by Ian Christe
For whatever reason, the construction on Eddie’s property was passed off to city inspectors as a racquetball court—never mind that the soundproof walls were cinder blocks filled with concrete. A hitch arose in the form of a powerful AM antenna from a sports station broadcasting with 50,000 watts of power just a few miles away, potentially generating awful interference. To prevent Eddie picking up boxing matches and L.A. Rams games through his wireless guitars, the engineers wrapped a layer of grounded chicken-wire fencing around the entire 5150 facility, turning it into a high-tech shielded coop.
Eddie and Landee had already calibrated the board by producing the recordings from US Festival ’83 for radio broadcast. Now the 5150 studio brought new possibilities to Van Halen. Their sound would become more processed and mellow, as their work schedule slowed to match the luxury of owning their own means of production. They got together when they felt like it, draining themselves of energy in short bursts and then splitting up for a couple weeks to recuperate and cut the grass.
“You should have seen what we did 1984 on,” Eddie said, “a $6,000 piece of shit console that came out of United Western, an old green World War II thing with big old knobs and tubes. Donn rewired it to make it work.”
Building 5150 gave Eddie a cocoon of his own making. He claimed he didn’t even have a cassette player or a turntable in his house. He also professed to listening to more challenging music like jazz and punk for inspiration—even as David Lee Roth was heading the opposite direction, immersing himself in pop radio. “I think the only true rocker of the bunch is Al,” Eddie told Musician. “He’s the only one who listens to AC/DC and all that kind of stuff. Dave will walk in with a disco tape and I’ll walk in with my progressive tapes and Mike walks in with his Disneyland stuff.”
Dubbed an “$8.98 nirvana” by Roth, 1984 recombined the band’s splintered interests. The seventy-second synthesizer landscape “1984” introduced the new era, an edit of a much longer electronic piece recorded at 5150 with Donn Landee. Along with whatever scraps of magnetic tape survived from “Sunday Afternoon in the Park” and “Invader” on the past two albums, Eddie was creating a sizable synth backlog in his library.
Ted Templeman and Roth planned to do Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour” on 1984, but ditched it after Eddie finally put up a vehement protest. “I’d rather fail with my own shit than succeed with someone else’s,” became the guitarist’s new mantra.
Instead, the very first sessions at 5150 produced “Jump,” a song that in raw form had already been rejected for Diver Down for one simple reason—Eddie played keyboards instead of guitar. “Eddie wrote this thing in synthesizer,” Templeman told Billboard. “I really hadn’t heard it for a long time, then he laid it down one night in the studio. It just killed me. It was perfect.”
“We had intentionally stayed away from keyboards until then,” Roth told Classic Rock, “because what instruments you used indicated which neighborhood you were part of. At the time it seemed important.”
After all his years of lessons, Eddie’s predilection for piano was nothing new. Even after catching hell at school for touching the precious Steinway, he often wrote songs on piano, then transcribed them for guitar. Such were the origins of “Hear About It Later” from Fair Warning and “And the Cradle Will Rock” from Women and Children First. But keyboards represented a rival musical style and society, and Van Halen were expected to lead the hard rock charge with guitars using as little circuitry as possible.
Eddie was either oblivious or headstrong. To him, the song sounded good. “Nothing can replace the guitar in my life,” he told Hit Parader. “But I also love keyboards. I’ve always written a lot of our material on keyboards, it’s just that in the past I’d reinterpret it on guitar. On this album I didn’t do that. This only expands our sound.”
Loyal hard rockers were horrified to see Eddie playing an electronic synthesizer for the first time in the video for “Jump.” For the keyboard line, Eddie used an Oberheim OB-Xa, switching to a similar but newer Oberheim OB-8 in concert. Though he could have used sequenced or taped keyboards onstage, he played them live, with Michael Anthony taking over during Eddie’s guitar solo. A whole new portion of the public loved the move: Recorded by the band in one take, according to Eddie, “Jump” became Van Halen’s first number 1 hit single, topping the charts for five weeks.
