Everybody Wants Some

by Ian Christe

  “If it’s not some chick taking off her clothes, it’s someone’s hair getting torched because a sparkler lands on their head,” Michael Anthony told Bass Frontier. “When I’m looking out at 50,000 faces, I’m watching as much of a show as they are.”

  Afterward, Van Halen whisked Jefferis past the backstage greeting line of music writers, local record store managers, and groupies hoping to rekindle encounters from 1979. The band gravitated toward the unassuming fan and doted on him, the realest guy in the room. Eddie blew smoke rings for him. They all sang “Happy Trails” together. At the end of the night, Dave started a massive food fight. “Everyone was involved,” Jefferis told The Inside, “the band, Valerie, and the midget security guards. Mike and Valerie dumped potato salad on each other’s heads. There was shit everywhere—broken plates and glass—it was amazing.” Not fully aware of what they’d done, MTV had presented its first reality television show, and it was a smash success.

  The entire tour felt like a celebration, and every single night was sold out to capacity. Eddie played a never-ending outpouring of crisp notes and riffs, teasing with short quotes from well-known songs. Mike was a constantly tumbling brick avalanche. Alex pounded on a humon-gous Ludwig kit covered in tiny square reflective mirrors, an environment built on six massive bass drums. Dave was now at his finest as ecstatic emcee, ringmaster of an unbelievable party. “We’re a flame that burns for 24,000 people a night,” he explained.

  In New York, Roth had to be talked down from staging an expensive stunt at Madison Square Garden, releasing $10,000 in one-dollar bills from the rafters as a thank-you to fans. He called it “the Van Halen instant rebate.” Even the ever-helpful Van Halen management team had to nix that idea, fearful of the legal repercussions of unleashing a money riot in the lawsuit capital of the world.

  One interesting upshot of Van Halen’s exploits in their ultra-prime was how the giant illusion of their lifestyle created a million dirty little white lies. Roth disallowing wives in Detroit and strategically tossing his room for the Life photo shoot, complete with panties hanging out of his cowboy boots, was part of the show. Van Halen had never lied about sex and drugs—in fact, they used their reputation to score more sex and drugs. But with three wives in tow and headaches galore, the party was more a spiritual creation on most nights than a sordid romp. As Roth often admitted, he didn’t finish his onstage bottle of Jack Daniel’s every single night.

  Yet Dave was enjoying the bounty of being a man about town, and he promoted a big picture of Van Halen as endless sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Once unleashed, that imprint reproduced and multiplied everywhere and every day. Every time Van Halen’s music touched someone, there was a chance for a rumor. Girls claimed they were paid to hang out with Roth. Letters came addressed from expectant mothers. A woman charged jewelry to his accounts on Rodeo Drive, and mailed invitations to their nonexistent wedding to two thousand of his closest friends. The punks talked about Roth showing up at their club in limos, picking up girls, and splitting—rarely mentioning how often he stuck around and got onstage to sing with the band.

  Never mind that Roth did not actually have paternity insurance with Lloyd’s of London—all anyone remembered was that he tried. As Van Halen’s costume designer, Nancy Grossi, told Life, “All the girls ask me if David stuffs his crotch. He doesn’t.” Yet 50 percent of them would swear they heard that he did.

  Even twenty years later, Ratt cover model and future Whitesnake wife Tawny Kitaen told Blender, “I dated Van Halen’s manager, and we’d go to the Bahamas with David Lee Roth. If he had to travel with any narcotics, he’d shove it in my bag. We’d get in a car and drive David down Sunset Boulevard, looking for hookers, and then he’d bring ’em back to our house while I laid in my bedroom crying, ‘I can’t believe we have a hooker in the house!’”

  Roth’s pucker-faced, hip-grinding mating dances also invited speculation beginning around this time about whether he was bisexual. For certain, he was in touch with his feminine side, along with the feminine sides of half the female population of California. And he definitely danced outside the lines of Reagan-era Rambo masculinity. After all, he had come on the tail end of swishy 1970s glam rock stars like David Bowie, Mick Jagger, and Steven Tyler, frontmen whose sex appeal came smeared from the end of a lipstick tube.

