Everybody Wants Some

by Ian Christe

  Roth trained his fledging troupe on old Van Halen material to gauge their chemistry, and then proceeded with songwriting. “I listened for potential,” Roth explained. “And when I found the musicians I wanted, I decided that if they weren’t walking around unattended, I would—in the great old American rock and roll tradition—simply steal them from another band.” Even Eddie’s longtime guitar tech Rudy Leiren came to assist Vai for one week during rehearsals.

  Full of gravel-voiced sincerity, Roth courted the Canadian press with his sensibleness. “[Van Halen’s] got nothing better to talk about than me. I do. I’ve got a beautiful band, man, and I’ve got a great future.”

  When asked about his relationship to the Van Halen brand, however, Roth was quick to defend the legacy. “Hellafied brand name, isn’t it? It’s just like Ajax. It’s just like the guy who invented the package for Lucky Strikes cigarettes. They said he was done, he had one stroke of genius and he’d never have it again. He went on six years later to design the S-1 locomotive. So don’t expect that after ten years of love and labor I’ll just step outside of it.”

  If the Crazy from the Heat EP was a polite diversion from the high-energy rock of his day job, Roth’s full-length solo debut, Eat ’Em and Smile, set its sights straight on Van Halen’s home base. Released in July 1986, the album declared tribal warfare—and now that Van Hagar had gone the pop route, Roth offered fans the irresponsible hard rock they craved. The record quickly rose to number 4 and went platinum in September, vindicating the frontman’s decision to fly the coop.

  “Are you ready for the new sensation?” he crowed at the start of “Yankee Rose.” “Guess who’s back in circulation!” His voice sounded coarser and wilder, while the music began in a frenzy and climbed higher. “Yankee Rose” cracked the Top 20 and rolled out the carpet for Roth’s solo career.

  The Roth-Vai songwriting team penned the feisty “Elephant Gun” and “Bump and Grind.” “Shy Boy” was a hectic metal showcase written by Sheehan’s prior band Talas. As opposed to the steady, throbbing bottom end Michael Anthony created for Van Halen, Sheehan rode his bass alongside Vai like a second lead guitar player, putting the music’s energy all the way up front. Roth’s concept was all active ingredients.

  Roth revived his movie aspirations for the music video for the sub-lime summer pop song “Goin’ Crazy.” During an ultra-bright intro sequence nearly as long as the song itself, he buried himself in an enormous fat suit complete with bulbous neck, bad necktie, and rhine-stone belt buckle. He became a vulgar five-hundred-pound record company executive—a fair indication of the poor regard he held for the people he worked with in the music business.

  Ever the old-time entertainer at heart, Roth brought the vibrating pop metal orgy to a grinding halt with an album-closing cover of Frank Sinatra’s “That’s Life”—a welcome respite for listeners out of breath by the finish line. The record was all Roth, all the time—his pepped-up ensemble had recapped his entire career in just over thirty minutes, managing to play and say twice as much as any mortal hard rock band.

  An unusual Spanish-language version of the album appeared, titled Sonrisa Salvaje (“Wild Smile”). At the urging of Sheehan, Roth took the time to translate and sing all ten songs, a cosmopolitan move that set him apart from the run-of-the-mill hairbangers in L.A. While the world was not yet ready for bilingual cock rock, Roth did swing an invitation to perform at the Miss Mexico pageant, where he lip-synched two songs from Crazy from the Heat beachside for an audience of girls in bikinis—nice work if you can get it.

  Eat ’Em and Smile led to a long tour of over a hundred shows with Cinderella in tow throughout 1986, shifting to Tesla in early 1987. Steve Vai later reckoned that his guitar chops were at a career high during the tour. Along with an expanded array of costumes and sword dances, Roth wielded a massive inflated microphone with his name printed down the side, wagging it from hip level. Flaunting his bravado and libido, he remained aware that the public expected more from him as a solo artist than the gyrations of a naughty sex god.

  Interviewed by Penthouse, Roth sounded wistful for the open-minded sexual sophistication of the 1970s. The girls he was hitting between the legs weren’t connecting with him as often between the temples—they had become too young and too predictable. The age of the sexually experienced and adventurous professional groupie was over. “What’s in the room next door now are college girls, working girls, secretaries, nurses, assistants. It’s not really like New York after-hours anymore—as much as I might like it to be.” He joked about suffering “choice fatigue” and ended up back at the hotel alone many nights.