Roth dedicated “Jump” to Benny Urquidez, the kickboxer who trained him three hours a day for months before the 1984 tour, even coaching him through an amateur fight. “Jump” was as good a philosophy as any, and Roth started using a lot of jump metaphors when talking about success, fame, and fortune: “I can teach you to jump up in five seconds—it takes years to learn how to land properly.”
“Panama” was the singer’s sexy ode to his 1951 Mercury lowrider, allegedly composed while he was lounging in the backseat being driven around Los Angeles. Through the car Roth met model Patricia “Apol-lonia” Kotero, a Lowrider cover girl and ex–L.A. Rams cheerleader. Her run with Roth was peachy—at least until she was ordered to break up with him by Prince while starring in his concept film Purple Rain.
While the band was laying down “Panama", the benefits of building 5150 were already paying dividends. Eddie recorded the revving engine sound effects by backing a Lamborghini up the driveway and pushing the blinking red button on his studio tape machine.
The video for “Panama” showed Dave swimming over the stage on a wire with a boom box on his shoulder, inner-city B-boy style. Eddie sat at the piano blowing smoke rings. Roth showed off the moves he’d picked up in strip clubs, doing a pole routine with himself in triplicate.
The clip also debuted a new trademark for Michael Anthony—a bass guitar shaped like a Jack Daniel’s whiskey bottle, constructed from spare parts and some extra Kramer tuning pegs. Along with bass tech Kevin Dugan and pal Dave Jellison, Mike pieced the instrument together as an unofficial tribute to Van Halen’s drink of choice—though Dugan had to be coaxed by Anthony to drink it. Michael later decided to build a high-quality version with the help of GMW Guitars in Glendora, California. The Jack Daniel’s company offered to assist with the graphics in exchange for Mike’s entry into their hall of fame; thus he became a Ten-nessee Squire. The whiskey-bottle bass became an icon, completely upstaging the giant orange-dotted popsicle-shaped “Davesicle” guitar that Roth used to play “Ice Cream Man” for several years.
For “Top Jimmy,” Eddie showcased a Steve Ripley stereo guitar, one of fewer than ten made, which featured separate right-left panning for each string and a pair of built-in vibrato effects. It was a musical instrument with the technical abilities of a small aircraft. Based on “Top Jimmy” Koncek, a real-life character from Roth’s nightlife, the song allowed Eddie to combine sweet harmonics with ridiculously fast rapid-fire blues licks in the vein of his former signature, “Goin’ Home.”
Alex credited the album’s production squarely to Eddie and Donn Landee, even discounting his own participation. Eddie’s home studio was truly their private Disneyland—the brothers and Landee recorded “Drop Dead Legs” during a late-night session and presented it to Roth, Anthony, and Templeman the following afternoon. Working this way, they could have released 1984 as a double album. But Templeman ordered Eddie to stop writing new material—there were already hundreds of half-finished songs on cassettes littering 5150.
Overall, Ted Templeman was pushed to the periphery during the recording of 1984. The fights continued between him and Eddie, but now Templeman had to go home at night. Eddie was always on the clock. Among other deleted detours, Eddie finger-tapped a bass part to the explosive intro for “Hot for Teacher,” a bubbling-over bottom-end bass track to set off the hyperactive drums and guitar. The option was scrapped because the band could never pull off a performance like that live. Michael Anthony was the band’s anchor, not about to take off for the stars.
Opening with a monstrous fireworks display of Alex’s double-bass drum technique, “Hot for Teacher” also showed R
oth’s off-the-cuff working method as a lyricist. A scratch track recorded live with the band showed that until the eleventh hour, he still hadn’t settled on the words. “I missed so many classes, now my story can be told,” he improvised. “Heard you missed me, baby, well, I’m black—I’m gonna sit right over here so I can concentrate.”
“I was just improvising,” Roth said. “Ted went, ‘What do you have planned, Dave? You singing or what?’ I said, ‘No, in this one, we’re all pretending to be in the classroom.’ ”
“A lot of the stuff is Dave’s interpretation of life at that given moment,” Eddie told Guitar World, admitting he often wasn’t sure what Van Halen’s lyrics meant.
