Everybody Wants Some

by Ian Christe

  When Van Halen reached RIAA diamond certification in August 1996, marking over ten million copies sold, Van Halen would soon become one of five rock bands with two albums selling over ten million, joining the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Def Leppard. More people owned Van Halen’s first album alone than lived in any of the forty least-populated U.S. states. If the album Van Halen were a country, it would have roughly as many citizens as Belgium, Portugal, or Greece. Overall, more Americans had paid money for all of Van Halen’s albums combined than typically voted in U.S. presidential elections.

  When Van Halen’s Best of Volume I was released on schedule on October 22, 1996, the record debuted at the top of the charts—Roth’s long-overdue first number 1 album. It stayed in the Top 10 for all of November, and lingered on the album charts for a year, earning double-platinum awards during 1997. The record company promoted the album with a Willy Wonka–style golden “Wolfgang” ticket packaged in one CD, granting the winner a flight to California to pick up a signed Wolfgang guitar from Eddie.

  Eddie kicked more sand on Sammy Hagar’s name in Rolling Stone, claiming he became personally embarrassed at how badly Hagar treated Best of Volume I producer Glen Ballard, who had just produced Alanis Morissette’s phenomenally successful Jagged Little Pill and quit a troubled project with Aerosmith in order to work with Van Halen.

  Eddie was also quick to diminish the continued importance of David Lee Roth to Van Halen. Beneath his rock titan armor, he was still bleeding from battle injuries. “No matter what we do, it will never be the same,” he told The Inside. “You can’t exhume something like that. The magic is just gone.”

  The world was disappointed by the false restart. Having survived the end of L.A. hair metal and the ascension of grunge and hip-hop, now it seemed Van Halen’s only enemy was itself. There were cracks in the mirror, reflecting the ugly possibility that these old rockers were too bitter to reunite for the sake of love, their fans, or even money.

  The Van Halen brothers let the razzing from the peanut gallery bother them like, well—milk off a duck’s back. Eddie and Alex topped off the tumultuous year like strong-boned, healthy all-American boys, appearing in a “Got Milk?” ad photographed by Eddie’s old friend Annie Liebowitz. They were the first rockers to appear in a Milk Council ad, then titled “Milk: Where’s Your Mustache?” Alex was pictured bare-chested and strangely drenched in bovine lactations above a caption they apparently hadn’t seen beforehand: “Every time we change singers, we have an extra glass of milk. That way we’re sure to get more than the recommended three glasses a day.”

  Still, Eddie gave guitar fans what they had wanted for years, as he stepped outside his band to cross wires with musicians whose gifts equaled his own. He assembled a band for an eight-hour benefit concert on November 17 for Jason Becker—the guitar wunderkind diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease one week after joining David Lee Roth’s band in 1989. Dressed in black berets and wife-beater under-shirts, the so-called Lou Brutus Experience included Eddie Van Halen, his close friend Steve Lukather from Toto on guitar and vocals, Roth sideman Billy Sheehan on bass, and Pat Torpey from Mr. Big on drums. They played “Wipe Out” by the Surfaris, “Little Wing” by Hendrix, “Good Times, Bad Times” by Led Zeppelin, the Beatles’ “She’s So Heavy,” and a unique dual-guitar version of “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love.” The ridiculous level of musical chops onstage playing three-chord rock songs was like hiring Michelin chefs to make popcorn for a slumber party.

  If Eddie would continue branching out, the promise of his life beyond Van Halen could prove very exciting. “It’s like when I did that City of Hope thing recently,” he told The Inside, speaking of another impromptu gig he played in October 1996. “Depending on what tune or who you’re playing with, you play differently. And it’s just the interaction with the people you’re with that pushes you to another level.”

  PART III

  Where Have All the Good Times Gone?

  The Cheronean Era and Neo-Rothozoic and Neo-Hagarlithic Periods, 1996–2007

  • July 26, 1961: Gary Cherone born in Malden, Massachusetts.

  • 1985: Cherone’s band the Dream wins MTV’s Basement Tapes.

  • June 8, 1990: Extreme’s “More Than Words” single hits number 1.

  • April 20, 1992: Gary Cherone joins surviving members of Queen at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in London.

