Everybody Wants Some (11 page)

The next afternoon, Roth met Neil for lunch. He arrived in a dark Mercedes-Benz with a skull and crossbones painted on the hood, then proceeded to brain-dump on the young singer the lessons of seven hard years. “Don’t go with a small distribution company,” Roth urged. “You have to have your records in Tahiti. If they aren’t in Tahiti, they aren’t anywhere else.” Neil promptly ignored the advice, and says he soon learned Roth was right.

Not every fellow traveler in Hollywood was a superstar in waiting, however. Somehow Van Halen were charmed, gliding straight across the fly-infested molasses of exploitation. The sticky sidewalks of the Sunset Strip had a dangerous way of dissolving dreams like industrial solvent, and the also-rans became the stuff of Hollywood’s darker legends.

While seducing Southern California one bikini at a time, Van Halen were tempered by the mood of the Me Generation: if it felt good, they did it. But in the hands of lesser mortals, sometimes “anything goes” went to a dark place. Depravity tainted the decadence of the Hollywood rock clubs. Using drugs as bait, real predators hunted underage foxes, young girls with fake IDs and a willingness to try new things. David Lee Roth recalled sixty-year-old Bill Gazzari using rudimentary videotape equipment in the mid-1970s to videotape himself getting blow jobs from the teenyboppers who worked at his club.

The Sunset Strip was filled with the flotsam and jetsam of the star machine, and the cautionary stories of runaways and junkies could be chilling. In 1982 the Starwood Club, where Van Halen had been discovered, burned down under mysterious circumstances. The previous year, Starwood owner Eddie Nash had made headlines—not for his support of the local music scene, but for his involvement with an infamous quadruple homicide in Laurel Canyon known as the Wonderland Murders. Drug-addicted porn star John Holmes went to jail for refusing to testify to his involvement in the crimes; Nash was also imprisoned.

Even outside the seedy gravity of Hollywood, criminals sought out Van Halen’s families. Posing as a patient, a man named Danny Angel Vega entered Dr. Nathan Roth’s office and kidnapped Dave’s father at gunpoint. Seizing a chance, Dr. Roth clocked the interloper and ran, and the man was captured. Vega spent the time in jail grousing about his imaginary injuries at the hands of the Roth family. In early 1987, he escaped and was killed hours later after pointing a .357 Magnum pistol at police. “He died under a Toyota,” Dave said.

The situation was not a joke. Several year later, for example, basketball star Michael Jordan’s father was robbed and shot to death on a North Carolina interstate, his body dumped in a swamp and his NBA championship rings taken. After the incident with his own father, Dave bought himself a gun, security against the increasing dangers of mounting fame. “You buy the land, you get the Indians,” he said resignedly.

Paranoia mounted as the band members became aware that their gilded lives could be easily threatened—hurdling the pitfalls became part of what made excessive partying so much fun. To protect his fort, Roth hung a sign outside his house in Pasadena, his deadly sense of humor intact: “Attention: There’s nothing here worth dying for.”

Van Halen had good musical genes, and they were photogenic. Now the tide of history seemed to be turning in their favor. MTV wanted fashion plates, and most of the heavy hitters of the 1970s were slobs. Like stage actors adapting to the dawn of motion pictures, Van Halen redeployed their formidable stage charisma for the small box.

As early as 1982, MTV singled out talkative, witty David Lee Roth as the focal point of Van Halen. While the others were understandably less than thrilled about being relegated to sideman status, Roth made himself readily available. “We really don’t train for this kind of thing,” he explained to Martha Quinn. “I like sports, but I’m no good at any of them. I don’t have the discipline for it. I was raised on a steady diet of radio and television, so I need a commercial every ten minutes in my life. I’ve never really kept after any one thing. Most of the moves that I do onstage are taken from television or from comic books.”

Touring at maximum velocity, traveling through the dense jungles of the South Pacific, and witnessing the rampant weddings of the men of his musical tribe only seemed to make Roth more fearless. He threw himself into designing merchandise, plotting videos, and masterminding the nonmusical aspects of the band. “If there’s any kind of image here, it’s a nonimage,” he said. “We control all our press and media. We aren’t controlled by a fat cat manager. We’re actually doing what we want, and acting how we want. That’s the integrity of Van Halen—if there’s any to be found.”