  Then again, fatigue was inevitable when the Polaroids from his scrapbook featured sights like a backward-leaning naked girl being used as a coffee table, a lit cigarette in her vagina. Sheehan recalled dozens of women jumping into the shower with the band after one show. “Anyone that was backstage knew what it was about and was a willing participant,” he reported to Rotharmy.com.

  Regardless, Dave was learning that life was downsized outside the charmed world of Van Halen. He was working twice as hard for slightly smaller returns. On the other hand, he was officially in charge now, earning a bigger piece of the pie and spared the aggravation of constantly arguing with the Van Halen brothers. He had jumped ship and all the safety that entailed, and he remained head and shoulders above all the other glam metal pirates in the water.

  Potshots continued to fly like confetti between the Roth and Van Halen camps. Eddie Van Halen sounded less than impressed with Eat ’Em and Smile, calling Roth’s solo group a “pasted together junior Van Halen.” Roth harped on Sammy’s age, and he called Eddie “a wonderful guitar player” but “a shitty human being.” He declared, “Van Halen had disintegrated into a spiteful bunch of bleary-eyed, argumentative procrastinating individuals.”

  “I think the Van Halens forgot where they came from,” he complained. “They keep saying they were a Volkswagen with me, and now with their new singer they’re a Porsche. A Porsche—that’s all they talk about these days. And that’s exactly what they went for—they went out and made the kind of music that will get you that kind of fancy car. I’ll always have a lot more fun in the backseat of my Volkswagen, baby.”

  12. Nothing's Shocking

  After taking 5150 to triple platinum, Van Halen were war-torn and battle-weary. Surviving the first foray while still fighting Roth had been exhausting. Eddie’s face looked puffy, and Alex was shorn bald—as if his hair had disappeared because of worry. “I said a few things in anger that I should apologize for,” Eddie told Rolling Stone. “But I cried. I was bummed. I slagged him in the press because I was pissed and I was hurt. The thing was Dave is a very creative guy, and working with him was no problem. It was living with the guy.”

  The latest blows weren’t easy to push to the background. During the 1986 tour, manager Ed Leffler had been hospitalized in Texas after being assaulted in a hotel elevator. Worse, Valerie Bertinelli suffered a miscarriage that threatened her marriage to Eddie. “It wasn’t the eas-iest thing to deal with,” she told interviewer Debby Bull in 1987. “But nobody knew I was pregnant, so nobody knew I had a miscarriage. I’d like to have four kids. Ed says he wants a full band.”

  Though she professed total love for her guitar player, lengthy absences and continual drinking constantly tested the couple. She admitted to a women’s magazine that the marriage needed work. “He doesn’t abuse me, but he hurts himself,” she told Redbook. “He’s got a problem I’m not happy with, but I bring stability to his life.”

  The year 1986 ended sadly for Van Halen, as Alex and Eddie’s father, Jan, died in December from complications stemming from alcoholism. He was in his late sixties. The brothers holed up in the 5150 studio at Eddie’s house for ten hours playing music together. David Lee Roth called to express his sorrow.

  One of Jan’s last wishes was that Alex and Eddie would stop drinking before they destroyed their bodies as he had done. In a seismic shift in priorities, Van Halen
’s most unfettered party animal, billed by Sammy as “the greatest rock and roll drummer in the world—drunk or sober,” Alex Van Halen climbed on the wagon in April 1987. The brother who had stayed out all night in high school while Eddie stayed home and practiced guitar was now tackling sobriety. The band’s wild-life image mattered little compared to the members’ continued health and vitality. Van Halen would have to carry on with a drummer who no longer got drunk at sushi restaurants, climbed up on the table, stepped on a sake glass, and fell onto the searing hibachi grill. That Alex was a creature of history.

  Though the elder Van Halen brother was well on his way to staying clean, Jan Van Halen’s request proved more difficult for Eddie. As Sammy was learning, the hell-bent “Bocephus mode” was really a permanent affliction. “At first Sammy thought Alex and I were drinking because we were so excited to have a singer, that we were celebrating,” Eddie told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “Then he realized that that’s the way we were every day. I think he was a little scared.”