  • October 4, 1996: Alex and Eddie announce Van Halen’s new singer will be Gary Cherone.

  • March 17, 1998: Release of Van Halen III, the first VH studio album not to go platinum.

  • November 5, 1999: Gary Cherone leaves Van Halen.

  • May 2000: Texas hospital confirms Eddie in outpatient cancer prevention study.

  • Summer 2001: Van Halen completes at least three new songs with David Lee Roth.

  • January 2002: Van Halen’s partnership with Warner Bros. ends after twenty-three years.

  • April 15, 2002: David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar announce joint forty-date summer concert tour.

  • May 2002: Doctors declare Eddie Van Halen cancer-free.

  • July 2002: Eddie and Valerie Van Halen announce separation.

  • April 2004: Sammy’s Cabo Wabo Cantina opens branch in basement of a Lake Tahoe casino; Cabo Wabo tequila ships over 110,000 cases for the year.

  • June 11, 2004: Van Halen launches reunion tour with Sammy Hagar; relations sour by the end of the summer.

  • November 19, 2004: Eddie smashes two Peavey Wolfgang guitars, ending his thirteen-year partnership.

  • December 6, 2005: Eddie and Valerie officially file for divorce.

  • January 2006: David Lee Roth replaces Howard Stern as morning radio DJ; lasts through April.

  • September 2006: Eddie Van Halen announces Van Halen will tour in 2007 with his son, Wolfgang, playing bass.

  • December 2006: Roth rehearses with a new all–Van Halen lineup.

  • March 2007: Van Halen inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

  16. No Way Out

  During the grace period between singers, Van Halen seemed to sail right along. Eddie and Alex were nominated for a Grammy in early 1997 for Alex’s piano piece on the Twister soundtrack. Eddie also remained central to the guitar industry, and his Peavey EVH Wolfgang won Guitar of the Year from the Guitar Dealers retail association. He increased production and added a lower-priced model for beginning players. Yet for lesser mortals the pantheon of hard rock was crumbling. Headbangers Ball had been dumped by MTV, the hot car on the horizon was not a Camaro but a revamped VW Bug, and guitar solos were shunned in popular music like a cause of AIDS.

  Dinosaurs became extinct when their environment could no longer sustain them, allowing smaller, quicker animals to take over. Where David Lee Roth failed to send feathers flying in Vegas, in January 1997, the king of schmaltz Pat Boone laughed his way up the charts with a cover of “Panama” on the In a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy album. Van Halen should have been deeply worried when a campy, ironic version of their music was considered more fun than the real thing. Young audiences in the late 1990s liked their “rock” with a wink and a nod—like nerdy Chicago indie rockers Weezer, whose “Flying W” logo was a knowing riff on Van Halen’s trademark.

  Piling on the chuckles, suburban pop punkers Nerf Herder released “Van Halen” in 1997, a singsong novelty hit that praised Van Halen and two-handed tapping, while mocking Roth’s hairline and lamenting Hagar’s lost cool. The Van Halen brothers, Michael Anthony, and Valerie Bertinelli granted permission for their images to be used in the video—which MTV added to regular rotation—but Nerf Herder claimed Hagar called them “faggots” and refused to sign off on the insulting tribute.

  In their glory days, Van Halen had defied parody because they were more fun than the funnymen. There had always been a big fat joke hanging in songs like “Hot for Teacher,” and peeling off the black fishnets to find the punch line was part of the appeal. But somewhere along the way, everyone got
seriously distracted and Van Halen became an unwitting source of laughs. In Adam Sandler’s 1998 retro-comedy The Wedding Singer, set during the 1980s, his lovable loser character warns his fiancée to stop disrespecting a Van Halen shirt for fear his favorite band will break up. Only a dope could still have faith.

  Undaunted, Sammy set about showing the world how much fun he was having without Van Halen to slow him down. The Red Rocker turned a gray-sounding fifty in October 1997, ringing in the years at his Cabo Wabo club with a bongo-laden south-of-the-border retirement version of “Right Now.”

  Hagar’s 1997 solo album Marching to Mars was recorded with nearly a half million dollars of his own money. He flaunted his new freedom with all-star guests like Huey Lewis, drummer Matt Sorum and Slash of Guns N’ Roses, funk bass legend Bootsy Collins, and Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead. He fell far afield from hard rock, revisiting “Amnesty Is Granted,” a song he wrote and performed on a 1995 Meatloaf album.

