Everybody Wants Some (16 page)

With Roth unmarried and still single-minded about the band, the others bridled under his constant supervision. Eddie complained of not being allowed to write longer “hypnotic” songs like Led Zeppelin, because Roth vetoed anything he couldn’t dance to.

Van Halen had seriously neglected Britain and Europe since 1980, to the point that lesser marvels like Mötley Crüe, Def Leppard, and Bon Jovi were stealing their thunder across the Atlantic. To European hard rock fans the most recognized Roth wasn’t Dave, but Ulrich Roth of Scorpions. Making a quick trip but getting the most from it, Van Halen signed on for the August 1984 Monsters of Rock concert before sixty-five thousand people at Castle Donington. Sharing the bill were Ozzy Osbourne, Gary Moore, Y&T, Accept, AC/DC, and Mötley Crüe.

No American band had ever headlined the venerable British metal event, including Van Halen who were in the unenviable spot of playing before AC/DC, whose crowds were loyal and grueling. They performed during the daylight, without the help of their vaunted lighting arsenal. Asked by the
Whistle Test
TV show how Van Halen felt going on before AC/DC, Alex joked, “We’re taller.”

The interviewers asked AC/DC what they thought of the Yanks. “They’re more of a pop band than what we are,” guitarist Angus Young answered. “We’re more of a rock and roll band.” After that assessment, nobody should have been surprised that when the gruff blokes in AC/DC lined up for an afternoon photo session, prima donna David Lee Roth suddenly appeared a few feet away with a boom box and began performing warm-up acrobatics. Roth could not contain his bravado. “There’s liable to be a sense of competition at Castle Donington,” he said with a grin. “It will be of the manner of who plays Edward’s solo the best.”

After camping in the mud for days, the notoriously unruly British festival crowd demanded constant entertainment. When overly bored or excited they hurled dirt clods and beer bottles filled with piss at the stage. With menacing black trash fires smoldering on the horizon and security struggling to keep overzealous fans off the stage, Van Halen responded by speeding up the tempo, overwhelming the Brits with an unusually kinetic display of power. Roth deftly high-stepped around thrown fruit, bottles, and rolls of toilet paper, and Michael Anthony killed on a striped Rickenbacker bass. Van Halen had something to prove to this country, and they delivered.

In the backstage corral, Hollywood homeboys Mötley Crüe made a big impression of their own kind. The new kings of the Sunset Strip were literally rising up to bite Van Halen. According to their bandleader Nikki Sixx, he was so drunk and coked up that as soon as he saw “squinty-eyed” Eddie Van Halen, he bared his teeth, lifted Eddie’s shirt, and bit him on the stomach as a sign of affection.

“What’s wrong with you?” Sixx gleefully recalled Valerie Bertinelli chastising him in the Mötley Crüe memoir
The Dirt
. “Biting my husband? You fucking freak!” Her yells only alerted the rest of Mötley Crüe to the feeding frenzy, according to Sixx—the band’s singer promptly ran across the room and chomped into Eddie’s hand.

Afterward, Roth seemed to be really beginning to view himself as Napoleon and all other bands the vanquished armies of Europe. “Mötley Crüe—I see them and I want to laugh,” he told
Faces
. “All that rage—over what? A band like that is a quick fix.” He belittled AC/DC’s “pound, pound, get down, I’m gonna fuck your brains out victimization style.”

Off camera, however, the band was fraying. Even generally easygoing bassist Michael Anthony was completely turning off to Roth, whose glittering star seemed to him like a faraway planet. He dreaded sharing the stage each night with someone he felt was a stranger. “I always thought, this guy’s putting on a show for me now, too?”

Roth started traveling on his own tour bus, absorbing himself in magazines and books when not entertaining guests. He admitted his world was completely different than the Van Halens’. “There was always tension between me and Edward,” he rationalized. “But there’s always tension with me and everyone!”

Not helping matters, Eddie later admitted he was doing “a lot of blow” and drinking heavily to cope with the constant pressures of his popularity. He had more money than he knew what to do with, and a good buzz was his just reward for the headaches he had to deal with.

Though Roth was not a candidate to win an award from Nancy Reagan, he had a healthy distrust of hard drugs. “Never did heroin, never took pills, downers, or speed,” he told
Rolling Stone
. “They kill your creativity and your spirit. Anyway, what’s worse than drink and cocaine together is greed. Greed breeds egoism and sloth.”