The singer drew his lines from a mental word processor, editing and refining like a jailbird in solitary confinement composing his memoirs in his head. “I’ve never written down any lyrics, I usually just make it up in the studio,” he admitted, stressing that the inflection was usually more important than the words.
While Van Halen were still bridling against formulaic song struc-tures, the unusually sentimental “I’ll Wait” was a pseudo-ballad about Roth’s ideal woman—who at that moment happened to be a Calvin Klein underwear model taped to the screen of his hotel television. Though Roth and the others did not want another synth-laden track on the same album as “Jump,” Eddie and Donn Landee were again adamant. Proving their point, “I’ll Wait” propelled to number 13 on the Billboard singles charts.
Unlike Diver Down, which featured several one-take solos, all of the guitar solos on 1984 were overdubbed carefully, recorded during dis-crete sessions apart from the rest of the music. By now Eddie’s solo bursts were attractions in themselves, dissected and critiqued by the cottage industry of fans, magazines, and aspirants created by his influence. Not that he was overthinking things—Eddie wrote “Girl Gone Bad” in a hotel room one night while Valerie was sleeping. So he wouldn’t disturb her, he tiptoed into a closet and hummed the riff into his portable recorder for safekeeping.
Dipping into the old well that had served the band so reliably, Alex pushed for the return of “House of Pain.” The club-days standard appeared on the Gene Simmons demo and elsewhere, resurfacing on 1984 with new lyrics and a more fluid arrangement—still, a typical bashed-out Van Halen album closer.
The album cover of 1984 featured a painting of a jaded baby New Year leaning on one elbow and smoking a cigarette. Dave claimed he handpicked the lettering font from the French graphic comic Moebius. The smoking cherub on the cover seemed like a quick-thinking blas-phemy based on Black Sabbath’s smoking, gambling angels from 1980’s Heaven and Hell.
With three Top 20 singles and four videos in heavy rotation, Van Halen discovered pop crossover in spades. Released in January and peaking at number 2, 1984 was quadruple platinum by October. It would eventually become the band’s second album with Dave to top ten million in sales. This was the record where Roth earned the right to compare Van Halen to his frequent point of reference, McDonald’s hamburgers. “Van Halen music ranks right up there with football and religion as something that will uplift you,” he preached. Indeed, millions had been served.
Eddie called 1984 the first Van Halen record done the way he wanted. Sweeter still, Van Halen had ascended largely through its own efforts, producing appealing music videos and recording their own music in Eddie’s backyard. The choppy waters of Diver Down were a memory. “The failure of our last record really wasn’t our fault,” Roth told Hit Parader. “If you want to find out why the album didn’t do as well as it should, go ask our record company. There were a lot of people there at the time who were far more concerned with getting their daily allotment of cocaine than with promoting our album.”
MTV now reached over twenty-five million homes and had become a big wheel in the engine of the ever-spinning Van Halen promotional machine. Eddie and Dave even made a cameo appearance in the video for Frank Sinatra’s “L.A. Is My Lady,” from the singer’s final studio album of the 1980s. While riding in a limo, Dave popped a videotape of vintage Sinatra clips into the backseat player, saying, “I got something new—it’s the latest, it’s the greatest, a little bit of Frank!”
Thanks to 1984’s successful slew of music videos, in September 1984 the band scored at the first-ever MTV Video Music Awards. Now that the rock video form was important enough to warrant its own awards show, the band-directed clip for “Jump” took home honors for Best Group Video, Best Stage Performance in a Video, and Best Overall Performance in a Video. At the after-party a bouncer urged, “Watch your step” as Dave dipped under the velvet rope. “I always do,” Roth replied.
Roth described the process of directing videos as an accidental art form—like watching television with the sound down and Black Sabbath or Wagner playing in the background. They claimed to have spent $600 and used one 16mm camera on “Jump”—as venerated progressive rockers Yes were embarrassed to learn when they requested a referral to whatever high-paid director had captured Van Halen’s charm so intimately.