  Angry about his public bashing at the hands of Eddie Van Halen, Hagar depicted the guitarist in his “Little White Lie” video as a clueless chimp slapping a guitar. The song was about Van Halen secretly rehearsing with Roth, only to have the reunion attempt backfire. “My God, these are sick dudes, man!” he told Rolling Stone. “They stabbed me in the back, and now they’re trying to throw dirt on me and bury me!”

  After twenty years, Sammy buried the hatchet with Ronnie Montrose, inviting him to play guitar on Marching to Mars’s “Leaving the Warmth of the Womb.” As Montrose said, “I did fire him from the Montrose band because he was on to his own thing and had many more things that he wanted to do as a band leader than he could do in our format. One of the running jokes is that it took Van Halen a lot longer than it took me to fire him!”

  While Van Halen figured out what to do with Gary Cherone, just like in 1985 the band’s phone rang off the hook with helpful applicants for the job of singer. One caller was Billy Squier, the radio rocker whose band Piper had been signed by A&M instead of Van Halen in 1976. The band was also strongly rumored to be courting a singer who had been moonlighing onstage in Jesus Christ Superstar—former Skid Row singer Sebastian Bach.

  “The way I think of it, we can make any singer sound good,” Michael Anthony noted. “We’re going to be known as the band that can take any singer and make him famous.”

  As mainstream news outlets were still learning how to filter the information morass of cyberspace, a news story based on a fake Internet interview hit wire services claiming that former Whitesnake singer David Coverdale was recording with the band. Coverdale soon denied the allegations, saying he had last seen Eddie in a hotel room in 1993 where the guitarist drank a beer while Coverdale and Jimmy Page had their afternoon tea.

  Also under the microscope during summer 1996 was Sass Jordan, a British singer with a music career in Canada. She lived seconds away from Eddie, and even while Sammy was in the band, Sass, Eddie, and Alex spent a lot of time together in 5150. Alex insisted he was casually interested in advancing her career, but Jordan later told Wall of Sound, “I was talking to their manager Ray Danniels and I said, ‘I swear to God, I think they were thinking of having a female singer in the band.’ And he said, ‘Of course they were! Why the hell else do you think you were up there?’ ” Instead, she went on to become a judge on the north-of-the-border talent search show, Canadian Idol.

  The editor of a music industry tip sheet issued an open letter in the summer of 1996, saying he knew firsthand that Van Halen were probably not rehearsing with Roth before Sammy left, but that they had hired another singer—not Cherone. In fact, according to North Dakota country rocker Mitch Malloy, he was hired as Van Halen’s replacement singer in early summer 1996. He had been sleeping in Eddie’s guesthouse, rehearsing with the band and recording a five-song demo including “Jump” and “Why Can’t This Be Love?” On the third day, the band called him to the control room, hugged him, and congratulated him on joining Van Halen.

  When the Dave reunion suddenly happened without his knowledge, Malloy claimed he wrote a letter to manager Ray Danniels backing out of the arrangement. “I thought it was a mistake and that they had just made it nearly impossible for any singer to come in and be successful cause now everyone thought Dave was back,” he told MelodicRock.com. He didn’t hear from the band again for several weeks.

  Incredibly, Michael Anthony may have also had a hard time getting his calls returned. The band appeared not only to be playing musical singers. According to Roth, the Van Halen brothers were also practicing with new bassists at 5150 at the same time they were testing the waters with him.

  Ultimately, the singer Van Halen had quickly tapped to replace Hagar was much younger howler Gary Cherone. Plucked fresh from a Boston production of Jesus Christ Superstar himself, Cherone had fronted Van Halen–influenced light metal band Extreme, who disbanded in 1996 after four albums. Cherone had just left Extreme to pursue his solo career, with their next album already halfwritten, shortly after guitarist Nuno Bettencourt left the group.

  Like Hagar, Cherone was not discovered through an all-points fifty-state star search. Extreme also happened to be managed by Ray Danniels, who sent over Cherone’s audition demo. The band was reportedly not wowed, but Eddie Van Halen felt differently about Cherone after meeting him. Cherone was a modest, unpretentious rock stylist with a decent track record and some dashing stage moves. For singer number three, Van Halen didn’t want to take over the world again—they just wanted someone they could work with.

