by Ian Christe
“I don’t have any idea what the boys in the Van Halen Wacky World are going to do,” David Lee Roth told KKGB radio. He sounded re-invigorated, despite his brushes with Van Halen, maintaining his fighting spirit with martial arts training and growing his shaggy bottle-blond mane back to proper rock god proportions.
“It’s a bummer for Gary because it will probably ruin his whole damn career,” Sammy Hagar commented to KCMQ in Missouri. “I mean, he’s a decent singer, but what’s he going to do now? ‘Hey, he’s the guy that bombed with Van Halen’? That’s not a good handle to have. I kind of feel bad for him, but it’s none of my business.”
17. Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground
When David Lee Roth finally crawled out of hiding after the ill-fated 1996 reunion attempt, he appeared before thousands of New Yorkers at the February 1997 premiere of Howard Stern’s biopic Private Parts. Speaking the minds of a generous plurality of his fans, Stern blurted, “Van Halen is nothing without David Lee Roth. Long live David Lee Roth!”
The zealous crowd ripped into a spontaneous protest of “Eddie sucks! Eddie sucks!” which Roth downplayed. “Nah, Eddie doesn’t suck—he just made a mistake.”
Still unflappable, Diamond Dave seemed advancing to a new stage of public life. On his birthday in October 1997 he released The Best of David Lee Roth, featuring one new song, “Don’t Piss Me Off.” On the cover, he was pictured in his prime, tanned and golden-maned, wearing assless chaps and gazing into a makeup mirror backstage somewhere in purgatory.
The self-reflection was carrying over into another major project, a great leap from his bite-size MTV blasts. With the help of an old acquaintance from the Zero One club in the early eighties, Henry Rollins, Roth was putting together his memoirs. While still in Black Flag, Rollins had begun printing small books of poetry. By the mid-1990s, his self-run publishing imprint had released dozens of books and become the springboard for Rollins’s career on the spoken-word circuit. “I helped [Dave] hook up with a few people to help him get his book going,” Rollins said. “I was just kind of a catalyst, a foothold for the moment. What I’ve read of it is just tremendous. Dave worked very hard on it, too. The guy is a great storyteller.”
The autobiography, titled Crazy from the Heat like his EP, hit book-stores in hardcover in October 1997. Roth had mused back in 1984 about following in the populist bootsteps of American writers Will Rogers and Mark Twain once his music career faded, and now here he was—gone literary.
Not a telling of the Van Halen story, Crazy from the Heat was a mental map of Roth’s extended interior safari. He explained himself fully, revealing a horny romantic with few inhibitions and grand aspirations. Without naming many names or grinding unnecessary axes, he heralded the perversity of his life on the road, and gave up the goods on Van Halen without seeming too self-serving. “The emotional impact for me,” he wrote of the break-up, “is once you’ve encountered hatred and ugliness like that, once you really become aware of just what human beings are capable of in that kind of sense, you’re not so quick to rush back out onto the field with a sword in one hand and a torch in the other. I’m not so quick anymore to form a team.”
Throughout the book, Roth’s frequent battlefield metaphors stuck with thorns, not Velcro. He unchained his inner Jewish warrior, and compared Alex and Eddie to Hezbollah fanatics in their crusade against him. He recalled growing up around concentration camp survivors with numbers tattooed on their forearms, and admitted to delivering a downer bar mitzvah speech about how much it sucked being Jewish in WASP-land. “The best you can hope for as a Jew is to be tolerated,” he wrote, adding that while leaping high off drum risers he always imagined himself landing hard on the panicked faces of his enemies.
At the same time, Sammy Hagar began his own book, tentatively titled Red Storm Arising, but had a falling-out with the coauthor over money. He successfully blocked the book’s publication by claiming he was part owner of the interview tapes.
Like Sammy backing his own solo career, Roth paid for his 1998 album DLR Band himself, recording the music in three weeks. Forming his own record company, Wawazat Records, he claimed not to have a manager, agent, promoter, or publicist. “I don’t have a plan for the future,” he reported. “I just stand up and surf, show up every day and see what happens. Know what? Every time I’ve done that, and really believed in that, the greatest things have happened. Every time I’ve tried to grow up and act like an adult with a plan, it’s blown my arm off.”
