Everybody Wants Some (24 page)

On the live front, Roth still flimflammed and bamboozled the crowd with a characteristic mile-a-minute pitch. His inflatable microphone grew a few feet longer and sprouted a shiny saddle so Roth could ride it around the stage like a bucking bronco. The band’s drum set was now positioned delicately above the garter line between a pair of forty-foot drop-dead inflatable legs, while fishnet stockings big enough to catch a white whale dipped tantalizingly into giant cherry red pumps on either side of the amplifiers.

After fifteen years under the bright lights, Roth’s routine was showing wear and tear. His extensive 1991 co-headlining tour with Cinderella played to arenas that were half full on average. Unlike five years earlier when he took Poison on the road, now a glam metal support act was just dead weight. The tour moved westward, and after a few nights pulling 16 percent capacity in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and 24 percent in Bonner, Kansas, the remainder of the shows were called off.

The album cracked the
Billboard
Top 20 and mustered a gold award. But the loss of the 1980s seemed to be hitting Roth harder than Van Halen. Ten years earlier, after his first six platinum albums, he had spoken of a Roman centurion whose job was to stand next to Julius Caesar to whisper, “All glory is fleeting.” Now he needed to hear that message.

There was one sure way back upstairs—jumping back into Van Halen. Roth sounded wistful for the camaraderie of his former band, perhaps hopeful for a return. “If we could get it on track here, we could make history,” he said. “Barring any act of death or Ferrari, who knows what will happen?”

Roth appeared on Howard Stern’s radio show in July 1992, offering his pitch to be reinstated in Van Halen. Perhaps sensing some weakness behind the band’s protests of continued happiness, he unleashed his cruelest torrent of anti-Sammy abuse yet. “Sammy is a mindless little bridge troll. Everything that comes out of his mouth is word barf. It’s the lowest common denominator. It’s music for children. Jimi Hendrix never made music for children. The fourteen-year-olds may have loved it, but the Beatles never made music for twelve-year-olds.”

Roth claimed that Ed Leffler, who he called “Sammy’s manager,” was blocking all communication, even calling Dave to shout at him that nobody got through to the band unless without his say-so. “The first time Edward graduated Betty Ford I tried to call, and then the second time I tried to call, and then the third time I tried again,” Roth claimed.

He also denied that he left Van Halen to pursue a movie career. “The reason I left Van Halen was they were completely stoned all the time,” he told Stern. “How do you make music with someone who is completely stoned or copping a buzz on a regular basis?”

When Eddie heard the news, he scoffed at Roth’s claims of unanswered phone calls. He wanted no part of any reconciliation. “I’ve had the same phone number since 1980—there haven’t been any messages. For anybody to think he’s coming back is just ridiculous! It was a divorce—and who wants to relive that?”

Van Halen’s song remained the same. “Roth is really more of a comedian,” Alex told
The Inside
. “Basically, he jumped around a lot. Roth went sideways as fame affected him. He thought he was bigger than life and that he was the shit. Watching it happen was actually very sad. You’re very connected with the people you play with, and you’ve got to remain centered. He forgot to remember that.”

Behind the scenes, Roth was carefully reassessing his situation, first by putting three thousand miles between himself and the endless sili-cone and spray-on tans of Southern California. He moved to New York City, where he had first tasted culture and counterculture under the arm of his nightclub owner uncle Manny. “I’m somebody who sees art, color, pathos, and passion in just about everything,” he said. “I’m surrounded by that in New York. Everywhere you go it’s a conglomeration.”

For a brief time, he maintained a low profile, rock-climbing incognito up the Hudson River in New Paltz, New York. He also managed a treach-erous six-week wintertime ascent on a 22,000-foot Himalayan mountain range that made his day job seem almost dangerously unimportant. He prepared for the climb for a year and a half, yet he slipped several times, lucky to live to tell the tale. Afterward, not only did Roth no longer sweat the small stuff, he seemed not to be bothered by his musical career at all. “When I’m gone, I take the Stanley Kubrick approach, and I’m truly gone,” he promised. “I can’t compose under a microscope.”

Roth’s star may have been waning, but as they say in showbiz, he could still get arrested. Fending for himself, he was busted in April 1993 while buying a five-dollar bag of pot in Washington Square Park, sections of which were then an open-air drug market in New York City. Two dozen others were caught in the sweep with him, mostly college students from New York University dorms that ring the park. 