Reflecting on the hazards of his trade, Alex admitted to
Modern
Drummer
that he suffered 15 to 20 percent hearing loss in both ears, which explained why he seemed standoffish to people meeting him for the first time. Seated nightly between walls of loudspeakers that would make airport baggage handlers cry for mercy, he explained how he often felt “noise drunk” mingling backstage after a show: “You don’t hear any more highs, and you kind of feel alienated when you finish playing.”

Turning a corner in his life, Alex was already onto his second marriage. His first trip with marital bliss had lasted only two months, and ended in ugly circumstances that brought tears to Eddie’s eyes for a year afterward. This time Alex was more careful, and more serious—the newlywed Kelly Van Halen was a fresh-faced model from Canada who had worked on the legendary
SCTV
sketch comedy show.

The
1984
tour ended on September 2, 1984, in Nuremberg, Germany, former capital of the Holy Roman Empire and site of the war trials in the late 1940s that put a giant period on the end of the advance of the Nazi military machine. As if history was hammering home omens of disaster, the gig took place on a former zeppelin field from the era of the
Hindenburg
. When Van Halen left the stage that night, they returned home with vastly different plans, unaware that they might never play together again.

“We were in the middle of this thing, and it was getting bigger and bigger,” Alex told
The Inside
. “Individually, we were so far apart that it was like night and day. We were never together, although it looked like we were from the public’s standpoint. That’s why in 1984 it was very natural for it to fall apart. We saw it coming, even though when it actually materialized it was a surprise. It was a complex deal. When you’re in the middle of it, you don’t have time to question or analyze anything—you simply go for it.”

The year 1984 seemed to sustain forever for Van Halen. The band had racked up a career total of more than twelve million albums in domestic sales, half of them during that calendar year. The arrival of the compact disc ensured that a good percentage of those albums would be repurchased in the coming years in the digital format. Then 1985 came calling like a hard, cold slap.

The band members had smelled one another’s stage sweat, bad breath, and dirty socks for over ten years. When Eddie turned thirty in January, the angry young men were officially no longer young—just angry. “Van Halen has four personalities,” David Lee Roth told MTV, “and they seem to be getting more different.”

To the delight of fans and the chagrin of his band, Roth revealed plans to record a solo album. The announcement made the rest of Van Halen very nervous—though they desperately needed a break from their extroverted singer for a while, they let him run off to do his own thing with a great deal of skepticism about what was happening within the band.

Michael Anthony fell over himself laughing when he heard Roth was planning to release a cover of the Beach Boys’ “California Girls.” But that was exactly the idea, to make America giggle.

“I think it’s something he’s always wanted to do,” Eddie told
Guitar World
. “Put it this way—it’s something I’ve always wanted to do, and haven’t done. I guess, in a funny way, it explains Dave as a vocalist and lyricist.”

Appearing at MTV’s New Year’s Eve show with new bodyguards—a pair of female bodybuilders—Dave rang in the New Year with the video for “California Girls,” the first video from his solo EP,
Crazy from
the Heat
. Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin had just stepped out in a similar way with the R&B-themed Honeydrippers
Volume One
EP. Likewise, British soul singer Robert Palmer had recently teamed with members of Duran Duran in Power Station. There was a feeling in the air that the most substantial rock singers could check in and check out of MTV video projects without marring their lifelong reputations.

“I think it’s the perfect time for me to do this,” Roth told
Creem
. “I mean it feels right. You know, use my hand darling, I won’t look.”

In the vein of “Ice Cream Man” and “Happy Trails,” Roth recorded four other covers for the first record under his name, all a bit unusual: the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Coconut Grove,” Louis Prima’s Tin Pan Alley medley of “Just a Gigolo”/ “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” and the jazz standard “Easy Street.” His arsenal of sidemen on the record was impressive—Beach Boy Carl Wilson sang backups on “California Girls,” and towering white-haired saxophonist/organist Edgar Winter of “Franken-stein” fame hammered keyboards.

