Night Beat

by Mikal Gilmore

Musical prowess aside, Van Halen concerts are mostly showcases for Roth and his gregarious talents. Roth wangles the crowd from overture to encore, cavorting throughout like a carnal gymnast and trotting out a bookful of born-to-raise-hell bromides. “Swear to God, I smelled dope when I walked in here tonight,” he says solicitously at one point, then has a dutiful roadie haul out something resembling a joint for him to puff on. Later, while swigging from a half-empty Jack Daniel’s bottle, Roth proclaims, “Tonight, I’m going to teach you how to drink for yourself; but when I come back next year, I’m going to teach you how to drink for other people.”

  After the concert, the party spirit extends backstage. As ZZ Top’s “I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide” pours out of Roth’s portable stereo, two young women climb up on a banquet table and cheerfully strip down to their boots and panties, to the rowdy delight of the men and the silence of the other women. Eddie Van Halen is hanging out at the rear of the room, wearily watching it all with unconcern. Brother Alex, however, and Michael Anthony move up close.

  Alex thoughtfully produces a flashlight, which he uses to illuminate the dancer’s pelvic motions. In return, the women spread their legs and rub themselves delightedly. Catching my eye from across the room, Roth comes over and gives me a fraternal slap on the shoulder. “Lost denizens of the night,” he says, smiling at the women writhing on the table. “Man, I relate to them heavily.”

  “YOU’RE ONLY as good as your worst night, and I feel like I went through hell tonight.”

  It’s the wee hours before dawn, and Eddie Van Halen is sitting on my hotel-room floor. When he showed up about half an hour ago, he seemed dragged out and depressed because he felt his guitar playing earlier in the evening had been haphazard and prosaic. Now, after a couple of glasses of straight bourbon, he appears ruminative. “I suppose what bothers me,” he says, “is that often the kids don’t even notice when I’m bad. I come offstage and get compliments up the ass. That’s so frustrating.”

  Unlike Roth, twenty-three-year-old Eddie Van Halen seems strangely disquieted by mass adulation. “Just three years ago,” he says, “I was fighting my way up front with the rest of the kids to see Aerosmith. Then a year later, we were playing with them. That boggled me to death. I mean, I knew I’d always play guitar, but I had no idea I’d be in the position I’m in now.”

  In a way, it might have been predicted. Born in Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, the sons of a jazz musician, Eddie and Alex Van Halen grew up studying counterpoint theory on piano and playing the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky. But after the family moved to Pasadena, California, in 1968, the two brothers grew enamored of American and British rock & roll.

  While still teenagers, Eddie and Alex formed Mammoth, a heavy-metal-cum-party band that frequented Pasadena’s wet T-shirt circuit. Alex still bristles when he recalls the bantering he and Eddie used to receive from friends for playing “primitive” music: “They used to call us ’musical prostitutes’ because we were playing songs that had simple structures. But it’s much harder to write a stable melody in a basic blues format than the stuff these progressive musicians come up with; they change chords and tempos more often than I change my underwear. Some people might call that technical proficiency, but I just call it jerking off.”

  Whatever lingering doubts the Van Halens may have had about their music’s validity were dispelled for good after they hooked up with Roth, who was doing a blues troubadour act at Pasadena’s Ice House. (One of the few things Roth does exercise restraint about is discussing his personal background, though he admits to growing up on a farm in Indiana and spending weekends at his Uncle Manny’s Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village before moving to Pasadena in the early seventies.)

  “Dave was more entertainer than musician,” says Eddie. “As a result, he had a better eye for the commercial thing. He was into short-format stuff because people’s attention spans are only so long.”

  After Roth joined up, the Van Halens also enlisted rival Pasadena bandleader Michael Anthony to play bass, then elected to change Mammoth’s name to Rat Salade. Roth persuaded the brothers that their surname might prove a more imposing title. “I didn’t like the idea at first,” says Eddie, “but now I have to admit it sounds powerful—like a German nuclear bomb.”