  Expensive visits to rehab were not helping, either. After all, Jan Van Halen had taught Eddie to drink and smoke as a twelve-year-old boy. “I tried to quit it for him,” Eddie told Rolling Stone. “I tried to do it for my wife. I tried to do it for my brother. And it didn’t do any good for me. After I got out of Betty Ford, I immediately went on a drinking binge, and I got a fucking drunk-driving ticket on my motorcycle.”

  In February 1987, Eddie revealed a new close-cropped haircut on Saturday Night Live. He appeared in a skit with his wife parodying their home life, and also finger-tapped and whammy-bar-dived his way through a bluesy rave-up alongside G. E. Smith and the SNL band. The stodgy backing players and Eddie’s preppy sport jacket and hair brought to mind Michael J. Fox miming to Eddie’s guitar tracks in the 1950s sock hop in Back to the Future—a conservative step back to the good old days of rock and roll.

  Meanwhile, Sammy Hagar went head-to-head with Roth as a solo act, fulfilling his Geffen contract with a self-titled album in 1987, produced by and featuring bass guitar by Eddie Van Halen. Sammy Hagar peaked at number 14—and was soon retitled I Never Said Goodbye by the winning viewer of an MTV contest designed to juice interest in the album. The single “Give to Live” cracked the American Top 40, and “Eagles Fly” fluttered at the lowest altitude of the Top 100. Though it met with unimpressive reviews, the album went gold.

  What had seemed like a concession to Geffen now looked like a smart move on Hagar’s part—the leverage of a separate identity outside Van Halen. “It’s hard to say exactly why I’d want to make another one because I get the chance to do anything I want with Van Halen,” Sammy said. “But there might be a time when I’ve got something that isn’t quite right for the band, and then if I get a few more songs together, I’ll have the makings of another solo album.”

  While Sammy enjoyed his freedom, Van Halen took a break during which Eddie claimed to put down the guitar for nearly a year, focusing on piano and keyboard. He emerged in early 1987 just to play bass on “Winner Takes It All,” a toss-off song written by Giorgio Moroder and sung by Sammy for the soundtrack of Over the Top—a corny remake of Rocky, starring Sylvester Stallone as a golden-hearted truck driver striving to become the world’s greatest semiprofessional arm wrestler.

  The movie was not a cinematic milestone, but newly minted A-list rock star Hagar was invited to arm-wrestle Stallone in the music video for the song. The ex-boxer had fought his way to the top of the music business. “I really didn’t know anything about these guys,” Hagar said of his decision to join Van Halen. “In my solo career I was doing fine. Things were going really well. I worked a long time to get where I was, and to just go back and start over again. I didn’t know. But after we played music together, there wasn’t any question. Artistically, it was the thing to do.”

  Production for the next Van Halen album was hurried, as the band was late to snap back into the rhythm of working. Reassured by the success of 5150, the band confidently proceeded without a producer, overseeing the recording themselves and crediting nobody on the album. Throughout most of the creation, the title intended for this album was Bone. Sammy spotted OU812 stenciled on the side of a truck, and adopted the license-plate joke as a title—a kind of ultra-casual answer and taunt to David Lee Roth’s Eat ’Em and Smile.

  This was a Van Halen you could bring home to meet Mom and Dad. Instead of sneaking a joint and a bottle of Ripple wine behind the school gym, OU812 was an album of prom themes—complete with pangs of lost innocence, lives at the crossroads, and dealing with heavy decisions. The hints of grit and darkness gave substance to the radio-friendly rock, without clouding up chances of airplay. The band also took a somber approach to graphic design, using a black-and-white portrait for the album cover, while the back jacket depicted a monkey contemplating a human skull—a riddle conceived by Alex Van Halen.

  After the synthetic 5150, the more natural production of OU812 was welcome. Synthesizers and digital drums still ruled the day, but they were allowed to breathe in the real world. Strangely, the guitar was largely subdued and the bass guitar was almost nowhere to be found—as if the band was trying to hide its animal impulses. “I probably didn’t even have to play on that album,” Mike later told The Inside. “Because of the production, you could barely hear any bass.”