Though MTV was heavily pushing British new wave and new romantic bands like the Eurythmics, the Police, and Duran Duran, the channel also adored Van Halen’s flashy, campy video clips. Prior to the 
Diver Down
 album in 1982, the band nodded to MTV by filming “the most lavish home movie ever made” at a Malibu movie set for their update of Roy Orbison’s “(Oh) Pretty Woman.” The video had the magic touch, with a storyline scooped out of little kids’ minds in the middle of the night when they’re dreaming in their bedrooms. Basically, when two midgets are spotted abusing a damsel in distress, Van Halen come to the rescue—Michael Anthony in samurai armor on horseback, Alex in a loincloth with a bone necklace, and Eddie done up as Billy the Kid. Roth poked fun at his own egomania, dressing as a campy Napoleon Bonaparte, the quintessential costume of a megalomaniac nut.

Incredibly, programmers in Japan were offended by the samurai likeness, and Australia thought the woman in distress was a blow against women’s rights—even though the supposedly pretty woman is unwigged at the climax and revealed to be a transvestite. After a few dozen showings, deluged by irate cards and letters, MTV pulled the video from rotation, another notch on the band’s outlaw record.

Van Halen’s funny, charismatic screen presence terrified the 1970s rock generation, visually moribund with their beards and beer bellies. The band had nearly owned the live arena, and now it totally took over television. They weren’t really competing with rock and roll bands anymore, but with video games and all thirty-two channels of cable television. “I’m sorry, I’m stoned—hey, why do you think I’m wearing sunglasses?” Roth said with a laugh during a televised interview, and the audience laughed along with him. He brought the party culture nationwide, just as Dean Martin had once made an older generation chuckle knowingly at his ever-present cocktail tumbler.

While the band sought a break from one another in early 1982, Warner Bros. released the toss-off cover of “(Oh) Pretty Woman” as a single. Unexpectedly, the song strutted up the Top 40 catwalk to number 12 on the singles chart. Van Halen rushed to Amigo Studios to make 
Diver Down
, the first album recorded outside the hallowed rooms of Sunset Sound Recorders. Warner Bros. owned Amigo, so they could make it available on short notice, and it was cheaper for them, only costing about $46,000.

Diver Down
 was created one song at a time over twelve days, collecting little pop vignettes instead of presenting an overarching statement like 
Fair Warning
. The cover was equally simple, a deep-sea semaphore flag marking where divers are swimming beneath the waves—an invitation to go more than skin deep with the band, signaling all kinds of activity under the pleasant surface.

Included in the song list were a slew of covers. Besides Orbison’s “(Oh) Pretty Woman,” another Kinks number appeared, “Where Have All the Good Times Gone?” The band had learned it during the cover band days along with “You Really Got Me” and a few others after Dave bought a K-Tel collection of Kinks songs for research purposes.

The band pointed toward Roth and Ted Templeman to explain why so many other people’s songs were on 
Diver Down
. Originally done by Martha and the Vandellas, “Dancing in the Street” was one of Roth’s musical inspirations as a boy listening to the radio. The keyboard line, played on a Minimoog, was something Eddie had first written for “(Oh) Pretty Woman.” Though Alex defended the choice—“It’s not so much the song as the way you play it”—his gut feeling was that the song was not right for Van Halen.

“They’re rather like send-ups, which is why there are words missing and choruses missing,” Roth told 
Creem
. True—somehow the most watched guitarist in the United States, Eddie Van Halen, allowed “(Oh) Pretty Woman” on the street without a guitar solo, an oversight that bothered him afterward.

Among the originals was a revamped version of “Last Night” from the 1977 demo session with Templeman. Musically, the song was virtually unchanged in five years. It had never made the cut before due to its lame dialogue, with Roth endlessly nagging a girlfriend, “Where were you last night?” Rewritten with epic western horse rustler lyrics, “Hang ’Em High” befittingly became a legend.

“Secrets” was a more recent leftover from the 
Fair Warning
 sessions, and it featured all the layered melodies and rhythmic motion of that hallmark album. Roth reportedly wrote the words using taglines from postcards and greeting cards he found at a truck stop in New Mexico. On this song, Eddie expanded the “brown sound” with a growing arsenal of guitars. Among them was a heavy double-necked Gibson, the polar opposite of the light wood models Eddie favored. “No wonder Jimmy Page has a slouch!” he joked to 
Guitar World
.

