Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Praise
Dedication
Introduction
PART I - RUNNIN’ WITH THE DEVIL
Chapter 1 - THE IMMIGRANT SONG
Chapter 2 - RATS IN THE CELLAR
Chapter 3 - HOTEL CALIFORNIA
Chapter 4 - BAT OUT OF HELL
Chapter 5 - BACK IN THE SADDLE
Chapter 6 - GIRLS ON FILM
Chapter 7 - JUKEBOX HEROES
Chapter 8 - KINGS OF ROCK
Chapter 9 - ROAD TO NOWHERE
PART II - TOP OF THE WORLD
Chapter 10 - IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT (AND I FEEL FINE)
Chapter 11 - ROLL WITH IT
Chapter 12 - NOTHING’S SHOCKING
Chapter 13 - LOVELESS
Chapter 14 - MELON COLLIE AND THE INFINITE SADNESS
Chapter 15 - ILL COMMUNICATION
PART III - WHERE HAVE ALL THE GOOD TIMES GONE?
Chapter 16 - NO WAY OUT
Chapter 17 - DEAD LEAVES AND THE DIRTY GROUND
Chapter 18 - GET THE PARTY STARTED
Chapter 19 - A GRAND DON’T COME FOR FREE
Chapter 20 - ALL THE RIGHT REASONS
Encore
Second Encore
Second Encore
BONUS TRACK A
BONUS TRACK B
BONUS TRACK C
BONUS TRACK D
BONUS TRACK E
BONUS TRACK F
LOOK AT ALL THE PEOPLE HERE TONIGHT!
INDEX
I still think that, whatever people say, you’ve got to read the book.
—Edward Van Halen on how to do things right
For Eugenia Van Halen, Sibyl Roth, Gladys Hagar,
Carol Sobolewski, Josephine Cherone,
and Valerie Bertinelli
And especially Carole Ann Bailey Christe,
1946-2006
INTRODUCTION
LEARNING TO PLAY “ERUPTION”
I didn’t think it would be fair to write this book without learning how to play “Eruption,” getting a good idea of the mental and manual speed of Eddie Van Halen plus appreciating how much work and practice goes into playing, if not developing, his style. Basically, I wanted to write this epic story about Van Halen with at least a tourist’s understanding of life in the land of big rock.
Like a lot of people, the first time I heard the guitar solo as a kid it sounded blatantly unplayable. I thought it was some kind of special effect, like a Star Wars laser blast, or a hi-tech synthesizer, or some combination of tape editing and video-game noises. That misconception only grew stronger with each successive challenge over the years—if no guitar hero could do better than “Eruption,” then it was virtually untouchable. Anyone who could play even a little piece of it—they were obviously gifted beyond belief.
If Eddie Van Halen was the best guitarist ever, the next logical position to take was not to care. Since the minions throwing themselves on the sword of “Eruption” were mostly empty sounding, as a heavy metal punk teenager it made sense to me not to bother. “Eruption” became the calling card of a certain kind of douche bag who hangs around guitar stores waiting to be discovered, bullying younger players in the meantime.
But ten years passed and there was “Eruption,” still retaining its magic, a brief postcard from some endless freak-out by Van Halen back in 1978, sounding miraculously fast and furious. On a whim, I leafed through a book of Van Halen sheet music and looked over “Eruption.” That’s when I realized it was even possible to play. I knew I could play the notes fast enough, but I had no clue where to begin—it seemed like trying to shake hands with the Tasmanian Devil. Guitar tablature uses an arcane system of notation to indicate finger slides, trills, and bent strings—and “Eruption” pretty much uses every trick in the book.
I feel much better writing this book after learning that “Eruption” was a carefully composed collection of techniques, not an off-the-cuff improvisation. Sitting down at home with my Jackson on my knee, I worked through the song, amazed with each tiny portion that I could extract from the version on Van Halen. When I finally pieced it all together after a few days work, it took me about twelve minutes to Eddie’s 90-second journey from razor blues to neoclassical tapping to outer space.
The glowing finger-tapping section turned out to be one of the simplest parts, as it’s all played on one guitar string. Memorizing the rapid-fire chord progressions behind all those notes, I’m sorry to say, took much longer. My progress was only hindered when I discovered over a thousand videos on YouTube of young kids blazing through the supposedly insurmountable “Eruption”—it must be the second most popular genre of video, next to clips of people falling off skateboards and animals biting people’s crotches.
I finally got “Eruption” under control, however, and feels great. I’ve applied the skills and shortcuts to my own playing—unlike the brilliant Eddie, I should add, who was summarizing all the little things he did to make regular songs sound special. I want to say the reason nobody has ever attempted to write this book before is there was never a writer who could play “Eruption.” Or maybe they all died trying.