Roth still trashed Duran Duran and other MTV-favored synthesizer bands in Billboard, calling their music “a lot of icing.” He told Faces, “It’s no big sweat going up on that stage when you really can sing, or play an instrument. But if you don’t have it, then it becomes tough . . . these new bands put in no effort at all. We used to think rock stars . . . were too coked out. But I don’t think Duran Duran does coke, they’re just all—milked out.”
On top of the world, Roth was taking on all comers. In a Creem interview he wondered what kind of man writes songs about cars instead women, provoking a brief flare-up with solo singer Sammy Hagar, who called Roth a homosexual looking for a “relationship” with him and said Roth looked like a “woman in drag.” Not above being dragged into a press war with a lesser luminary, Roth barked back through Creem, “Sammy definitely has a social problem—I think it’s based on lack of education. And evidently he hasn’t seen Van Halen lately or he wouldn’t talk like he does.”
Van Halen guessed the 1984 tour cost them around $100,000 a week to keep on the road— Entertainment Tonight claimed $500,000. The band used A and B stages, so that at the same time they were performing in Oklahoma City, the crew could already be erecting the framework for the following night’s show in Wichita. The grand spectacle was a giant metal framework of lights for the band to frolic beneath, which unfolded little by little throughout the set, ultimately revealing a blinding array of lights in a “1984” pattern, turning every night into New Year’s Eve.
After a quick trip to the tropics, Roth was ready for the road. Having exhausted every stripper routine he learned in Hollywood, he was kickboxing and running six miles a day to maintain his famous physique. “Everything I am, I was not born,” he said. “I had to kick it into shape.” He summoned monkey-style kung fu master Paulie Zink for a crash course in sword dancing, showcased in the “Panama” video. He also claimed to be learning Portuguese, Spanish, tap, dancing and bagpipes in his spare time—whatever it took to stay challenged and challenging.
“Being onstage is like being in the jungle,” he told an interviewer. “You hear all the noise and the volume, and they’re smoking in there, and people are throwing stuff up on stage, scarves and brassieres, and the keys to their house and car, and it’s just a big mess—just like my hotel room, man. And it gets really hot, reaches about 110 degrees by the second song, and you’re outta wind, and you’re limping and you barely make it to the next song. And that’s only the second song. You feel like an animal. It has great therapeutic value. I have a good time, that’s why I got this job.”
Van Halen and the conspirators at MTV colluded with dizzying power when MTV announced its “Lost Weekend with Van Halen” contest. The network soon received over a million postcard entries for a chance to spend three days with the band, doing everything that they did. The lottery couldn’t have found a more perfect average Joe than twenty-year-old Kurt Jefferis, a department store loading dock employee from Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. Kurt had
tossed half a dozen cards in the mail, before deciding to improve his odds and chuck another handful of entries in the post box—his winning card came from the second batch.
Kurt’s catch was the American boyhood dream, 1984-style. His prizes included a VCR, a camcorder, an Atari game system, a private screening of Footloose, and a couple days spent tasting the life of Van Halen. Kurt’s hometown newspaper ran the headline, “Would You Let Your Son Spend a Weekend with These Guys?” His mother quipped that she wished her boy had won a lost weekend with Perry Como instead.
For the blur of time from being picked up at his parents’ house by limo and flown on a private jet to Detroit, Kurt Jefferis was like Charlie after winning the golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s candy factory. He shotgunned beers with David Lee Roth, strapped on Eddie’s striped red guitar, and endured the torments of the band’s pint-size security staff—all for the vicarious thrills of viewers at home. At the end of the show, the band brought its pupil onstage, smashed a giant tray cake over his head, and soaked him with a dozen spurting bottles of champagne.
The band had been egging on audiences throughout the tour by pretending to film them with empty cameras, but that night the twelve thousand fans at Cobo Arena, intoxicated by the biggest rock band of the year and ignited by the obvious presence of MTV just as the network was beginning to break, were completely aware of the real cameras after weeks of build-up. When the house lights came up, the band could still see the shining white teeth screaming all the way to the back of the floor.