  “If you walk into a room and the room freezes, this is not a normal peer-group situation,” Roth said. “When you achieve a certain level of success and popularity, people don’t really want you to be regular, don’t want you to be normal. I have to take care to circumnavigate being in that kind of situation.”

  Though as a rock star, he was a natural cultural enemy of punks, Roth began acting as unofficial top-secret sugar daddy for the Zero Club, a Hollywood after-hours bar and meet market operating beneath the auspices of a semilegitimate art space. There, Roth befriended underground figures like Tomata DuPlenty of L.A. punk legends the Screamers, Henry Rollins of Black Flag, and Mike Watt of the celebrated San Pedro punks the Minutemen. Rollins would later be instrumental in publishing Roth’s autobiography, while the Minutemen’s cover of “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love” would become a punk rock legend.

  The Zero Club’s resident bartender, Top Jimmy, was a white blues-man celebrated with his own song on 1984. Roth reputedly caught Top Jimmy’s Monday night act with the Rhythm Pigs at the raucous Cathay de Grande club sixty-four weeks in a row. The singer of the biggest hard rock band in the country was bingeing on inspiration, putting away the cardboard Rolls-Royces to walk alongside with some of the most creative—and poorest—people on earth.

  After many nights prowling with these self-styled characters, Roth was showing unusual signs of introspection. “I sacrificed my education, my financial security, and my social background for something only one in a billion people get to do. From the beginning, I bet it all. Now the big voice comes from the sky and says the entry fee will be my family life. They take that right off the bat, because I have to live on the road.”

  One Day at a Time went off the air after nine seasons in May 1984, leaving Valerie with a Golden Globe Award and time to raise a family. As her schedule relaxed into more made-for-TV movies like I Was a Mail Order Bride, she noticed that Eddie’s didn’t—he still tinkered in the garage incessantly. “In the beginning when I met my wife, it was difficult,” Eddie told Musician. “She didn’t understand this thing that I had. It was huge, it was my life.”

  “I know his mistresses,” Valerie said, “and they aren’t people. My only threats are the electric guitar and the piano.”

  With the 5150 studio operating out of his house, Eddie could easily jump into projects during rare days at home. He recorded two songs, including an instrumental keyboard piece, for Valerie’s movie The Seduction of Gina, a made-for-TV movie tackling gambling addiction. The director had pushed for more music from him, but Eddie felt uncomfortable surrendering tapes to a movie he hadn’t seen. So in the middle of preparing Van Halen’s new album, Eddie and Donn Landee took frequent trips to monitor how his music was used. Eddie felt like a novice, and he wanted to make sure everything was right.

  With Landee’s help, Eddie also composed background music for the teen comedy The Wild Life, starring Christopher Penn, Eric Stoltz, and Lea Thompson. He had been on the short list two years earlier to con-tribute music to the hit film that launched the eighties teen comedy explosion, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and The Wild Life was a loose sequel also written by Cameron Crowe. Poor communication between the movie producers and the Van Halen camp thwarted Eddie’s participation in Fast Times. Instead curly-haired California rocker Sammy Hagar penned the title track. But Van Halen were too great a part of the indelible fabric of high school culture to ignore completely. Crowe had gone undercover posing as a high school student to write the book that his movie was based on. For authenticity’s sake, he made sure Van Halen bookended the screenplay: fast-talking slimeball Damone is introduced as someone who scalps Van Halen tickets, and surf hero Jeff Spico
li ends the movie a hero. After saving Brooke Shields’s life on the beach, he spends the money hiring Van Halen to perform for his birthday.

  In July 1984, Eddie made good on a previous promise and appeared live with the Jacksons’ “Victory” tour in Dallas to tap out his now-infamous solo for “Beat It.” Eddie hopped around, lost in the shuffle of choreographed dancers, electronic drums, and keyboard backing, until Michael Jackson shouted, “You got it, Eddie! Eddie!” and the guest ripped into a blazing twelve-second run. The great communion of techno-soul and high-tech rock arrived—finger-tapping guitar and Jackson’s slippery moonwalk were two great exciters colliding from separate sides of the sun.

  During the 1984 tour, Eddie began playing with an odd hinged panel attached to the back of his guitar. Like a folding stool, the con-traption let him finger-tap with both hands on a flat horizontal surface, making his guitar more like a piano. With outside encouragement, he eventually patented the eccentric folding guitar tool, perhaps wary after all the innovations of his that had gone unpaid in the past ten years. But he remained skeptical that the idea would be marketable to anyone but himself.