PART I
RUNNIN’ WITH THE DEVIL
THE ROTHOZOIC ERA, 1950-1985
May 8, 1953: Alexander Arthur van Halen born in Holland.
October 10, 1953: David Lee Roth born in Bloomington, Indiana.
June 20, 1954: Michael Anthony Sobolewski born in Chicago, Illinios.
January 26, 1955: Edward Lodwijk van Halen born in Holland.
Winter 1962: Jan van Halen emigrates with his family to California.
1967: Edward gets $100 Teisco Del Ray guitar from Sears.
1971: Alex and Eddie Van Halen form the Trojan Rubber Company.
Autumn 1973: David Lee Roth joins the Van Halen brothers in Mammoth.
Spring 1974: Mike Sobolewski joins Van Halen, becomes Michael Anthony.
May 1976: Gene Simmons “discovers” Van Halen at the Starwood, finances unsuccessful demo tape.
May 1977: Ted Templeman rediscovers Van Halen, signs band to Warner Bros.
February 10, 1978: Release of Van Halen; leading to tours with Journey, then Black Sabbath.
October 10, 1978: Van Halen goes platinum.
March 23, 1979: Release of Van Halen II; first headlining tour runs through October.
March 26, 1980: Release of Women and Children First.
August 29, 1980: Eddie Van Halen meets Valerie Bertinelli.
April 11, 1981: Eddie marries Valerie.
April 29, 1981: Release of Fair Warning.
April 14, 1982: Release of Diver Down.
May 29, 1983: Van Halen paid $1.5 million to play for four hundred thousand people at US Festival ’83.
January 4, 1984: Release of 1984, featuring band’s first number 1 single, “Jump.”
September 2, 1984: Final show by classic lineup in Nuremberg, Germany.
December 31, 1984: David Lee Roth releases Crazy from the Heat.
April 1985: David Lee Roth exits Van Halen.
1
THE IMMIGRANT SONG
Like the stories of other great Americans from Henry Ford to Walt Disney to Fievel the Mouse, the saga of Van Halen begins in an ancient land, far from the United States and its constant supply of hot water and electricity. As a narrator would say in the old movies: Among the windmills, tulips, and wooden shoes of lovely Amsterdam, Holland, there once lived a kindly musician named Jan van Halen.
Born in 1920, van Halen played saxophone and clarinet everywhere, from political events to radio orchestras to circus tents. During World War II, he was reportedly captured while fighting the Nazis, and forced to tour Germany as a prisoner playing propaganda music for the hated Third Reich. When he was released after the war, he traveled to Indonesia, where he met and fell in love with an Indonesian beauty, Eugenia van Beers. She was older, born in 1914, but they married and returned to Amsterdam, to Michelangelostraat, where a baby boy, Alexander Arthur van Halen, was born on May 8, 1953.
Mr. van Halen worked his horns in every venue imaginable, but a musician’s life was unsteady and nomadic. Shortly after the birth of second son Edward Lodwijk van Halen, on January 26, 1955, the young family moved to Rozemarijnstraat in Nijmegen, Holland. The proud father wanted his sons to someday become famous musicians, and he set the bar high for his second son—naming Edward Lodwijk after master composer Ludwig van Beethoven.
The van Halen house was alive with music. Always working on his tone, Jan played along with classical records at home, and the family always listened to his radio broadcasts together. When Jan joined the Dutch air force band, his little boys paraded through the house banging on pans and pot lids while their daddy practiced military marches. “The earliest memories I have about music are from our father,” Alex said. “You couldn’t help but be touched by music—we were surrounded by it.”
Since Jan didn’t have the patience to teach the boys about music, he sent them to lessons to become concert pianists. At six years old, Edward was already studying piano with a strict seventy-two-year-old Russian teacher. He and Alex remained in lessons, practicing Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, for nearly ten years. On one rare occasion when Alex didn’t feel like practicing, he recalled his mother placing his hands on the kitchen table and rapping them sharply with a wooden spoon.
When they were old enough, Alex and Edward joined their father at his gigs. Reaching his finest form, Jan joined the Ton Wijkamp Quintet, which took top prize at Holland’s esteemed Loosdrecht Jazz Festival in 1960. As they traveled all around Holland and sometimes across the border to Germany, the boys saw the practical aspects of a musical career firsthand, and on some of the more rustic and ribald nights they discovered the perks—Alex reported losing his virginity at age nine after one of his dad’s gigs.