  Van Halen traversed the city’s basin for almost four years, handling their own management and booking their own dates. Finally, following a successful series of self-produced concerts at Pasadena’s Civic Auditorium and an extravagant demo session produced by Kiss bassist Gene Simmons, record labels began to express an interest in the group. One night in 1977, Warner Bros. producer Ted Templeman hauled the label’s president, Mo Ostin, over to see the group at a near-empty Hollywood club. In effect, Van Halen signed with Warner Bros. that night.

  “The guys in the band still don’t know this,” says Templeman, who has produced all three of Van Halen’s LPs, “but I went down to see them the night before I brought Mo Ostin along, and they just floored me. David Roth came across as the most convincing thing I’d seen in a rock & roll theater since Jim Morrison, but mainly it was Eddie who impressed me.

  “Of all the people I work with, besides Michael McDonald, Eddie Van Halen is a true virtuoso. I think he’s the best guitar player alive, and I’ve listened extensively to George Benson, Django Reinhardt, Tal Farlow, Charlie Christian, Jim Hall, and Jimi Hendrix. Eddie can play thirty-second-note melodic lines with a complexity that rivals Bach, and I haven’t heard anybody who can phrase like him since Charlie Parker. Believe me, Eddie is a killer.”

  Eddie, though, winces at any mention of praise. “I don’t know shit about scales or music theory,” he says, “and I don’t want to be seen as the fastest guitar in town, ready and willing to gun down the competition. All I know is that rock & roll guitar, like blues guitar, should have melody, speed, and taste, but more important, it should have emotion. I just want my guitar playing to make people feel something: happy, sad, even horny.”

  Eddie smiles slightly, then pours himself a final glass of bourbon. “Actually, I hate people telling me how good I am. All that really says to me is that I have a lot of friends these days who aren’t really friends. I mean, if we stopped selling records tomorrow, bye-bye friends and bye-bye compliments.

  “I guess that doesn’t really bother me—it’s just that it’s the one thing I never expected.”

  THE AFTERNOON of the second Cobo Arena show, Van Halen and a small entourage of security and promotion personnel pile into two limousines standing outside the Detroit Plaza Hotel. The band members are slated to make a round of radio interviews, but judging from their bedraggled faces, they would probably prefer using the time to make up for lost sleep.

  Moods brighten measurably, though, when the band sees the bevy of fans—most of them female—waiting outside the first station. Roth and Alex fix in on a pair of silk-stockinged, milk-skinned twins and spirit them off to the radio booth. “Welcome to the top,” chuckles Roth, snuggling between them, his large hands cuddling their backsides. “You’ve finally hit the big time.” The twins float off to one of the booth’s corners, where members of the entourage cajole them into displaying their bare breasts. The band, fully revivified now, settles down for the startled D.J.’s first question.

  As it happens, he never gets to ask it. Van Halen quickly turns the proceedings into a chaotic, comic slingfest, tossing out more sexual innuendoes, ethnic slurs, and harmonized burps in two minutes than the Marx Brothers probably managed in their entire careers. “I’d like to present Al with the “Most Incredible Performance Back at the Hotel Award’ for last night,” sniggers Roth. “It was definitely a nine on the sphincter scale.” The band chortles knowingly, and the D.J. blanches.

  To celebrate his award, Alex grabs an open beer bottle, jams it in his mouth, tilts his head back so the bottle stands fully upended, and drains its contents in two awe-inspiring gulps. Then he ejects the bottle with a thrust of his tongue and repeats the ritual with a new bottle. The twins squeal admir
ingly.

  “Hey, I got an idea,” says Roth, moving over to a picture window. Catching sight of him, the fans in the parking lot below emit a volley of whoops and whistles. Roth turns back to the anxious D.J.: “Why don’t you play ’Everybody Wants Some!!’ from the new album.” As the sound of Alex’s undulating jungle beat and Roth’s Tarzan yodel booms out of the studio monitors, Roth pulls a chair over to the window and has one of the twins stand on it, her back to the kids in the parking lot.

  When the song gets to its tawdry spoken passage, Roth lip-syncs the words and handles the twin like a prop: “I like the way the line runs up the back of the stockings,” he mouths, hoisting the woman’s skirt above her hips and tracing the seam on her left leg, from ankle to ass. Miming to the lyric, he tells the young woman to leave on her heels, turn a provocative pose, and show her legs from the side, up to her hip bone. The fans outside, including the females, greet every motion with clamorous, assenting hoots.

