The name came from the California penal code for “invol-untary confinement of a person for purposes of psychiatric evaluation,” overheard by Eddie’s right-hand man Donn Landee one night on his police scanner. In the years to come, 5150 would very appropriately become Eddie’s rubber room.

  Designed by Landee, the beta version of 5150 was a high-ceilinged sixteen-track studio suitable for recording, overdubbing, and simple mixing if needed. The recording room was roughly six hundred square feet, sound-insulated with fiberglass and rubber, with a booth on the north end so Eddie could face north like a compass needle while playing. A photo of Eddie and Alex’s boyhood home in Holland hung in the kitchen. “This is my dream house,” Eddie explained. “It’s my house with a white picket fence.”