The material certainly didn’t clash with Van Halen—in fact, they had rejected “Just a Gigolo” for
1984
. All the songs were at least twenty years old, hailing from a bygone era—“Gigolo” was a hit in 1929. Roth also went out of his way to make sure producer Ted Templeman didn’t put guitars in the mix, afraid of confusing the fans. The EP was fun adult music about sex and love, still captivating to a teen audience in the hands of this winsome new interpreter.

Some of these lines, Roth had been delivering to the bedroom mirror since he was in elementary school, and they harkened to something much older. “Al Jolson is the classic showbiz model,” he explained to
Penthouse
. “The white gloves—drop to one knee—the Knickerbocker break—the flatspin—smile! No dead space. I can’t stand dead space onstage. I’ve got a surgically implanted disco beat. My show has to be 130 beats a minute or better.”

The record was assembled in a month and recorded in five days at the Power Station in New York. Roth walked to the studio every day, taking in the action of the city streets. Equally important was the production of the music videos. “Just a Gigolo” lampooned the living history of MTV to date. Roth cavorted through an imaginary backstage video world, shoving Billy Idol into his electric sci-fi stage props and sending Boy George into a schoolgirl tizzy. He was beating video satirist Weird Al Yankovic at his own game and pre-dating the smart-aleck
Pee-Wee’s Playhouse
. He was mocking MTV even as he became its greatest product. “I wrote and directed those videos,” he said. “Those are Bur-lesque. Those are Vaudeville. I learned it from watching shows back in the ’60s, and from going to the Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris in the 1970s.”

Roth was David Letterman’s first guest of 1985, and while the two self-deprecating Hoosiers sparred comically, Roth denied he would soon leave Van Halen. “I’ve got strong tribal instincts, and we’ll be going to the studio sometime in the next month to start arguing again.” He claimed Van Halen would release a new album in 1985, and he gagged about why Van Halen had never done anything like
Crazy from
the Heat
. When in doubt, blame the drummer: “In Van Halen we kept trying to have a concept, but Alex kept forgetting the concept.”

Van Halen were rehearsing for their next album, trying out tracks “Summer Nights,” “Get Up,” and “Eat Thy Neighbor.” They toyed with the idea of releasing a live album, a chance to showcase unreleased material. Yet progress was tough. Roth was becoming increasingly unavailable, constantly off doing interviews about
Crazy from the Heat
. After three months, they were making little progress.

The uncertainty started to spread into other important areas. The band let go manager Noel Monk, who had wrangled them since early 1978, encouraging their crazy stunts and leaving no whim unsatisfied, considering no request too irrational. They couldn’t agree on renewal terms for his contract, and suddenly he was gone. “Noel Monk was Dave’s goddamn puppet,” Eddie griped to 
Guitar World
. That didn’t stop Monk from suing Roth in L.A. County Superior Court the following year.

The spring of 1985 found Roth frequently stalling for time, partially because he felt uncomfortable proceeding without a manager. He also wanted Van Halen to postpone the next album and work as his backing band on a movie. The others were just pissed off. Rehearsals became unproductive, as Roth complained that the new songs were too sad and melancholy. He claimed Eddie had already broken the band covenant, putting soundtrack projects and outside guest spots ahead of Van Halen’s seventh album.

In March, Roth claimed the Van Halen brothers presented him with a future career path based on minimal touring. “Well guys, it’s been nice knowing you,” Roth told the crew in the parking lot after a lethal spat. He left the studio and never came back.

Then in April 1985, Van Halen claimed they gave Roth an ultima-tum, feeling that his solo career had brought progress on the new album to a standstill. Roth seemed preoccupied with turning 
Crazy from the
 
Heat
into a cinematic star vehicle; it was a zany adventure film along the lines of the Beatles’ 
A Hard Day’s Night
, the Osmonds’ 
Goin’ 
Coconuts
, and 
Some Like It Hot
. Dave was finally on the verge of becoming Errol Flynn, Johnny Weismuller, Bugs Bunny, and Marilyn Monroe.

But Van Halen were not interested in being his backing band, or his backup plan. Eddie’s report on his last conversation with the singer involved driving over for a sitdown at the Pasadena mansion Roth had bought from his parents and shared with his sister Lisa—the same building where Van Halen had practiced for years. “Maybe when I’m done with my movie, we can get back together,” Eddie recalled Roth saying.

“I ain’t waiting on your ass!” Eddie snapped. “So long, and good luck.”