Everybody Wants Some (8 page)

Released thirteen months after the first album on March 23, 1979,
Van Halen II
went gold the following month, and platinum the month after that. It peaked at number 6 on the strength of “Beautiful Girls” and the Top 20 success of “Dance the Night Away.”

The record kicked off with Clint Ballard Jr.’s “You’re No Good,” also the lead track on a number 1 1974 album by California soft rocker Linda Ronstadt. Now the boys of noise were repurposing her broken heart for their own needs. Stepping lightly with a volume-swell guitar intro, the track kicked in like a comeuppance to all the feel-good mellow fellows of the West Coast music establishment.

Alex identified “Light Up the Sky” as the band’s true musical direction at the time, or at least his personal preference—a swerving metallic number with a tender underbelly, stop-start rhythms, and a flashy guitar solo. He dismissed “You’re No Good” as “somebody else’s idea of a hit single”—presumably Templeman, who remained a record company man at heart, always looking to deliver chart action from the bands he produced.

Eddie’s guitar ran thick through the mix, deftly spinning pirouettes around the thrust of the songs. He still declined to double his rhythm tracks. To thicken his “brown” guitar sound, he preferred to turn up the volume, overdrive the circuits, and let the amplifiers crackle with natural warmth. The beautiful bell-like intro to “Women in Love” would stand as one of his proudest moments.

For “Spanish Fly,” another of Eddie’s high points, he played on an ordinary Ovation nylon-string guitar. An acoustic flamenco-style answer to the electricity of “Eruption,” the one-minute solo still relied self-referentially on tapping. While guitarists were still reeling from his finger-tapping innovations on the first album, now Eddie was admon-ishing his acolytes with tapped harmonics, opening another vocabulary for lead guitar.

The band returned to the demo sessions for the first album, bringing back club-pleasers like “Somebody Get Me a Doctor,” “D.O.A.,” and the Deep Purple–influenced “Bottoms Up!” with its blasting backup vocals. Likewise, “Outta Love Again” was one of the oldest Van Halen songs, dating to before Mike had joined the band. “Beautiful Girls” had also appeared on the Templeman demos under the name “Bring On the Girls”—the album version made the band’s horny teenage approach to courtship a little nicer.

More than on the first album, producer Templeman’s mellow Doobie Brothers chops shone through. Yet according to Roth, “When
Van
Halen II
was recorded and ready to go, everybody at Warners thought it was a failure.” Van Halen were succeeding underneath the radar of their own corporate masters.

From March to October 1979, Van Halen embarked on their first headlining tour, suitably dubbed the “World Vacation.” No longer only along for the ride, they were doing heavy lifting—thirty-six tons of gear were required to get the show on the road. Streamlining their operation, they did lose a little luggage by firing Marshall Berle and promoting Noel Monk to band manager as a reward for his success as road manager.

The band now dressed in striped overload—thin stripes, thick stripes, vertical stripes, and horizontal stripes. “We know that people come to see bands that look and act special,” Roth said, “and that’s why we dress in some outrageous costumes and put on a visual show, live right in front of your naked steaming eyeballs. We’ve got the tightest pants in the business.”

He was right—to kids who switched off the tube ten seconds before heading to a Van Halen concert, the band looked like
Charlie’s Angels
—two shag brunettes and a feathered blonde with a short, squat Bosley on bass guitar. The Van Halen generation was raised on
The Partridge
Family
, where every family had a rock band in their garage. Now Van Halen were trying to put on a pop spectacle that could compete with
The
Six Million Dollar Man
and
Love, American Style
. They blessed their crowds with the gracious bounty of everything rock and roll and a little technology could offer, then hoped the fans would provide the rest.

The tour started with a roar, and the second week the band played before 106,000 at the California World Music fest, joining heavyweights Aerosmith, Toto, UFO, Cheap Trick, and Ted Nugent—bands that Van Halen would have stood in line to see just a year earlier. That night, Van Halen and three hundred close friends arrived in a convoy of sixteen limousines. David Lee Roth presided over the backstage, joined by a chimpanzee dressed like him and two little persons hired as bodyguards.