Letters from Eugenia’s relatives told of a better life in the United States, and slowly lured the van Halens to try their luck in the land of opportunity. At the end of winter 1962, Jan and Eugenia gathered their two boys and the family’s Dutch-made Rippen piano and set sail on a nine-day Atlantic passage with little more than seventy-five Dutch guilders in their pockets. Jan played with the band aboard the ship to pay for the expedition. Eddie and Alex also showed off their piano training, passing the hat among passengers for tips. And so the musical urchins arrived in the New World, all seasoned and ready to work.
A familiar part of many immigrant stories, Jan’s first fateful move on reaching New York was to Americanize his surname, upgrading the antique “van Halen” to the slick “Van Halen,” symbolically starting over as a new man. After the stopover in New York, the newly minted Van Halen clan boarded a four-day train to California, in the corner of the country where the American dream was still available for no money down. They found a small bungalow in Pasadena where they would live together as a family for almost twenty years.
Bushy-headed Alex and little Dutch boy Edward arrived in California with the splinters from wooden clogs still in their feet. Speaking almost no English, they smiled and said yes to anything. The second English word they learned was “accident.” Edward remained extremely shy, and his bolder brother, Alex, protected him. The pair bonded tightly—comparing notes every day after school on what they’d learned on the playground. They began to blend in, riding bikes with neighbor kids, climbing into their tree house, and beating the hell out of each other.
Mr. Van Halen continued playing in wedding bands at night but kept several day jobs. He worked as a janitor, and when necessary walked five miles each way to wash dishes at Arcadia Methodist Hospital. He reinforced the boys’ enthusiasm for music, smiling as they played along with the radio on cardboard guitars, using empty ice-cream tubs for drums. California was living up to its promise of paradise—if only there were more kids in the family: “I always asked my mom where our bass player was,” Eddie said.
Around the holidays, the family played music together, with Eugenia seated at a huge electric organ. Yet Mrs. Van Halen was more traditional, and very concerned with taking care of the family. Though she pushed the boys to practice their music lessons, she hated the idea that they would eventually become musicians. Sometimes she was as much a mother to playful Jan as she was to her sons. “The whole time I was growing up,” Eddie told Guitar World, “my mom used to call me a ‘nothing nut—just like your father.’ When you grow up that way, it’s not conducive for self-esteem.”
When they reached the fourth and fifth grades, the Van Halen brothers began imitating acts from The Ed Sullivan Show like the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five, whose “Glad All Over” awoke Edward to a new kind of popular music. These were the first bands to break into the pop charts because schoolkids liked them—and Eddie and Alex were schoolkids who could already play music. So at Hamilton Elementary School they formed their first band, the Broken Combs, with Alex on saxophone like his father, Edward on piano, and various schoolmates including Brian Hill on drums, Kevin Hill on an Emenee-brand plastic guitar, and Don Ferris on second sax.
Playing original songs like “Rumpus” and “Boogie Booger” at hot venues like the school lunchroom, Alex and Eddie overcame their awkwardness adapting to American ways. Forget about fitting in—now they were somebody special. “Music was my way of getting around shyness,” Eddie later told Guitar World.
There were other ways to steel a timid heart. When Eddie was twelve years old, he was attacked and bitten by a German shepherd while on a family trip a few miles from home. To quell his younger son’s distress and numb the pain, his father prescribed a shot of vodka and a Pall Mall cigarette on the spot—inducting the kid into two lifetime habits.
By junior high school, the Van Halen brothers had both picked up the violin, and Alex was good enough to make the all-city orchestra. But the television tempted them with a wilder kind of music. Eddie remembered sitting on the couch, plucking out the cool detective theme to Peter Gunn on his violin strings. Classical music didn’t stand a chance—the boys wanted to play music standing up. Hoping to keep Alex’s musical progress on the level, his parents bought him a nylon-string guitar and sent him to flamenco lessons.
Meanwhile, Eddie started a paper route. “The only honest job I ever had,” he later joked. He bought a $125 St. George drum set and began studying songs by the Dave Clark Five.
Alex learned slowly on the guitar. He upgraded to a cheap electric and a Silvertone amp but remained frustrated by his progress. So while Eddie was out making collections for his newspapers, Alex slid behind the drums and started banging away, copying licks by Buddy Rich. Soon he mastered the primitive caveman rolls of “Wipe Out” by the Surfaris, a high mark of distinction in any school yard. Feeling somewhat frustrated at the unfair turn of events, Eddie picked up Alex’s guitar to show that turnabout was fair play. When he impressed his older brother by learning “Blues Theme” by the Arrows, the true natural order of things quickly became obvious.
By age twelve, Edward owned a $100 four-pickup Teisco Del Ray electric guitar from Sears and was tackling instrumentals like “Walk Don’t Run” by the Ventures. His first guitar amp was a chicken-wire model handmade by a friend of his dad’s. Eddie’s early guitar instructor in absentia was Eric Clapton, the heaviest player of the day, as Eddie figured out every riff and solo that Clapton recorded with the Yardbirds and Cream. He tried painfully to mimic the records but later admitted his versions never sounded quite right—his biggest fault was being unable to avoid his own style.