  Eddie’s superstar status had gone through the stratosphere. His appearance at the 1985 NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) convention caused a near riot. Meanwhile, fans were stealing his mail, and they eventually stole his entire mailbox. Eddie denied rumors he was working on a solo album, claiming that Van Halen offered him complete freedom and artistic satisfaction.

  “I’m partially brainwashed by the whole aspect of the business,” Ed told Guitar World. “What if I did something totally off the wall that I personally enjoyed, and people thought something weird about me? It’s exposing a side of yourself that is very difficult to expect anyone to understand in the slightest way. I’d rather not expose myself or that type of music to any attack.”

  Yet trouble bubbled to the surface, as the success of the 1984 album and tour aggravated long-brewing ego problems. The band had become too big to fit on one stage. The nightly set was burdened with so many solo spots that Eddie later likened it to The Tonight Show—a disorienting whiz-bang of jokes, flashy guitar tricks, and crowd-pleasing antics. The musical freedom was advanced, bordering on over-indulgent. Eddie and Alex were jamming so long onstage that Michael Anthony often dropped out to let them explore.

  Offstage, the personalities were starting to clash. “I’d stay up until six o’clock in the morning in the hotel room writing,” Eddie told Rolling Stone. “Roth would bang on everybody’s door at eight, nine in the morning, to get us to go roller skating or jogging. I’m going ‘Fuck you, man, I just got to sleep,” and he would be saying ‘Well, man, you live wrong.’ ”

  With Roth unmarried and still single-minded about the band, the others bridled under his constant supervision. Eddie complained of not being allowed to write longer “hypnotic” songs like Led Zeppelin, because Roth vetoed anything he couldn’t dance to.

  Van Halen had seriously neglected Britain and Europe since 1980, to the point that lesser marvels like Mötley Crüe, Def Leppard, and Bon Jovi were stealing their thunder across the Atlantic. To European hard rock fans the most recognized Roth wasn’t Dave, but Ulrich Roth of Scorpions. Making a quick trip but getting the most from it, Van Halen signed on for the August 1984 Monsters of Rock concert before sixty-five thousand people at Castle Donington. Sharing the bill were Ozzy Osbourne, Gary Moore, Y&T, Accept, AC/DC, and Mötley Crüe.

  No American band had ever headlined the venerable British metal event, including Van Halen who were in the unenviable spot of playing before AC/DC, whose crowds were loyal and grueling. They performed during the daylight, without the help of their vaunted lighting arsenal. Asked by the Whistle Test TV show how Van Halen felt going on before AC/DC, Alex joked, “We’re taller.”

  The interviewers asked AC/DC what they thought of the Yanks. “They’re more of a pop band than what we are,” guitarist Angus Young answered. “We’re more of a rock and roll band.” After that assessment, nobody should have been surprised that when the gruff blokes in AC/DC lined up for an afternoon photo session, prima donna David Lee Roth suddenly appeared a few feet away with a boom box and began performing warm-up acrobatics. Roth could not contain his bravado. “There’s liable to be a sense of competition at Castle Donington,” he said with a grin. “It will be of the manner of who plays Edward’s solo the best.”

  After camping in the mud for days, the notoriously unruly British festival crowd demanded constant entertainment. When overly bored or excited they hurled dirt clods and beer bottles filled with piss at the stage. With menacing black trash fires smoldering on the horizon and security struggling to keep overzealous fans off the stage, Van Halen responded by speeding up the tempo, overwhelming the Brits with an unusually kinetic display of power. Roth deftly high-stepped around thrown fruit, bottles, and rolls of toilet paper, and Michael Anthony killed on a striped Rickenbacker bass. Van Halen had something to prove to this country, and they delivered.