The news came as a shock, mainly because the public assumed a former singer of Van Halen would have a much better pot connection. Gossip columns suspected a ploy for attention. “The fine was $35,” Roth countered. “In New York, the fine for letting your dog crap on the sidewalk is $100. If I wanted publicity, I’d have crapped on the sidewalk.”

In 1991, Kramer Guitars declared bankruptcy after losing a royalty lawsuit brought by Floyd Rose. Anticipating the collapse, Eddie gave birth to another baby when after twenty-one prototypes, his new partner Ernie Ball Music Man unveiled the new EVH Music Man signature guitar. Compared to his slapdash Frankenstrats, this was a more refined instrument suiting Eddie’s regal position. Production was limited to little more than a thousand per year, with each one handcrafted to consistently high quality.

The new gear featured two completely different pickups and a bass-wood body with a hard, resonant maple top. The design combined elements of the Fender Telecaster and the Gibson Les Paul, and aimed for sustain and tone quality over fuzzy brown distortion. This axe was clearly the weapon of an older warrior, a far cry from the slipshod kamikaze hand-built model Eddie now derided as a “piece of shit.” “When I first started out, to me the most important thing was how fast you could play and what a technician you could be,” he told
Guitar
. “It’s all changed. My priorities have changed . . . I think I’m much more conscious of the overall end result as opposed to just being me.”

The elite new guitar helped temper Eddie’s manic outbursts. On
F.U.C.K
., the band had tuned to conventional E notes, whereas in the past he either tuned a quarter step down or let the tuning stay wherever the guitar found itself. Eddie—who inspired a generation of players to tear out their neck pickups in favor of the attack of the bridge pickup—played most of the album with the mellower front pickup of his Music Man. “The main thing I look for is a sweet, warm sound that isn’t like someone chuckin’ razor blades at you,” he explained.

Along with a new guitar sponsorship came a new amplifier—the Peavey 5150 line. He spooked the engineers during the design process with his “magical” ears and touch. “When Eddie came to us, he sent us his Marshall and his Soldano and other things and told us what he wanted,” Peavey product manager Tony Pasko told WolfgangGuitars.com. “A lot of his amps had something wrong with them and they were always broken as he was always tweaking them, changing transistors, adding juice gooses or what have you. And to us they sounded crappy. Then Eddie would visit and he would play through them and it was like, wow that sounds pretty good. And the point was—it was just Eddie.”

Unlike Eddie’s new genteel guitar, the 5150 amp was a step in a dirtier direction. It offered six gain stages in its circuitry, twice what a 1970s Marshall amp would carry, and while gain stages alone did not make the amp, these were awash in rich, tonal distortion. While a young, aggressive player could be forgiven for not even knowing the expensive EVH Music Man guitar existed, within ten years the 5150 amp would become standard at heavy rock, hardcore punk, and extreme metal shows.

Eddie branched out as a musician around this time, experimenting with different playing styles as well as technical innovations. His circle of jam pals was expanding too, beyond Steve Lukather, with whom Eddie had performed a set of Hendrix and Cream covers earlier that year in a group called Phuxnot. Collaborating with a former new wave rival, Eddie also played rhythm guitar on Thomas Dolby’s 1992 outing
Astronauts & Heretics
. To promote his new signature guitar, Eddie appeared at the NAMM music retail convention jamming in a booth with future Deep Purple guitarist Steve Morse and British country guitarist Albert Lee—two disciplined heavy hitters who kept the free-floating Eddie in check.

Eddie shared the stage with George Harrison and David Crosby on December 14, 1992, for a performance of “A Little Help from My Friends,” at a benefit concert for the family of late Toto drummer Jeff Porcaro. Eddie the wunderkind was now officially rock aristocracy, nearly fifteen years after winning his first player of the year award. He spread his vitality around, plugging in with supporting act Alice in Chains during their hit “Man in a Box”—surprising guitarist Jerry Cantrell, who thought a soundman had messed up and put a delay on his guitar.

Hoping to shake loose some fresh insight from the band,
Guitar
assigned Sammy to interview Eddie for the magazine. While the pair was installed in the lobby of the Bel Air Hotel, rehashing their love of Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton, comedian Al Franken strolled past. Sammy egged him to asked the world’s greatest guitarist a question, so Franken asked which finger Eddie would choose to lose if forced to slice one off. “Probably the pinkie on my right hand,” Eddie replied, a rare disarming moment.