  At the display’s end, the grimacing D.J. swallows hard and tries to think of something to ask. After a few minutes, he says, “Uh, that reminds me. It was unbelievable at your show last night. The response was so enormous, you couldn’t even hear yourself think.”

  Roth grins back triumphantly, then notes, “Would it be worth listening in the first place?”

  ALEX VAN HALEN props himself on the edge of a dressing-room table and offers me a lenient smile. “Why should rock & roll be meaningful?” he asks in reply to a question about the seemingly slight themes of Van Halen’s songs. “I mean, is sex . . . He pauses, and a wistful smile curls his lips. “I was going to say, is sex meaningful, but I guess that’s the whole point: If something feels good, then it’s meaningful. And since our music is designed to make people feel good, it is meaningful.”

  Just then, the door swings wide and Roth struts in, pulling a tall, moon-eyed blond by the hand. “Go to another room,” he directs us in a bearish voice. “Me and this lady got to talk.”

  Alex looks the woman up and down savoringly, then snickers. “Yeah, I bet you want to talk.”

  “There’s an empty room across the hall,” replies Roth, undaunted. “You guys can go over there.” Then Roth spies my tape recorder and an inspired look crosses his face. “Okay, wait a minute. We’ll give you an in-depth perspective of Van Halen.” He turns back to the young woman. “What was your name again? Okay, look, darling, this guy is from a magazine and . . . ”

  The young woman sends a befuddled look in our direction and shakes her head. “You can’t fool me. I know who that guy is. That’s Alex.”

  Alex laughs like a firecracker, and Roth looks embarrassed. “No, this guy here—he’s from a magazine and is doing a story about us.” Roth picks up the tape recorder and holds it up to the woman’s face. “Just tell him what you think of us.”

  She looks even more confused. “You mean what I think of Alex?”

  Alex erupts in laughter again, and Roth stares at the woman disgustedly. “No. Not Alex. Us. Tell the tape recorder what you think of us.”

  “You want me to talk into this thing and say what I think about the band?”

  “C’mon, babe, don’t waste the man’s time.”

  The young woman gives a shaky look, then takes the recorder. “Okay, here I am and they’re asking me about Van Halen,” she says with a quivery Midwestern accent. “What I think of Van Halen is that I enjoy the show very much, and they rock & roll definitely all the way. It’s hard core, makes you want to move, makes you want to groove, makes you do anything you want to do. And for another thing,” she adds, smiling broadly at Alex and Roth, “every one of the guys in this band knows how to get down—that’s for goddamn sure.”

  Roth pulls the recorder from her hand and gives it back to me with an uncertain smile. “I think maybe I just put my neck on the line.”

  Alex, still laughing hard, takes me by the elbow and steers me out of the room. “Can you believe,” he says in a titillated whisper, “the mentality of some of these girls?”

  WOMEN—SERVILE WOMEN, that is—are a matter of endless fascination to the members of Van Halen, as they are, indeed, to many male musicians. But during my stay with Van Halen, I’ve seen enough nude women and heard enough graphic, abasing morning-after anecdotes to fuel an article about porn-rock—or a diatribe against sexism. It doesn’t seem, I tell Roth at one point, that Van Halen holds women in very high regard.

  Roth looks surprised by the comment. “What are you talking about? I like women very much.”

  After pausing to hoot over his latest witticism, Roth continues: “I suppose you mean that rap earlier with the girl in the silk stockings? Well, she wore the stockings, I was merely complimenting her. That ain’t sexist. What you’re talking about is sexy feelings, and that’s what Van Halen’s striving to create. I mean, we don’t have songs about forcing women to do anything. It takes two to tango, let us remember.

  “As for me personally, I feel sexy a whole lot of the time. That’s one of the reasons I’m in this job: to exercise my sexual fantasies. When I’m onstage, it’s like doing it with twenty thousand of your closest friends. And that’s a great relationship, because you never have to ask them, ’Did you come?’ They’ll let you know.”