The band concocted an elaborate stunt for the show, at the expense of Aerosmith. On a grassy incline behind the stage, visible to the crowd, a $100 yellow Volkswagen was parked throughout the day. Periodically, someone at the soundboard would make an announcement asking for “someone in the Aerosmith organization to please move their car.” Van Halen had arranged for a Sherman tank to roll out onto the field before their set and crush the “Aerosmith” car, but apparently word leaked to Aerosmith and the caper was curtailed before any military hardware could be deployed. The party still stormed well into the next day, leaving many casualties, including Dave—he fainted onstage in Spokane, Washington, five days afterward. He later blamed a stomach virus.

Their quest for carnage was soon satisfied in July at the Illinois State Armory in Springfield. According to the
State Journal-Register
, the band destroyed a limousine there and started a fire that caused $2,000 worth of damage. They were stopped overnight for a police investigation, forcing a cancellation of the Cincinnati show the next night.

Tour mishaps became growing experiences as the band struggled to keep up with its success. Backstage sex movies, drug abuse, and clashing egos came with the territory—though the Van Halen brothers remained close, often sharing hotel rooms. “When we started out, the emphasis was on sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” Alex told
Guitar Player
. “Forget the drug part, we’ll drink ourselves to death. You do your tour—two hours onstage—and then get the hell out of there so you can get laid!”

The band took rock hedonism to new levels. When they found something that made them laugh—like a sex shop in Cleveland overloaded with inflatable love dolls—they shared it with the audience, hanging a full harem of lingerie-laden air hoochies from the lighting rafters. The fans got laid, the band got laid, and their crew and business associates got laid. Even the journalists sent out to cover the band got laid. “What happens after our show isn’t that different than [what] happens on a lot of tours,” Dave explained. “It’s just that we’re the ones who will let you take a picture.”

A Van Halen concert was a constantly shimmying rock variety show packed with as many highlights as imaginable. When you went to see the Who, you had to wait a while to see Pete Townshend’s windmills. At a Led Zeppelin show, Jimmy Page didn’t break out the violin bow for his guitar until the second hour. But with Van Halen, the money shots started the moment Roth made his stage entrance with the bang of the lights and flying aerial splits off the drum riser.

The impact of Van Halen’s early streaks across the United States was tremendous and far-reaching. Kirk Hammett of Metallica saw them play in Oakland in 1978. Henry Rollins—then still Henry Garfield—and his pal Ian MacKaye, the future leader of Minor Threat and Fugazi, watched Van Halen open for Ted Nugent and were amazed. And not only the young minds were impressed. Leslie West of Mountain, a band Van Halen had covered, was deep into drug problems, and claimed he had all but abandoned playing guitar until witnessing Eddie Van Halen opening for Journey in 1978.

Also apparently fallen under the spell of Eddie was guitarist Rick Derringer, who began copying Eddie’s guitar solo while opening shows for Van Halen on the tour. He crossed the line when he began ending his sets with a certain Kinks cover. “After the show, we’re sitting in the bar,” Eddie told
Guitar Player
’s Jas Obrecht. “I said ‘Hey Rick, I grew up on your ass. How can you do this? I don’t care if you use the technique—don’t play my melody.’ And he’s going, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ The next night he does my solo again, and he ends the set with ‘You Really Got Me,’ which is exactly what we do. So I kicked him off.”

Not everyone appreciated the hot-dog approach to making music. Seasoned rock fans saw all the glitz and powder as a distraction, a sug-ary substitute for the integrity found in rock songwriters like Bruce Springsteen or Patti Smith. “There is a lot of wizardry and technique at work here,” Roth defended himself during a TV interview. “We just don’t bang on it and bang on it to show you how artistic we are. But hey, we’re from California!”

A measure of respect arrived when Eddie was voted guitarist of the year in
Guitar Player
in 1979. By now, there were legitimate guitar manufacturers betting their entire business on single-pickup models based on Eddie’s homemade Strat. The band celebrated with friends by going out for pizza and beer. Unlike Roth, Eddie was not the type of person to put himself on a pedestal. The world would be glad to do that for him.
Billboard
’s year-end chart for 1979 placed both Van Halen albums in the Top 40.

For the third album,
Women and Children First
, the band ran on momentum, even spinning its wheels a little. If
Van Halen
was an approaching comet, and
II
was the heat of that approach, then
Women
and Children First
was a kind of afterglow—a chance for everyone to gather their wits and take stock of everything that had happened.

The instrumental tracks were recorded in four days and the vocals added afterward in six days. Inside of a week later, they had a finished record. “I don’t think we’ll ever be confused with Fleetwood Mac or Steely Dan, who spend jillions of dollars and years in the studio just to make one record,” Roth guffawed in
Hit Parader
. “How boring can you get, man? I like to think that all we’re really trying to do is capture some of our youthful enthusiasm.”