As they surrendered to the growing rock and roll scene, the Van Halens became infatuated with Jimmy Page in the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck from the Jeff Beck Group, and the unpredictable Jimi Hendrix. Surprisingly, considering the comparisons that came later, Eddie was not so into the wilder, free-form playing of Hendrix. “He used a lot of effects, and I couldn’t afford the wah wah pedals and fuzzbox,” he said.
Whenever Eddie broke the rules or neglected his piano, Eugenia Van Halen would lock his guitar in the closet for a week, the ultimate punishment. Friends at school also recalled Eddie getting in trouble for touching the sacred Steinway concert piano, the pride of the music department—but the penalties were light thanks to his aptitude and his impish grin. Remaining in lessons until age sixteen with a new, typically strict Lithuanian teacher named Staf Kalvitis, Eddie took top prize at Long Beach City College’s youth piano competitions for three years running. The first year, he missed accepting the prize onstage. Sitting in the stands when they called his name, he froze, pretending not to hear the announcement. He didn’t know how to accept an accolade.
Though his fingers were dazzling, Eddie could never read sheet music as well as he should have. Alex was an excellent sight reader, but Eddie’s performances were painstakingly crammed into his brain note by note, phrase by phrase, in advance. The judges at piano contests praised his unusual interpretations, but as far as he could tell he was playing it straight. “The only reason they ever wrote music down is because they didn’t have tape machines,” Eddie later complained. “Do you think Beethoven or Bach would ever have written things down if they had twenty-four-track tape machines?”
Since the Van Halen home was too small to host band practice, the brothers keyed into jamming with local kids whose houses had garages. They formed a band called Revolver, and progressed from the Ventures to heavier covers by Cream and Mountain—power trios centered around guitar and drums. “I approached the drums not as an instrument, per se,” Alex remembered, “but more as an attitude—viciously attacking something” with the biggest, heaviest drumsticks available.
At thirteen, Alex began subbing for the drummer in his dad’s wedding band, keeping time to jazz and salsa tunes driven by clarinet and accordion. Eddie frequently joined on bass, playing the oompah music lines. “One of Al and my first gigs together was with my dad at the La Merada Country Club,” Eddie recalled. “We’d be the little freak sideshow while the band took a break. I would play piano or guitar and Al would play drums.”
The first night on the floor, the boys passed a hat around to the dancing couples and collected twenty-two dollars. Their father gave each of them five dollars, and said: “Welcome to the music business, boys.”
David Lee Roth was born on October 10, 1953, in Bloomington, Indiana, where his achievement-oriented father, Nathan, went to medical school. After the senior Roth graduated, he moved his family several times, first to a small ranch in Newcastle, Indiana, where Dr. Roth became the caretaker of a menagerie of horses and swans. Next the parents took David and his two sisters, Allison and Lisa, to the East Coast, settling on East Alton Court in Brookline, Massachusetts, outside Boston.
David was an energetic kid, but he was plagued by allergies and fought with health problems that forced him to wear leg braces from almost the time he could walk until age four. Then he was shipped off to therapy for the better part of a decade. At nine years old, he began three intensive years of clinical treatment for hyperactivity. He had a few healthy outlets—Roth’s parents called his dinner-hour routines “Monkey Hour,” when he acted out cartoons and sang revved-up vaudeville songs for dinner guests.
Though his mother, Sibyl, taught high school music and language classes, Roth claimed his parents were nowhere near as tuneful as the Van Halen family. “I had no musical influences to speak of,” he told MTV. “My idols were always Genghis Khan, or Muhammad Ali, or Alexander the Great, or the guy who invented McDonald’s hamburgers.”
By his telling, he wasn’t suffering from lack of concentration. Everyone else was simply having trouble playing their part in his continuous mental picture show, a fast, animated flipbook of Mad magazine and Playboy. Dave was obsessed with Bugs Bunny, Tarzan, and blackface song-and-dance man Al Jolson, whose songs he played on old brittle clay 78s. Later, he loved Elvis Presley—but not the music, just the movies.
While Roth’s head was swimming in pop culture, his roots were knotted tightly around the Old World—his grandparents were Ukrainian Jews who traded the mountains and steppes of Eastern Europe for the sweltering cornfields of the Midwest. In fact, all four of his grandparents spoke Russian. “My great-granddaddy died dancing,” he later joked with a TV interviewer, “at the end of a rope.”