  Opening with a pulsing electronics, “Mine All Mine” was an ominous synth-rock track built up from sequenced keyboards. The lyrics put Hagar through ten hard days. “I beat myself up, hurt myself, punished myself, practically threw things through windows, trying to write the lyrics,” he told writer Martin Popoff. “I rewrote that song lyrically seven times, ripping papers up, drinking tequila all night one night to where I had the worst hangover in the world and I couldn’t even go into the studio. And I’m not like that. I don’t hurt myself very often. So Donn Landee and I locked ourselves in the studio and I sang the lyrics, and the whole time he had his head down on the console because he was trying to give me some space. When I finished, he jumped up with fuckin’ eyes bugging out of his head and said ‘that’s the coolest song you ever wrote.’”

  The teen romance theme “When It’s Love” was the first song completed, written before Sammy even arrived at the studio to start work. The Van Halen brothers played him their tape when they picked him up at the airport, and by the time they arrived at 5150 the lyrics were done. Eddie unwrapped his full arsenal of Roland, Oberheim, and Yamaha synths on this one, even running MIDI cable into a Steinway grand piano. The schmaltzy single went to number 5, and sales of con-traceptive sponges among teenage girls very likely reached a new peak.

  The first appearance of full guitars on OU812, “A.F.U. (Naturally Wired)” became the band’s opener on tour. Tidily bundling Sammy’s soaring yell, Eddie’s harmonics, and Alex’s chopped-up big rock drums, the track was mostly midtempo with fast parts and lots of open space—an excellent chance for technicians to adjust the lighting and sound.

  The inspiration for “Cabo Wabo” came to Sammy near his vacation house in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, while he was watching a wobbling drunk attempting to walk through a chain-link fence. At the time, the song was best known for being the first time Eddie used a wah pedal. In a few years, it would be hard to imagine “Cabo Wabo” as anything but a promotional Halenmercial for Sammy’s forthcoming south-of-the-border party empire.

  “Source of Infection,” a tipsy tribute to James Brown, rekindled the untethered spirit of early Van Halen. Sammy had suggested calling the album Source of Infection, but Alex found it offensive. The idea was shot down immediately.

  Though the idea for “Sucker in a 3 Piece” dated to before Sammy’s time in the band, the song sounded a lot like the steady sex and potatoes rock that was the Red Rocker’s claim to fame.

  Van Halen assumed the coast was clear to resume playing covers, gracing OU812 with a juke joint version of Little Feat’s “A Apolitical Blues.” Donn Landee had engineered the original, so he copied the setup for the recording using just tw
o mics in 5150. The band recorded live, and Eddie added piano parts later.

  Eddie seemed for the first time to be writing dirty blues songs, something he had always avoided in the past. “Finish What Ya Started” was another country rock song in the Mellencamp vein with a roadhouse feel, benefiting from unusual fingerpicking and a peppy arrangement. Eddie hit on the riff late one night after all the music they needed for the album was already done. He shouted from his balcony in Malibu to Sammy’s house two doors down. Sammy rose from bed and found Eddie outside beckoning him, a guitar over his shoulder and cigarette in mouth.

  “So he had a good song and I had the tequila,” Hagar told writer Martin Popoff. “And Eddie smokes, so he couldn’t come in. I don’t allow people to smoke in my house. We’re sitting outside on the porch, and I took my acoustic guitar and we wrote right on the spot ‘Finish What Ya Started.’ I didn’t have the lyrics quite done yet but I went back upstairs after we finished. About four in the morning and I’m laying there going in my head to myself ‘Come on baby, finish what you started.’ Because fuck, the guy got me all wound up, and I’m sitting here in bed with the song running through my head and I jumped up and wrote those lyrics.”

  The chemistry and camaraderie of the Van Hagar lineup were paying off. In the stripped-down black-and-white video for the song, Sammy whooped it up with the others on a big hollow-body electric guitar. “Finish What Ya Started” peaked at number 13 in Billboard, making a grand total of four Top 40 singles on the album.

  Dedicated to the memory of Jan Van Halen, OU812 was released May 24, 1988, and became the second album in a row to hit number 1. Within eight weeks, it went double platinum, proving that the success of the Hagar-era Van Halen was not a onetime fluke. Their material had changed radically, but they remained an important band. Though the moment could be fleeting, for the time being Van Halen was a family.