Missing some of the overall energy of the first two records,
Women
and Children First
showed signs of road fatigue. However, the record benefited from three great tracks on side one: the slow-motion power anthem “And the Cradle Will Rock,” the explosive “Everybody Wants Some,” and the frisky “Romeo Delight,” which became the band’s new show opener. Notably, for the first time there were no cover songs.

The powerhouse opener, “And the Cradle Will Rock,” featured the band’s first use of keyboards, an old Wurlitzer disguised by bristling distortion that came from playing it through a Marshall guitar amp. No longer allowed the endless club dates that had honed their past material and defined the songwriting process, Eddie and Alex played the main riff to the song together in Dr. Roth’s basement two hours a day for two weeks to fuse the feeling in all the right places.

“Everybody Wants Some” was a hymn to horniness, with Roth launching off-the-cuff into some trash talk directed toward a woman visiting the studio control room. The song’s subtext was the band blowing off steam about a syndrome they were experiencing of former friends, rivals, and complete strangers hitting them up for handouts. Onlookers saw the silver outfits and limousines and started thinking about what they could get from Van Halen. While the band had recently played L.A. Forum, for example, some scheming stoners had broken into Jan and Eugenia Van Halen’s house and stolen two dozen framed platinum albums, thinking the awards were cast from precious actual platinum.

Still dipping into the fertile songwriting well of their formative  years, “Fools” was a thumping track that had been with Van Halen since before Michael Anthony. A basic blues bomp, the song had character, but it was easy to see why it had been passed over on the first two albums. A better early track resurfacing was “Take Your Whiskey Home,” which the band had already recorded as early as 1974—one of the first songs Michael Anthony learned.

Moving beyond his former heroes Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, Eddie now championed the playing of jazz-fusion virtuoso Allan Holdsworth, whose slapping technique was predicated on funk. Eddie had maxed out on speed and flashy technique, and was trying to push his playing in more subtle ways. “I ain’t no extrovert,” he said. “I’m a quiet person. That’s probably why I do all these weird things on guitar.”

“Tora! Tora!”—which Eddie had wanted to call “Act Like It Hurts”—began with backwards guitar before lurching into a Sabbathy dirge that introduced the spastic “Loss of Control.” Though Eddie had written the music the same day as “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love,” Roth’s lyrics were still incomplete, so he improvised a helicopter pilot transmission at the start of the song. MTV was more than a year away from launching in the States, but the band produced a strange concept video for “Loss of Control” in Europe with Roth vamping onstage in a hospital gown and white gloves, groping and grinding with a pretty young nurse. The rest of the band wore green surgical scrubs, and Alex had X-ray films taped all across his drums.

Templeman suggested that Eddie use a guitar slide for “Could This Be Magic?” creating the old-timey bottleneck sound that made this original song sound like a traditional sea shanty. David Lee Roth, whose parking-lot fingerpicking skills remained unsung, joined on second guitar. This neo-skiffle treat also featured harmony vocals by former Linda Ronstadt session vocalist Nicolette Larson. She was repaying a favor, as at the end of 1978 Eddie had stealthily recorded a guitar solo for her hit
Nicolette
album against Roth’s wishes.

The album ended with an untitled twenty-second muscular vamp that the band referred to sometimes as “Tank” or “Growth.” If the band was not rushed to finish the album, the mystery riff would probably have been developed into a full song. Instead the idea was to let the riff fade out, then start the next album by fading it back into a full song—a plot that was never hatched.

The guitar pictured on the album cover was the Ibanez Destroyer lent to Eddie by local Pasadena guitarist Chris Holmes, later of W.A.S.P., made from highly desirable and resonant korina wood. Not by coincidence, the guitar was a great stunt double for the instrument Eddie used to record most of
Van Halen
—which he had inadvertently wrecked by sawing halfway apart. Holmes had bought the Destroyer in the first place to emulate Eddie. “When I got it back,” Holmes told
The
Inside
, “the bridge was turned around backwards and all that intonation. It was just backwards to the way I would have had it. I just don’t see how he played it that way, but he did. I’ve been to a few Van Halen shows and I put on Ed’s guitar and it’s just the complete opposite of the way I set up mine. He’d have the strings about a mile off the fret board. He likes his whammy bar so loose that he Super Glues the nut on the back so it spins around.”