Diver Down
 abandoned a long-standing Van Halen production quirk. On the first four albums, Eddie’s guitar was hard-panned to one side, to create a realistic impression that he was playing live on one side of a stage. Eddie hated that. He reckoned that half the kids driving around in Ford Pintos only had one speaker connected, so there was a fifty-fifty chance they were missing almost all of his playing. On the other hand, plenty of junior Eddies were turning the balance control to the max and jamming in their bedrooms with the other three-fourths of the band—the same trick he had used to learn Cream songs.

“Intruder,” the drum, synth, and guitar-noise intro to “(Oh) Pretty Woman,” picked up where “Sunday Afternoon in the Park” left off: a paranoid electronic soundscape for a generation just getting hooked on Space Invaders, Gorf, and Defender. According to Roth, he wrote it on an Electro-Harmonix membrane synthesizer in about an hour as a filler preamble for “(Oh) Pretty Woman,” because the video ran three minutes longer than the song.

Outside a hotel in Memphis on the 
Fair Warning
 tour, a fan named David Petschulat gave Eddie a one-third-scale miniature replica of a Les Paul. Spotting a good stage gag, Eddie wrote “Little Guitars,” and its Spanish feel inspired Roth to write a love song to a señorita. “Little Guitars” was one of Eddie’s self-professed finest moments. Along with “Cathedral,” it was a rare example of his needing ten takes to get a perfect performance.

Usually, what came down on record was exactly what Eddie played live in the studio. The process was not meticulous, though—before Eddie ripped into “Little Guitars (Intro),” Templeman asked if he wanted to “do the electric thing first?” Eddie was prepared for a virtuoso performance of any kind, but was still incredibly hard on himself. “I’m fucking nervous,” he squeaked before completing “Little Guitars” with a stellar take.

Only slightly beneath the surface, “Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now)” allowed Roth to ride Edward’s marriage, singing about Big Bad Bill’s conversion from wild child to pussy-whipped husband, doing the dishes and mopping the kitchen floor. The song, a hit from 1924 by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen, also featured guest Jan Van Halen playing clarinet. Probably the only recording of Mr. Van Halen as a soloist, the playful woodwind lines are a brief glance into the whimsical hand that guided two of the modern era’s best-known musicians. Mr. Van Halen hadn’t even played clarinet in ten years, after losing one of his fingers in an accident. The band sat in a circle with sheet music during the session, and Eddie remembered his father being extremely nervous. “My dad would get tears in his eyes every time he saw us play. He loved it. He lived through us because he never really made it.”

The TV sugar rush came with “Happy Trails,” a sing-along from 
The
 
Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Show
 in the early 1960s. “If you laugh, don’t worry,” Roth instructed the others when the tape started rolling. “If you hit a flat note don’t worry—as long as there’s exuberance.” The lighthearted breather was one of dozens of songs—including the Mounds and Almond Joy candy bar commercials—the band could sing in four-part harmony, and “Happy Trails” became a heralded and beloved show-closer.

Diver Down
’s back cover showed a photograph of the band leaping to greet 150,000 fans while opening for the Rolling Stones in Orlando, Florida, one week before Halloween 1981. The triumphant performance was one that nearly didn’t happen—Alex had broken his hand in four places, and affixed a drumstick to his arm with tape and shoelaces so the show could go on.

Diver Down
 was like soft colorful Lycra compared to the leather gloves of 
Fair Warning
, but held together with the same robust stitching. The few overdubs were done mostly for quiet sounds like Dave’s harmonica. The whole episode was barely over thirty minutes long, slightly longer than a TV sitcom—the band pleaded with the press to accept their argument that higher audio fidelity demanded wider grooves and a shorter playing time. Eddie claimed they had even dropped two old club days originals recorded for the album, “Big Trouble” and “House of Pain.”

The way the producer and the singer ran roughshod over this rush job did not sit well with the musical members. “What Eddie and I do is we argue,” Roth told 
Creem
. “We come from different backgrounds, musically, philosophically, socially, our hobbies. I have trouble understanding, more times than not, why he does what he does. There are meeting grounds, of course. But on the musical end, there is no meeting ground. We’re arguing. Somehow we reach a compromise. No one is ever happy except the public.”

Though 
Diver Down
 lacked the impact of the first four albums, MTV and the fun song selection successfully goosed record sales. It inched slightly higher up the charts than its four older siblings, peaking at number 3 during a lengthy sixty-five-week run in 
Billboard
. “Dancing in the Street” joined “(Oh) Pretty Woman” in the American Top 40. Though the record rang in platinum status after just ten weeks, for at least ten years it remained Eddie’s least favorite Van Halen album.