When Roth was seven, his movie-buff dad took him to see Some Like It Hot, the classic Billy Wilder film where Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon dress in drag to get close to Marilyn Monroe. “Life turned into an ongoing quest to be in that movie, just somewhere in that movie,” Roth told Rolling Stone. On the way home that night, while his eyes were still boggled, his dad detailed the plot to Robin Hood—the movie Mrs. Roth thought he was taking their son to see.
The rambunctious David found a kindred spirit in his uncle Manny Roth, a bohemian hepcat whose small Café Wha? on MacDougal Street was a nexus of New York’s Greenwich Village beatnik scene in the early 1960s. Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen, Bill Cosby, and Richard Pryor all tempered their antiestablishment acts there before a highly engaged cosmopolitan audience. “New York certainly reflects the dinner table I grew up with,” Roth later told an interviewer. “Obviously it encouraged me.”
Summer trips to New York impressed on young David Roth that, guidance counselors and behavior therapists be damned, there was a big wide world that craved and coveted extravagant personalities. Uncle Manny bought him a radio for his eighth birthday, hoping to feed the kid some inspiration. “I put it on, and there was Ray Charles singing ‘Crying Time,’ ” David said, “and I just knew I had to be on the radio.”
The Roths left the East Coast for California in 1963, when Dave was ten, just in time to fall under the spell of the Beach Boys in their prime—America’s only real defense against the Beatles. From his new home in Altadena, young Dave shuffled off with his tousled hair and tennis shoes to fourth grade at the Altadena School. Meanwhile, Dr. Roth’s ophthalmology practice thrived—he became a successful eye doctor, and was also active in local theater productions. Throughout junior high, Roth remembered a poster hanging over his bed given to him by his father, picturing two chickens meeting a turkey above the caption “To thine own self be true.”
After three years as a Tenderfoot Scout, Roth left behind his boyhood like the Van Halen brothers abandoning their tree house when he discovered his life’s future work. He once reported losing his virginity on a beach in Tahiti at age thirteen, under a full moon and over a girl who didn’t speak English. “She kept saying she liked me, she liked me. I know she meant she loved me—but ever since I’ve had a complex.” Tahiti came to be Roth’s catchall perfect setting for stories that may have only taken place in paradise. In his memoir, Crazy from the Heat, he reported another crucial moment in his early sex life—getting a blow job behind the bushes in the suburbs while looking through someone’s living room window and seeing Johnny Carson on the TV.
As Dr. Roth’s career bloomed, the family moved to the affluent section of Pasadena. When integrated busing arrived, Dave became a societal guinea pig, sent to predominantly black schools from sixth grade onward. He boasted of his ingrained blackness later, but at the time being a fair-haired white hippie meant lots of fights. He put gobs of Brylcreem in his hair, he liked to do headstands, and school became an all-day talent show. Teachers didn’t know what was wrong with him.
Despite his effusive personality, Dave was something of a loner, an overly intelligent rich kid with delusions of grandeur. He felt persecuted, and yet above it all. He had vulgar candy-sprinkled ideas of sexuality, a by-product of learning about the world through the twisted twin lenses of Mad and Playboy. Despite his father’s money, he was always a worker: at the end of his junior year at John Muir High School, Roth bought himself a stereo with the dollars he earned shoveling dung alongside Mexican gang members at a stable.
A bench-clearing brawl during a gym-class football game led to a brief stint at boarding school. More rules only brought more resistance, so after one semester in uniform David rejoined the teen scene at public school, his wild streak intact. “I never went to class, but I went to school,” he said. “I used to sit under a tree in the parking lot playing guitar.” He attracted girls and cultivated a rep for his unusual old-time repertoire and generally gleeful demeanor. While fighting a constant cultural war at home with his attentive parents, he carefully pushed his public image to the brink—his short-lived trademark was a bleached skunklike strip down the center of his hair.
A native midwesterner like Roth, Michael Anthony Sobolewski was born on June 20, 1954, at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Chicago. His family lived in a working-class section of what was then the breadbasket of blue-collar America. Michael was the second of five children, and the oldest boy. His dad, Walter, played in polka combos, gigging often at the Aragon Ballroom with musical prankster Kay Kyser, the popular bandleader who wrote “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.” Walter encouraged Michael to play the trumpet too.
The Sobolewski family heeded the same clarion call that lured the Van Halens and the Roths westward, first testing the waters during a short move in 1963. In 1966, they left Chicago for good, settling in Arcadia, California, a town five miles east of Pasadena, where Jan Van Halen worked as a hospital dishwasher. Walt Sobolewski continued playing at dances, performing standards for other midwestern transplants and old-timers.