Roth assembled a touring lineup of the DLR Band but scotched a self-financed tour after sales registered nothing but a blip. Even at this late stage in the game, however, he credentialed another guitar hotshot—John Lowery from Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Lowery had worked cheap for Salt-N-Pepa, k.d. lang, and former Judas Priest singer Rob Halford on the Two project. When the DLR gig stalled, he skipped off to Marilyn Manson, upgraded his name to John 5, and within five years was a bona fide guitar hero with a steady gig working for Rob Zombie.
Roth contented himself with a promotional tour, where he sold the record with a new universal angle: “You may have never bought one of my records, but you heard my voice coming out of the stereo at the local drive-in, or the beach, coming from the stereo at the lifeguard station. You heard it in the club. You heard it when you went to jail—I got you through jail. I got you through war. I’ve got letters from people who conceived children to my songs.” Advanced egomania, possibly, but also true. “I think we’re onto something that people may have already known, but may have forgotten for a while.”
Pressed by a Finnish TV show about how many copies the album had sold, Roth seized the offensive with a tart one-liner. “Are you trying to hit me up for dinner? Because I’ll take your whole motherfucking country out for dinner on this one.” Dave could have given the TV host a break—in a country where thirty thousand CDs rates a platinum award, the actual number probably would have sounded impressive.
Billing himself as the ultimate multimedia entity in the flesh for the age of the tech boom, Roth launched an Internet television show called Dave TV—a spin-off of a concept from his “Just a Gigolo” video. The content was a flickering blitz of vintage Van Halen, live Roth, and commentary clips. Unfortunately, with broadband Internet still mostly a buzzword, the short run of five episodes hosted by Dave 2.0 dressed in futuristic cyber-outfits was largely wasted. Behind their squealing modems, only a small number of Internet users at that time were interested in guitar rock. Though money was flowing through the taps in every city in the United States, this was the age of irony—and genuine rock had just reached an absolute low point.
Even indestructible source of life “Top Jimmy” Koncek, inspiration for one of Van Halen’s happiest tunes, succumbed to liver failure and died in May 2001. The loss of the signal flags up ahead called for a quick stop to check the road map. “I’m old enough to know there may not be a tomorrow,” Roth said. “With my last dying breath, if you lean over to me on my deathbed, I want to be able to say I tried everything on the menu—twice.”
When the Advil finally stopped working, Roth went for arthroscopy on his knee in January 2000—torn cartilage from too many hard jumps. He announced to Rolling Stone that he and Van Halen were attempting a trial marriage, and nothing more was said for a while. “You learn how to have fun,” he said, “you learn how to be positive, you learn how to get along—then you can come to the barbecue. What I’m also going to say is don’t hold your breath. These guys are unhappy. These guys are sour. They’re different people now. It’s not just a case of pop Diamond Dave in and all of a sudden the sun comes up.”
Edward Van Halen’s only output for 1999 was a heady collaboration with Pink Floyd guitarist Roger Waters and Italian soundtrack boss Ennio Morricone on the song “Lost Boys Calling” from the film The Legend of 1900. When in doubt, Eddie returned to the studio, adding a seventy-two-input analog mixing desk to 5150. He bought a Mellotron, a peculiar 1960s keyboard that played tape loops of flutes, choirs, and guitars like
a rudimentary and spooky-sounding sampler. He also finally underwent his long-delayed hip replacement operation on November 16, 1999, receiving a titanium implant that made him partly a man of metal. His doctor told USA Today that the procedure had been recorded for posterity—possibly for use on a future Van Halen album. Later a mysterious source told Blender she’d seen Eddie’s real hip on ice in a freezer.
Eddie was no longer spending much time on the Malibu coast, where he had lived two doors down from Hagar, literally looking toward the horizon over an ocean of possibility. He seemed lost up in Coldwater Canyon in the Hollywood Hills, another genius with a fortune floating in a dreamland. “I’ve been playing a lot of cello lately,” he told Guitar World in 1999. He cited Chinese American cellist Yo-Yo Ma as an inspiration, and described trying to play along with his records like some pimply teen trying to learn Van Halen songs.