  Before hiring Cherone, Van Halen put him through the ropes with a handful of songs like “Panama” and “Why Can’t This Be Love?” representing the back catalogs of both other singers. Within an hour they had compiled the first song with their new lineup—“Without You,” originally written to start with the line, “Hey you, wake up, get your shit together.”

  “There’s not a hint of LSD—Lead Singer Disease,” Eddie told The Inside. “He’s a brother, a normal guy like Alex, Mike, and me.”

  Born north of Boston in the suburb of Malden, Massachusetts, on July 26, 1961, Cherone came into a Catholic household headed by an Army sergeant father and a gym teacher mother. He was the third of five brothers, including his fraternal twin, also a musician. In that sense, Van Halen could joke that they were keeping a spare singer on hand.

  Almost fourteen years younger than Hagar, Gary grew up listening to Van Halen. As a teenager he aspired to play basketball but injured his knee and turned to music. In the late 1970s he formed a cover band called Myth with future Extreme drummer Paul Geary. Hardly surprising considering the era, they played Van Halen songs like “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love” and “Dance the Night Away.”

  After changing their name to Cherone and the Dream in 1981, the band won MTV’s Basement Tapes in 1985, an early call-in talent search where successful regional bands battled for record contracts. Cherone learned the ropes during the 1980s, and then caught the tail end of the glam rock craze with Extreme, whose self-titled debut was released in 1989. The antithesis of airhead West Coast metal, Extreme offered deeper tunes and natural hair. The number 1 ballad “More Than Words” from 1990’s Extreme II: Pornograffitti CD was a career high point. Afterward, Extreme supported David Lee Roth’s band on tour. Always open about their Van Halen influence, on their final tour Extreme added “Hot for Teacher” to their set list.

  Though he was a much-younger suitor calling on the mother of American hard rock bands, Cherone’s idols came from the same old guard that had inspired Van Halen: Freddie Mercury, Roger Daltrey, and Mick Jagger. Marking a serious notch in his belt, at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in 1992, a long-haired Cherone took the helm of Queen, leading the legendary hard rock band’s three surviving members in a hyperactive rendition of “Hammer to Fall.” His performance endeared him to Queen fans and spoke for his potential beyond Extreme.

  Oddly for a rock singer chasing their coattails, Cherone had never seen Van Halen live until joining. Describing how it felt to be chosen for
the job, he joked, “It doesn’t suck.”

  Van Halen welcomed Cherone to the family like a cute puppy who would one day be called on to pull the sled of their career. Gary took over Eddie’s guesthouse, and Valerie reportedly nicknamed the new singer “Schneider,” after the ever-present handyman character on One Day at a Time. “This is it for life,” said Eddie. “He’s in. If it doesn’t work out for whatever reason, that would pretty much be it for Van Halen. Al and I would just move on, score movies, whatever.”

  Eddie delayed his much-needed hip surgery again in anticipation of a quick tour, but he ended up spending a lot of time alone in the 5150 studio. He began recording in his bathroom, writing “on the pot” where he believed God gave him frequent inspiration. His safe haven, the toilet-based studio came complete with rack effects for serious bursts of divine intervention.

  The songs just kept coming from Eddie—he briefly wanted III to be a double album. Much of the new album featured songs passed over by Roth during sessions the previous summer, though in that time Eddie had conjured dozens more song ideas.

  Out of left field, the band chose producer Mike Post, a golfing buddy of Eddie’s and a five-time Grammy-winning legend in soundtrack music. Originally a musician, he played guitar on Sonny and Cher’s hit “I Got You Babe” but soon became engrossed in writing emblematic cops-and-robbers music for television. His experience in rock album production began and ended with Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5.

  Post penned one of the most memorable TV theme songs of all time for The Rockford Files, not to mention the themes for Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, NYPD Blue, and Law & Order—basically any legendary show with a badge. He also composed for ChiPs, Kojak, and Knight Rider. His last brush with rock was the 1990’s cult show Cop Rock, a Steven Bochco–produced abomination that was like Cops meets the “I Can’t Drive 55” music video, where police officers make busts then burst into song.