  In the backstage corral, Hollywood homeboys Mötley Crüe made a big impression of their own kind. The new kings of the Sunset Strip were literally rising up to bite Van Halen. According to their bandleader Nikki Sixx, he was so drunk and coked up that as soon as he saw “squinty-eyed” Eddie Van Halen, he bared his teeth, lifted Eddie’s shirt, and bit him on the stomach as a sign of affection.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Sixx gleefully recalled Valerie Bertinelli chastising him in the Mötley Crüe memoir The Dirt. “Biting my husband? You fucking freak!” Her yells only alerted the rest of Mötley Crüe to the feeding frenzy, according to Sixx—the band’s singer promptly ran across the room and chomped into Eddie’s hand.

  Afterward, Roth seemed to be really beginning to view himself as Napoleon and all other bands the vanquished armies of Europe. “Mötley Crüe—I see them and I want to laugh,” he told Faces. “All that rage—over what? A band like that is a quick fix.” He belittled AC/DC’s “pound, pound, get down, I’m gonna fuck your brains out victimization style.”

  Off camera, however, the band was fraying. Even generally easygoing bassist Michael Anthony was completely turning off to Roth, whose glittering star seemed to him like a faraway planet. He dreaded sharing the stage each night with someone he felt was a stranger. “I always thought, this guy’s putting on a show for me now, too?”

  Roth started traveling on his own tour bus, absorbing himself in magazines and books when not entertaining guests. He admitted his world was completely different than the Van Halens’. “There was always tension between me and Edward,” he rationalized. “But there’s always tension with me and everyone!”

  Not helping matters, Eddie later admitted he was doing “a lot of blow” and drinking heavily to cope with the constant pressures of his popularity. He had more money than he knew what to do with, and a good buzz was his just reward for the headaches he had to deal with.

  Though Roth was not a candidate to win an award from Nancy Reagan, he had a healthy distrust of hard drugs. “Never did heroin, never took pills, downers, or speed,” he told Rolling Stone. “They kill your creativity and your spirit. Anyway, what’s worse than drink and cocaine together is greed. Greed breeds egoism and sloth.”

  Reflecting on the hazards of his trade, Alex admitted to Modern Drummer that he suffered 15 to 20 percent hearing loss in both ears, which explained why he seemed standoffish to people meeting him for the first time. Seated nightly between walls of loudspeakers that would make airport baggage handlers cry for mercy, he explained how he often felt “noise drunk” mingling backstage after a show: “You don’t hear any more highs, and you kind of feel alienated when you finish playing.”

  Turning a corner in his life, Alex was already onto his second marriage. His first trip with marital bliss had lasted only two months, and ended in ugly circumstances that brought tears to Eddie’s eyes for a year afterward. This time Alex was more careful, and more serious—the newlywed Kelly Van Halen was a fresh-faced model from Can
ada who had worked on the legendary SCTV sketch comedy show.

  The 1984 tour ended on September 2, 1984, in Nuremberg, Germany, former capital of the Holy Roman Empire and site of the war trials in the late 1940s that put a giant period on the end of the advance of the Nazi military machine. As if history was hammering home omens of disaster, the gig took place on a former zeppelin field from the era of the Hindenburg. When Van Halen left the stage that night, they returned home with vastly different plans, unaware that they might never play together again.

  “We were in the middle of this thing, and it was getting bigger and bigger,” Alex told The Inside. “Individually, we were so far apart that it was like night and day. We were never together, although it looked like we were from the public’s standpoint. That’s why in 1984 it was very natural for it to fall apart. We saw it coming, even though when it actually materialized it was a surprise. It was a complex deal. When you’re in the middle of it, you don’t have time to question or analyze anything—you simply go for it.”

  9. Road to Nowhere

  The year 1984 seemed to sustain forever for Van Halen. The band had racked up a career total of more than twelve million albums in domestic sales, half of them during that calendar year. The arrival of the compact disc ensured that a good percentage of those albums would be repurchased in the coming years in the digital format. Then 1985 came calling like a hard, cold slap.

  The band members had smelled one another’s stage sweat, bad breath, and dirty socks for over ten years. When Eddie turned thirty in January, the angry young men were officially no longer young—just angry. “Van Halen has four personalities,” David Lee Roth told MTV, “and they seem to be getting more different.”

  To the delight of fans and the chagrin of his band, Roth revealed plans to record a solo album. The announcement made the rest of Van Halen very nervous—though they desperately needed a break from their extroverted singer for a while, they let him run off to do his own thing with a great deal of skepticism about what was happening within the band.