During 2000, Van Halen stalled for time, releasing newly remastered versions of their first six albums that fall. At the Video Music Awards in 2000, MTV lampooned the band’s lack of action. The network mocked Van Halen along with MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice with a fake memorial production tribute to “artists no longer with us”—perhaps unaware that Eddie Van Halen was battling cancer.
The health problems in paradise that began with Eddie’s late-eighties rehab visits blossomed during the 2000s, as years of drinking and excess came to a head in a slew of problems. After two decades, Van Halen’s great legacy of sex, drugs, and rock and roll was haunting the band. Their former assets became liabilities.
In May 2000, the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston denied that Eddie was a patient but later confirmed he was participating in an outpatient cancer prevention study. Eddie didn’t further address the rumors for an entire year, until in April 2001 he came clean on his Web site, revealing he had been checked out by three cancer specialists and three neck surgeons at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles and was well on his way to recovery.
“Ed went through a very difficult time,” Alex told the Boston Globe. “It was a health scare, and believe me, as his brother who didn’t know if he was going to make it through the next week, it was a very strange experience.”
David Lee Roth released a chipper public statement of support: “You can beat this, champ. See ya down the road.” Two weeks earlier he had leaked news that he had recorded three “astonishing” new songs with the band after Gary Cherone’s departure but hadn’t heard from Eddie or Alex since his contract expired in July 2000. He hoped that alerting the public would juice the band into responding. All Van Halen would say in response is that they were indeed working on their next album.
As he fought his potentially lethal squamous cell carcinoma of the mouth, Eddie again began talking about God. He had been a smoker for roughly forty years, and the inevitable lightning bolt finally struck. Sammy Hagar had poked Eddie to quit, to no avail. Eddie had quit drinking occasionally but never gave up his smokes. He even smoked on the golf course. Now he went under the knife and hoped to save his life.
With surgery and treatment, about 75 percent of patients survive oral cancers. Doctors cut out roughly one-third of Eddie’s tongue to eliminate the tumors. On Live with Regis and Kelly, Valerie Van Halen joked, “Whenever he gets smart with me, I say I’ll cut more of that tongue out.” Now even when sober, Eddie’s speech sounded a little sloppy. “They butchered me,” he later complained.
The band’s latest attempt to reform with David Lee Roth began in 2000 and dragged well into 2001. They disagreed over songs that were too radio-friendly, over business details, and over one another. With Alex and Eddie running the band’s business, there was no hard-nosed manager involved to make sure all the pieces fell into place. Eventually, Eddie told the New York Post that they finished three songs with Roth in 2001 but that they would all “probably be scrapped.”
“Everything looked pretty positive about getting together, but before you know it attorneys are involved,” Eddie told Maximum Gold. “These cats had me so beat down and confused, it made the cancer seem like a tiny zit on my ass. Everything seemed to fall apart once these guys got involved. I mean, we used to do it on a handshake. At this point, I don’t have a clue what is going on.”
He insisted that musically the band was still advancing, even as he supposedly underwent treatment supervised by the Mayo Clinic. “The band has always been together,” he told the Post. “Whether we have a singer or not is a different story.”
“I don’t know if we had a complete album’s worth of stuff, but we were pretty damn close,” Michael Anthony told a Japanese magazine. “For the most part it was actually pretty good. I don’t think Ed would ever let it out, though. I’ve got some demo stuff at home, they didn’t even really want me to take any stuff home, but I ended up with some stuff, anyway.”
WEA International, the megacorporate cousin of Warner Bros., tested the waters by releasing two Van Halen box sets in Japan—one box containing the first six albums from 1978 to 1984 with a metal VH key ring, the second offering four Sammy albums from 1986 to 1993 including the live album and two bonus tracks. Though WEA also had rights to put a Van Halen box out in the United States, it respected the band’s wishes and waited for the time being, hoping to preserve its good relationship with a rock and roll mega-entity.