Michael became a long jumper at Dana Junior High. He played trumpet in the marching band, and stayed active in sports, going out for baseball. After his older sister, Nancy, brought home psychedelic acid-rock bands like Electric Flag, Cream, and Blue Cheer, Michael’s attention wandered to the loud, animal side of music. He learned the walking bass line to Electric Flag’s “Groovin’ Is Easy” and admired the band’s bassist, Harvey Brooks. Straying from the conformity of the high school band, he idolized bassist Dickie Peterson of Blue Cheer—an iconoclastic hippie whose tough attitude was basically one giant middle finger to the world.
At fifteen, with younger brother Steve on drums and friend Mike Hershey on guitar, Mike formed Poverty’s Children, later known as Balls. His bass was a cheap Japanese Teisco guitar belonging to Hershey—they removed the two highest strings to create a “bass” guitar. Though he played catcher on local baseball teams as a left-hander, he considered himself ambidextrous—in fact, he started playing bass as a lefty, and switched sides because a right-handed instrument was easier to find.
Since Michael wasn’t sure how to tune a bass, he tuned the four strings to an open E chord for the first year. He soon acquired a Fender P-bass copy at a local flea market. Like Alex Van Halen, Michael also played with his father’s band, a polka combo, tooting a trumpet for pocket money up until college.
By their midteens, Alex and Eddie were regularly performing live sets of covers by Black Sabbath and ZZ Top, while joining their dad for his regular gig at the North Continental Club in North Hollywood, acting as designated drivers when needed. They were several inches, many dollars, and quite a few decibels short of where they wanted to be, but they were resourceful and shameless enough to beg or borrow any equipment they needed for their gigs.
In 1971, the Van Halen boys formed the Trojan Rubber Company, a power trio with neighbor Dennis Travis on bass. Already the boys were little-league outlaws. They smoked cigarettes like European street kids—their mom, Eugenia, even bought them packs to smoke. They had to call themselves the Space Brothers to get permission to play a Catholic high school—the priests and sisters found cosmic drug references more acceptable than a band named after condoms.
By any billing, the Van Halen brothers became known for their spot-on impersonations of cool hard rock bands like Cream and Cactus. Eddie had been playing through a 100-watt Marshall guitar amp from the time he was fourteen. Competing in a local battle of the bands against kids eight to ten years older, Alex was already stealing shows with a bombastic set piece—Ginger Baker’s entire fifteen-minute-plus drum solo from “Toad.”
While other kids were dating, experiencing heartbreak, getting into fights, and enduring the endless social humiliation of high school, Eddie sat most of those years out. Sequestered in his bedroom, he entered into a long-term relationship with his guitar. “Everybody goes through their teens getting fucked around by a chick or not fitting in with the jocks at school. I just basically locked my room for four years,” he said.
His mind may have been with his guitar, but his skill as a guitarist made him popular. He experienced sex at an early age, and girls were always interested in this sweet, shy boy. In the eleventh grade, his steady girlfriend became pregnant. “It was very confusing,” he told writer David Rensin in TeenAge. “We didn’t even have enough money to go to a doctor to see if she was pregnant. And getting out of school to take care of it was a feat in itself. Luckily I had a friend in the school office who gave me blank admit slips.”
The potentially life-changing event was over quickly, before gravity really kicked in for the young couple. “She wanted an abortion,” Eddie said. “We went to Planned Parenthood and talked it over. We were worried about her parents and my parents finding out, about getting busted for cutting school. Eventually her parents did find out, and their reaction surprised me. It was ‘why didn’t you come to us and let us help?’ I thought they’d call us scum.”
Stashing the experience in the back of his mind, Eddie stayed focused on his guitar and his band with his brother. Though their schoolmates were already wild about them, at one show they completely changed the life of a kid from a nearby school, Dave Roth. He was a sponge for all forms of culture, high and low, mass and micro, and followed every dance craze from the Twist to the Freddie—yet he was somewhat sheltered. His parents forbade him to go to big rock concerts—until he was nineteen and snuck off to see Humble Pie. So when teenage Roth first saw Eddie Van Halen playing guitar, he saw the light.
“Eddie was kind of a mentor,” Roth later told a TV interviewer. “I saw what he did with his fingers, and I knew that’s what I wanted to do with my feet, and with my voice.” Praise be and hallelujah.
2
RATS IN THE CELLAR
By the time Alex Van Halen graduated from Pasadena High School in 1971, he and his brother were well-regarded fledgling musical professionals. Continuing to direct and manage his band with Eddie, Alex started music classes at Pasadena City College. He signed up for a composition class, where he arranged West Side Story for a fourteen-piece jazz orchestra, and was still subbing with his father’s wedding band when needed. “I was surprised by how well Alex played our kind of music—polkas and waltzes,” said Richard Kreis, a regular bassist in Jan Van Halen’s group. “He carried the rhythm of the band! And while we set up before the bar opened, he’d watch the door while I got the beer from the tap.”