  IN A SENSE, the intercourse that takes place between Van Halen and their audience may be more political than sexual. Whether the musicians accept it or not, Van Halen is a massive success because the band represents the real ideals of a massive audience. Or, to put it another way, the members of Van Halen may live the life they sing about, but they also sing about a life their audience reveres, even aspires to.

  That idea comes across with resounding force at the group’s second Cobo Arena show, where the howl of the crowd often rivals the squall of the band, until the two meet and meld in one deafening, indivisible roar. But the biggest clamor occurs when Roth sings the opening verse from Van Halen’s current single, “And the Cradle Will Rock”—a smart and funny song about how the early 1980s heavy metal generation, like so many rock & roll upstarts that have preceded and will follow them, bewilder and frighten their elders. But it’s also a song about how those elders fail to understand their own children, and how the young people’s unrest amounts to a good deal “more than just an aggravation.”

  The crowd sings along from start to finish, in the process appropriating the song and raising it to anthemlike status.

  A little later, as Roth rests backstage, I share my theory of heavy-metal political intercourse with him. He doesn’t seem all that impressed.

  “I don’t speak for kids,” he replies, “and I don’t represent people. I’m simply one of the people. But I’ll tell you this much: When that crowd out there tonight went nuts, they weren’t going nuts because David Lee Roth is so cool, or because Van Halen is so hot. They went nuts because they were enjoying themselves.

  “That’s what we mean when we say there’s a little Van Halen in all of us and we’re just trying to bring it out. It’s like something bursts inside of you, something that makes you not care what people around you are thinking. It makes you feel invincible—like, if a car hit you, nothin’ would happen. It should make you feel like the Charge of the Light Brigade, even if you’re just going to the bathroom. When you do that on a mass level, it becomes hysterical, not political. It expands to a large group of people not caring about conventions, just getting into the thrill of being themselves. That experience is about the audience, not us. All we do is provide the soundtrack.”

  Roth decides it’s time to join the party in the outer room, but first he has a final comment to share about the audience: “When people ask how far I think I’ve come in this racket, I always say twelve feet—from the audience to the stage. And when this is all over—because you know how it goes in this business—I’m going back into that audience, and back to the streets.”

  One could pass that off as just another bit of bravado on Roth’s part, but the statement says something vital and valid about Van Halen’s appeal. Like som
e other rock writers I know, I used to entertain the fantasy that the heroism of punk would eclipse, even negate, the mindlessness of heavy metal.

  But heavy metal, quite plainly, has remained the music of choice for most of America’s young rock partisans, and Van Halen is a salient case in point why: They provide their audience with a heady, spectacular respite from the daily, drudging rhythms of common futility. That, plus an invitation to the party.

  In the end, maybe that’s no different—no better, no worse—than an offer of shelter from the storm.

  PART 4

  dreams and wars

  bruce springsteen’s america

  On the night of November 5, 1980, Bruce Springsteen stood onstage in Tempe, Arizona, and began a fierce fight for the meaning of America. The previous day, the nation had turned a fateful corner: With a stunning majority, Ronald Reagan—who had campaigned to end the progressive dream in America—was elected president of the United States. It was hardly an unexpected victory. In the aftermath of Vietnam, Watergate, the hostage crisis in Iran, and an ongoing economic recession, America had developed serious doubts about its purpose and its future, and to many observers, Reagan seemed an inspiring and easy response to those hardships. But when all was said and done, the election felt stunning and brutal, a harbinger for the years of mean-spiritedness to come.

  The singer was up late the night before, watching the election returns, and stayed in his hotel room the whole day, brooding over whether he should make a comment on the turn of events. Finally, onstage that night at Arizona State University, Springsteen stood silently for a moment, fingering his guitar nervously, and then told his audience: “I don’t know what you guys think about what happened last night, but I think it was pretty frightening.” Then he vaulted into an enraged version of his most defiant song, “Badlands.”

  On that occasion, “Badlands” stood for everything it had always stood for—a refusal to accept life’s meanest fates or most painful limitations—but it also became something more: a warning about the spitefulness that was about to visit our land, as the social and political horizon turned dark and frightening. “I want to spit in the face of these badlands,” Springsteen sang with an unprecedented fury on that night, and it was perhaps in that instant that he reconceived his role in rock & roll.