Everybody Wants Some (14 page)

“You should have seen what we did
1984
on,” Eddie said, “a $6,000 piece of shit console that came out of United Western, an old green World War II thing with big old knobs and tubes. Donn rewired it to make it work.”

Building 5150 gave Eddie a cocoon of his own making. He claimed he didn’t even have a cassette player or a turntable in his house. He also professed to listening to more challenging music like jazz and punk for inspiration—even as David Lee Roth was heading the opposite direction, immersing himself in pop radio. “I think the only true rocker of the bunch is Al,” Eddie told
Musician
. “He’s the only one who listens to AC/DC and all that kind of stuff. Dave will walk in with a disco tape and I’ll walk in with my progressive tapes and Mike walks in with his Disneyland stuff.”

Dubbed an “$8.98 nirvana” by Roth,
1984
recombined the band’s splintered interests. The seventy-second synthesizer landscape “1984” introduced the new era, an edit of a much longer electronic piece recorded at 5150 with Donn Landee. Along with whatever scraps of magnetic tape survived from “Sunday Afternoon in the Park” and “Invader” on the past two albums, Eddie was creating a sizable synth backlog in his library.

Ted Templeman and Roth planned to do Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour” on
1984
, but ditched it after Eddie finally put up a vehement protest. “I’d rather fail with my own shit than succeed with someone else’s,” became the guitarist’s new mantra.

Instead, the very first sessions at 5150 produced “Jump,” a song that in raw form had already been rejected for
Diver Down
for one simple reason—Eddie played keyboards instead of guitar. “Eddie wrote this thing in synthesizer,” Templeman told
Billboard
. “I really hadn’t heard it for a long time, then he laid it down one night in the studio. It just killed me. It was perfect.”

“We had intentionally stayed away from keyboards until then,” Roth told
Classic Rock
, “because what instruments you used indicated which neighborhood you were part of. At the time it seemed important.”

After all his years of lessons, Eddie’s predilection for piano was nothing new. Even after catching hell at school for touching the precious Steinway, he often wrote songs on piano, then transcribed them for guitar. Such were the origins of “Hear About It Later” from
Fair Warning
and “And the Cradle Will Rock” from
Women and Children First
. But keyboards represented a rival musical style and society, and Van Halen were expected to lead the hard rock charge with guitars using as little circuitry as possible.

Eddie was either oblivious or headstrong. To him, the song sounded good. “Nothing can replace the guitar in my life,” he told
Hit Parader
. “But I also love keyboards. I’ve always written a lot of our material on keyboards, it’s just that in the past I’d reinterpret it on guitar. On this album I didn’t do that. This only expands our sound.”

Loyal hard rockers were horrified to see Eddie playing an electronic synthesizer for the first time in the video for “Jump.” For the keyboard line, Eddie used an Oberheim OB-Xa, switching to a similar but newer Oberheim OB-8 in concert. Though he could have used sequenced or taped keyboards onstage, he played them live, with Michael Anthony taking over during Eddie’s guitar solo. A whole new portion of the public loved the move: Recorded by the band in one take, according to Eddie, “Jump” became Van Halen’s first number 1 hit single, topping the charts for five weeks.

Roth dedicated “Jump” to Benny Urquidez, the kickboxer who trained him three hours a day for months before the 1984 tour, even coaching him through an amateur fight. “Jump” was as good a philosophy as any, and Roth started using a lot of jump metaphors when talking about success, fame, and fortune: “I can teach you to jump up in five seconds—it takes years to learn how to land properly.”

“Panama” was the singer’s sexy ode to his 1951 Mercury lowrider, allegedly composed while he was lounging in the backseat being driven around Los Angeles. Through the car Roth met model Patricia “Apol-lonia” Kotero, a
Lowrider
cover girl and ex–L.A. Rams cheerleader. Her run with Roth was peachy—at least until she was ordered to break up with him by Prince while starring in his concept film
Purple Rain
.

While the band was laying down “Panama", the benefits of building 5150 were already paying dividends. Eddie recorded the revving engine sound effects by backing a Lamborghini up the driveway and pushing the blinking red button on his studio tape machine.