Meanwhile, Sammy told the Philadelphia Inquirer that a Las Vegas businessman had offered him, Van Halen, and David Lee Roth $50 million to play two pay-per-view concerts in Sin City. He claimed everyone but Roth shot down the offer immediately. It was hard to tell whether Van Halen were beginning to cash in their chips—or whether their chips would soon be cashed in for them.
After twenty years, a good-size general audience still wanted to hear Eddie’s guitar playing and Roth’s attitude, preferably in combination. But in the past five years, the public had heard enough Van Halen drama—it was time for new music or nothing.
On the bright blue morning of September 11, 2001, religious fanatics commandeered four commercial airliners and flew two of them into the symbolic heart of America’s financial empire, the World Trade Center in New York City. The director of Van Halen’s celebrated “Right Now” music video, Carolyn Mayer Beug, died aboard American Flight 11 when it collided with the North Tower, 1 World Trade Center.
The next month, while the country still remained in chaos, Valerie Bertinelli and Eddie Van Halen were amicably separated. “This is something Valerie tried very hard not to have happen,” her mother told People, “but it finally came to a breaking point. I believe it will result in a divorce. I think Valerie is going on with her life.”
They had seemed the perfect couple for twenty years and six months, since Valerie was a tender twenty-one years old. During that time she had played virtually every kind of suffering female role imaginable. Eventually, her marriage to a perfectionist alcoholic guitar god became too close to a sad made-for-TV melodrama. She and Eddie began living apart during the summer of 2001, when she moved to Salt Lake City for a role alongside Della Reese on Touched by an Angel. She lasted the remaining fifty-nine episodes until the show was canceled in 2003. The marriage did not.
David Lee Roth and the tabloids had claimed that Valerie left Eddie previously in 1992, but nine more years together quieted that gossip. Now there was no denying the marriage was done. Eddie paid Valerie a settlement in one lump payment, and he was a single man for the first time since he was twenty-six. The parents shared joint custody of ten-year-old Wolfgang, though he lived with his mom throughout the separation.
“I can’t say that we’re really great friends,” Valerie had told an interviewer during a rocky period in 1990. “We don’t have a hell of a lot in common, but we’ll always be connected like brother and sister.”
At least Eddie soon had his health. After doctors declared him cancer-free in May 2002, Eddie relayed the news via the band’s Web site. “I’m sorry for the delay but I wanted to let you all know that I’ve just gotten a 100 percent clean bill of health—from head to toe
.”
The hardships brought lifelong musical partners Alex and Eddie closer together. The cool, contained older brother stepped out of the shadows. “Eddie always knew he would get better. I didn’t,” Alex told the Dutch publication Telegraaf. “All we had in those difficult times was our music. It was therapy. We played for months and months working on new songs.”
Eddie also reached out to Alex, who had protected him since they were fresh off the boat from Holland. “There is a huge misconception about this band and that is without my brother, Alex Van Halen, who is the key, the band would not be. He is and has been there for me since before I was born,” he told Guitar World. Eddie promised to get back to making music quickly, but though he and Alex played frequently, Eddie still seemed hampered by his old brainwashing voiced after 1984—that the public might not accept music from him outside certain defined lines.
During this time, Eddie did talk with Indiana country rocker John Mellencamp about an acoustic tour, a quiet change of direction. He also quietly continued to work against cancer. On The Howard Stern Show in 2006, Eddie offered a series of bizarre revelations. He proclaimed himself totally cancer-free, not simply in remission, then denied that thirty years of chain-smoking had brought on the disease. “I live in an electromagnetic field about fourteen to eighteen hours a day in my recording studio with a metal pick in my mouth. It’s basically like playing golf in a lightning storm.”
Eddie also claimed to be funding McClain Labs, a pathology lab with twenty-nine employees in Smithtown, New York. As loony as his explanation of how he beat cancer sounded, the technique he described was in fact at the cutting edge of oncology. The experimental lab cut a tiny healthy piece of his tongue, then grew the cells and conducted all the tests outside of Eddie’s body before administering treatment. “I didn’t have to drink the Drano,” he said.