Though Eddie admitted he hadn’t bought a new record since Peter Gabriel’s
So
in 1986, he couldn’t help but see that a new era had arrived in full force by 1992. Metallica, U2, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Guns N’ Roses all registered Top 20
Billboard
albums for the year. The numbers didn’t lie—the introduction of Soundscan meant that record sales were now counted at the cash register by actual units, not by the previous system of cronyism that had kept many dinosaurs on life support. Alternative, country, heavy metal, and R&B albums shot to the top, while music industry pet projects like 1991 chart toppers Wilson Phillips and Michael Bolton were walloped.

Van Halen’s hand remained strong. Metallica had benefited from joining them on the 1988 Monsters of Rock tour. The Red Hot Chili Peppers were like Van Halen through a funhouse mirror—cocky lords of Hollywood with a flamboyant lead singer, a virtuoso bass guitarist, and a colorful wardrobe straight out of David Lee Roth’s fantasies. Most of the new breed of hard rock bands still took major cues from young Van Halen’s music, visual style, and reckless approach.

In September 1992, Van Halen cleaned up at the MTV Video Music Awards, as “Right Now” brought home top honors for editing and direction, as well as Video of the Year. Surely some forces of history were grumbling, as Nirvana’s phenomenal “Smells Like Teen Spirit” clip was passed over. Funnily enough, Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain reported that the first-ever rock concert he attended, in 1983, had been to see Sammy Hagar and Quarterflash—and he had worn an oversized concert T-shirt for a week.

Van Halen still represented the American dream, but the dream was in crisis. Rock bands were no longer expected to smile. Politically, the mood was edgy, as a recessionary economy and signs of war in the Middle East left music fans wanting something more than tits-and-ass lyrics. Not to say that Van Halen didn’t reach their share of intelligentsia. After Eddie commented modestly on MTV in 1992 that playing guitar the way he did wasn’t as hard as brain surgery, neurosurgeon Jim Schu-macher from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston got in touch to offer one day of brain surgery training in exchange for guitar lessons.

Van Halen had thus far skated through the storm, but the question remained how the band would adapt to the new realities—whether they would notice and react, go by way of the dinosaur, or simply continue to hover untouchable in their own perpetual success. They often dismissed grunge and rap as updated versions of the punk and disco they had blown past on their initial rise to glory. Yet their true direction in the 1990s remained murky. “A lot of times we reminisce about the clubs we used to play,” Mike said, suggesting a desire to go back to basics. “Those were the good days. It’s kinda neat playing in a little room.”

According to David Lee Roth, Alex Van Halen had always blocked live recordings because Led Zeppelin had never done a live record, just a lackluster soundtrack to their concert film. Now in February 1993, one of the greatest live acts in rock and roll released its first live album,
Right Here, Right Now
. “It’s kind of like a greatest hits, but it’s not,” Alex explained. “It’s kind of like a live album, but it is,” Sammy joked. The first official answer to hundreds of bootleg releases captured a typical Sammy-era live set in its prime. Included among two dozen tracks running over two hours were four Roth-era songs, the individual solo spots, plus a crowd-pleasing cover of the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” with Eddie playing the keyboard part on guitar.

Spurred by the radio broadcast they produced for Westwood One, Van Halen started work on the live album by themselves. After a month, however, Alex and Eddie reached “terminal mixing capacity.” They lured Andy Johns back to 5150 one last time to mix and make sense of miles of disorganized tape from remote truck recordings. He reached back as far as the 1986 and 1988 tours for good performances of a handful of songs. Once assembled, the live album peaked at number 5, and went double platinum by September. One of the families whose disaster-stricken home was pictured on the cover threatened legal action but quickly settled out of court.

Michael Anthony’s wish to play clubs was granted when the band booked a March 3 gig at a familiar venue—the Whisky a Go Go in West Hollywood. The show was touted as a fifteenth anniversary gig, dating to their signing with Warner Bros. Van Halen had played dozens of dates there in 1976 and 1977, the final year of their stint as a club band. Now prior to launching its 1993
Right Here, Right Now
tour, the band put up 250 tickets at $20 each. More than three thousand fans waited for a spot, and when the ticket sales location was announced, a massive footrace began down Sunset Boulevard, stopping traffic and drawing six dozen policemen to the scene. Tickets sold out in fifteen minutes, and the band filmed the mob scene for its live video for “Dreams” from
Right Here, Right Now
.