The video for “Panama” showed Dave swimming over the stage on a wire with a boom box on his shoulder, inner-city B-boy style. Eddie sat at the piano blowing smoke rings. Roth showed off the moves he’d picked up in strip clubs, doing a pole routine with himself in triplicate.

The clip also debuted a new trademark for Michael Anthony—a bass guitar shaped like a Jack Daniel’s whiskey bottle, constructed from spare parts and some extra Kramer tuning pegs. Along with bass tech Kevin Dugan and pal Dave Jellison, Mike pieced the instrument together as an unofficial tribute to Van Halen’s drink of choice—though Dugan had to be coaxed by Anthony to drink it. Michael later decided to build a high-quality version with the help of GMW Guitars in Glendora, California. The Jack Daniel’s company offered to assist with the graphics in exchange for Mike’s entry into their hall of fame; thus he became a Ten-nessee Squire. The whiskey-bottle bass became an icon, completely upstaging the giant orange-dotted popsicle-shaped “Davesicle” guitar that Roth used to play “Ice Cream Man” for several years.

For “Top Jimmy,” Eddie showcased a Steve Ripley stereo guitar, one of fewer than ten made, which featured separate right-left panning for each string and a pair of built-in vibrato effects. It was a musical instrument with the technical abilities of a small aircraft. Based on “Top Jimmy” Koncek, a real-life character from Roth’s nightlife, the song allowed Eddie to combine sweet harmonics with ridiculously fast rapid-fire blues licks in the vein of his former signature, “Goin’ Home.”

Alex credited the album’s production squarely to Eddie and Donn Landee, even discounting his own participation. Eddie’s home studio was truly their private Disneyland—the brothers and Landee recorded “Drop Dead Legs” during a late-night session and presented it to Roth, Anthony, and Templeman the following afternoon. Working this way, they could have released
1984
as a double album. But Templeman ordered Eddie to stop writing new material—there were already hundreds of half-finished songs on cassettes littering 5150.

Overall, Ted Templeman was pushed to the periphery during the recording of
1984
. The fights continued between him and Eddie, but now Templeman had to go home at night. Eddie was always on the clock. Among other deleted detours, Eddie finger-tapped a bass part to the explosive intro for “Hot for Teacher,” a bubbling-over bottom-end bass track to set off the hyperactive drums and guitar. The option was scrapped because the band could never pull off a performance like that live. Michael Anthony was the band’s anchor, not about to take off for the stars.

Opening with a monstrous fireworks display of Alex’s double-bass drum technique, “Hot for Teacher” also showed Roth’s off-the-cuff working method as a lyricist. A scratch track recorded live with the band showed that until the eleventh hour, he still hadn’t settled on the words. “I missed so many classes, now my story can be told,” he improvised. “Heard you missed me, baby, well, I’m
black
—I’m gonna sit right over here so I can concentrate.”

“I was just improvising,” Roth said. “Ted went, ‘What do you have planned, Dave? You singing or what?’ I said, ‘No, in this one, we’re all pretending to be in the classroom.’ ”

“A lot of the stuff is Dave’s interpretation of life at that given moment,” Eddie told
Guitar World
, admitting he often wasn’t sure what Van Halen’s lyrics meant.

The singer drew his lines from a mental word processor, editing and refining like a jailbird in solitary confinement composing his memoirs in his head. “I’ve never written down any lyrics, I usually just make it up in the studio,” he admitted, stressing that the inflection was usually more important than the words.

While Van Halen were still bridling against formulaic song struc-tures, the unusually sentimental “I’ll Wait” was a pseudo-ballad about Roth’s ideal woman—who at that moment happened to be a Calvin Klein underwear model taped to the screen of his hotel television. Though Roth and the others did not want another synth-laden track on the same album as “Jump,” Eddie and Donn Landee were again adamant. Proving their point, “I’ll Wait” propelled to number 13 on the
Billboard
singles charts.

Unlike
Diver Down
, which featured several one-take solos, all of the guitar solos on
1984
were overdubbed carefully, recorded during dis-crete sessions apart from the rest of the music. By now Eddie’s solo bursts were attractions in themselves, dissected and critiqued by the cottage industry of fans, magazines, and aspirants created by his influence. Not that he was overthinking things—Eddie wrote “Girl Gone Bad” in a hotel room one night while Valerie was sleeping. So he wouldn’t disturb her, he tiptoed into a closet and hummed the riff into his portable recorder for safekeeping.