The brothers had outgrown their neighborhood bands—the Trojan Rubber Company closed shop after bassist Dennis Travis moved away. In 1972, Alex and Eddie formed a new group with bassist Mark Stone. They wanted to call themselves Rat Salad, the title of a Black Sabbath instrumental from the ultra-heavy, groundbreaking new Paranoid album. Instead, the Van Halen brothers chose the name Genesis—the optimistic beginning of a musical career of biblical scale.
As Genesis began playing backyard parties in Pasadena, a friend jokingly drew up a poster announcing “Genesis at the Forum”—sum-moning a hilarious fantasy that the band would ever be big enough to play L.A. Forum. Then one sad afternoon Eddie came home from the record store and glumly informed Alex that their band already had an album out—he had discovered the latest record by the British progressive rock band Genesis on the new-release shelf.
Afterward they became known as Mammoth, a wild and woolly beast that promised a heavy step. For a while, the Mammoth lineup included a keyboard player, which Eddie hated because the electric piano filled up the sound and tied down his guitar playing. Besides playing guitar, Eddie also sang lead vocals in Mammoth, though singing was not his strongest point.
“Rock Steady” Eddie, as he became known at school, soon followed Alex to Pasadena City College, where he studied composition with Dr. Truman Fischer, also a former teacher of Frank Zappa’s. Fischer was a follower of the visionary composer Arnold Schoenberg’s stern belief in learning the rules so you could completely ignore them. From this professor, Eddie received his lifelong creative license: If it sounds good, it is.
While setting up on stages in high school gyms and auditoriums, Mammoth met fellow heavy travelers like Snake, boogie rockers who played ZZ Top and Foghat covers. Snake also lent the Van Halen brothers equipment—which was to be expected. Alex remained perpetually a few pieces of gear short of the bigger, better show, and he was shameless about borrowing what Mammoth needed to slog onward.
Snake’s leader, vocalist and bassist Michael Sobolewski, had graduated from nearby Arcadia High in 1972. He crossed paths with Alex Van Halen at Pasadena City College, studying psychology until his father gave him permission to switch to music. Even on rudimentary originals, Mike’s powerful lungs, expanded by blowing trumpet and running track, were an obvious strong point.
Another of Alex’s classmates at Pasadena City College, Dave Roth, frequently supplied Mammoth with a PA system, but at least he had the good sense to charge ten bucks a night for rental. At one point, Roth auditioned for Mammoth, but the band was unimpressed with his freewheeling renditions of Cream and Grand Funk Railroad standards. At that ill-fated meeting, a nervous Eddie left the room so older brother Alex could break the bad news.
Undiscouraged, Roth formed the Red Ball Jets, an R&B-influenced act that played old rock and roll covers like “Johnny B. Goode,” a band where a huge horn section wouldn’t have been out of place. They rehearsed in the basement of Dr. Roth’s office building in San Marino, and frequently faced off against Mammoth in local battles of the bands in public parks. “It was never about the music for him, it was about the show,” Eddie recalled. “He was like an emcee, a clown. He was great at what he did.”
Biding his time with theater courses in junior college, Roth was a big personality for a small suburban city. His constant manic energy grated on the down-to-earth teenage rock scene. He wore ridiculous costumes, talked constantly, and strutted and preened like the sex god he obviously believed he was. Mike Sobolewski’s first reaction when meeting Roth was, “Jesus Christ, get this guy away from me!”
Borrowing liberally from his inspirations, Roth built his singing voice from an articulate palette of screams, including the primal roar of Ian Gillan from Deep Purple, the orgiastic squeals of the Ohio Players and Cold Blood, and a whole bag of tricks from obscure midwestern soul singers like Major Lance. Jim Dandy Mangrum of Black Oak Arkansas, a godfather of cock rock, claims that Roth asked permission to film his shows at a Hollywood club. If true, Roth was learning stagecraft from a lurid master. “It’s better to steal,” Roth later told MTV. “Inspiration doesn’t come from nowhere. You don’t lie in a dark black room and a burst of light appears with the hand of the Lord offering you a song. It doesn’t happen like that. You have to steal it from somebody. You change this and you change that—if it was good enough for Beethoven, it’s good enough for me.”