Dipping into the old well that had served the band so reliably, Alex pushed for the return of “House of Pain.” The club-days standard appeared on the Gene Simmons demo and elsewhere, resurfacing on
1984
with new lyrics and a more fluid arrangement—still, a typical bashed-out Van Halen album closer.

The album cover of
1984
featured a painting of a jaded baby New Year leaning on one elbow and smoking a cigarette. Dave claimed he handpicked the lettering font from the French graphic comic
Moebius
. The smoking cherub on the cover seemed like a quick-thinking blas-phemy based on Black Sabbath’s smoking, gambling angels from 1980’s
Heaven and Hell
.

With three Top 20 singles and four videos in heavy rotation, Van Halen discovered pop crossover in spades. Released in January and peaking at number 2,
1984
was quadruple platinum by October. It would eventually become the band’s second album with Dave to top ten million in sales. This was the record where Roth earned the right to compare Van Halen to his frequent point of reference, McDonald’s hamburgers. “Van Halen music ranks right up there with football and religion as something that will uplift you,” he preached. Indeed, millions had been served.

Eddie called
1984
the first Van Halen record done the way he wanted. Sweeter still, Van Halen had ascended largely through its own efforts, producing appealing music videos and recording their own music in Eddie’s backyard. The choppy waters of
Diver Down
were a memory. “The failure of our last record really wasn’t our fault,” Roth told
Hit Parader
. “If you want to find out why the album didn’t do as well as it should, go ask our record company. There were a lot of people there at the time who were far more concerned with getting their daily allotment of cocaine than with promoting our album.”

MTV now reached over twenty-five million homes and had become a big wheel in the engine of the ever-spinning Van Halen promotional machine. Eddie and Dave even made a cameo appearance in the video for Frank Sinatra’s “L.A. Is My Lady,” from the singer’s final studio album of the 1980s. While riding in a limo, Dave popped a videotape of vintage Sinatra clips into the backseat player, saying, “I got something new—it’s the latest, it’s the greatest, a little bit of Frank!”

Thanks to
1984
’s successful slew of music videos, in September 1984 the band scored at the first-ever MTV Video Music Awards. Now that the rock video form was important enough to warrant its own awards show, the band-directed clip for “Jump” took home honors for Best Group Video, Best Stage Performance in a Video, and Best Overall Performance in a Video. At the after-party a bouncer urged, “Watch your step” as Dave dipped under the velvet rope. “I always do,” Roth replied.

Roth described the process of directing videos as an accidental art form—like watching television with the sound down and Black Sabbath or Wagner playing in the background. They claimed to have spent $600 and used one 16mm camera on “Jump”—as venerated progressive rockers Yes were embarrassed to learn when they requested a referral to whatever high-paid director had captured Van Halen’s charm so intimately.

Roth still trashed Duran Duran and other MTV-favored synthesizer bands in
Billboard
, calling their music “a lot of icing.” He told
Faces
, “It’s no big sweat going up on that stage when you really can sing, or play an instrument. But if you don’t have it, then it becomes tough . . . these new bands put in no effort at all. We used to think rock stars . . . were too coked out. But I don’t think Duran Duran does coke, they’re just all—milked out.”

On top of the world, Roth was taking on all comers. In a
Creem
interview he wondered what kind of man writes songs about cars instead women, provoking a brief flare-up with solo singer Sammy Hagar, who called Roth a homosexual looking for a “relationship” with him and said Roth looked like a “woman in drag.” Not above being dragged into a press war with a lesser luminary, Roth barked back through
Creem
, “Sammy definitely has a social problem—I think it’s based on lack of education. And evidently he hasn’t seen Van Halen lately or he wouldn’t talk like he does.”

Van Halen guessed the
1984
tour cost them around $100,000 a week to keep on the road—
Entertainment Tonight
claimed $500,000. The band used A and B stages, so that at the same time they were performing in Oklahoma City, the crew could already be erecting the framework for the following night’s show in Wichita. The grand spectacle was a giant metal framework of lights for the band to frolic beneath, which unfolded little by little throughout the set, ultimately revealing a blinding array of lights in a “1984” pattern, turning every night into New Year’s Eve.