Reconsidering his early rejection, Alex Van Halen sensed a fellow warrior in Roth. Besides, his brother was struggling as lead vocalist of Mammoth. Though his voice would have been adequate in any other local act, compared to the wunderkind’s magical guitar his singing sounded dodgy. Not only did Eddie’s playing shame other guitarists, it shamed his efforts as a frontman. Alex started to envision a whole package. Besides his boundless drive, Roth came with a rehearsal space, an Opal Kadett station wagon for transportation, plus the PA system that was currently costing Mammoth plenty of dough. So in late 1973, David Lee Roth joined Mammoth, and the band ditched the Blue Cheer/Cream power-trio configuration that had gone out of style in the late 1960s, becoming a quartet like Led Zeppelin—the template for the 1970s.
As Eddie’s reputation spread, his picture-perfect renditions of the guitar gods gave way to a fluid yet unpredictable style he described as “falling down the stairs and hoping I land on my feet.” “I sometimes wonder myself when it was that I turned the corner and went my own way in playing,” he told Musician, “because the last thing I remember was playing ‘Crossroads’ and being Eric Clapton. All of a sudden, I just changed.”
Shortly after David Lee Roth joined Mammoth, their hapless keyboard player was given the boot. The next business was a name change—“Mammoth” sounded too ponderous. Roth suggested “Van Halen,” a cool, memorable moniker like Santana that would stand out on a poster next to other local bands like Snatch or Kuperszyth. Next, Van Halen devised their first band logo—loopy, with descending lines that looked like musical notes.
Graduating from high school auditoriums, the next step for a fledgling hard rock band was playing the informal backyard party scene. Rock ruled for California teens in 1974, and massive crews of kids in tank tops and cutoff jean shorts passed the hot summer nights with kegs of beer and ample opportunity to score cheap grass. By the time Van Halen played their first backyard party, they were already able to muster nine hundred paying heads.
In demand from the start, Van Halen played everywhere they could draw electricity—outdoor parks, the backyards of mansions, and roller rinks. Where extension cords couldn’t reach, they took electric generators. The locations became familiar—Huntington Drive, Arden Road, Colorado Avenue, Hamilton Park, and Madison Avenue—all announced on mimeographed party flyers with hand-drawn maps. Friends remember an early flair for showmanship, like Eddie sticking his cigarette in the headstock of his guitar in emulation of Keith Richards. Eddie’s lead guitar playing was unrivaled. He usually closed shows with an extended firestorm based perfectly on the electric blues boogie “Goin’ Home” by Ten Years After—no easy task, as their guitarist Alvin Lee had been billed the “fastest guitar in Britain.”
Inevitably the police arrived to bust the backyard parties, sometimes in helicopters, to keep the revelry from going too far over the edge. For the kids, it was all part of the light show, and “crime scene” videotapes made by the police remain the ultimate unseen early documents of Van Halen. When the cops broke up the show, the kids would scatter, spreading out into suburban neighborhoods, scrambling in their sneakers through culverts and vacant lots, evading the long arm of the law, hoping to regroup before night’s end. If they were lucky, Van Halen would arrive at the next party, and Eddie would seize whatever guitar was available and reel off a few choice tunes in the living room.
There were minimal distractions at that time—no video games, no VCRs, no Internet chat rooms, and no cable TV. There were barely even any skateboards. When they outgrew GI Joe dolls and Evel Knievel action figures, live rock bands gave kids a setting to entertain one another. While the adults of California partied with cocaine in hot tubs, the children got wild in the streets with cheap beer and little plastic sandwich baggies stuffed with green grass. Not only was AIDS not an issue, there was no War on Drugs, and the drinking age was for all practical purposes nonexistent. “Back in 1972 I OD’d on PCP, thinking it was cocaine,” Eddie later told radio interviewer Mark Razz. “That’s when I first got exposed to that stuff, and I didn’t know what it was.”
Along with neighborhood divisions came territorial rivalries. Van Halen represented the San Gabriel Valley and fought for turf against the San Fernando Valley’s Quiet Riot, who dressed in polka dots and showcased their own guitar prodigy, Randy Rhoads. Innocent but extremely headstrong, Van Halen weren’t above a bit of sabotage, unplugging amps to steal the thunder of opening bands and hurry themselves onto the stage. “What’s a party without any guests?” Dave taunted from the stage. “A Quiet Riot concert!”
As wild Pasadena parties and Eddie’s guitar wizardry put the band in demand, Van Halen’s repertoire of cover songs grew to a hefty two hundred tunes—three hundred if you count blatant hack jobs. Their set list ranged from pounding proto-metal by Deep Purple, Queen, Black Sabbath, and the little-known Captain Beyond, to boogie rock by ZZ Top and Grand Funk Railroad. To broaden their appeal beyond Pasadena, Roth insisted they learn soul jams that could move the dance floor, like James Brown’s “Cold Sweat” and KC & the Sunshine Band’s “Get Down Tonight.” As late as 1976, Van Halen would still pull off a left-hand turn like Stevie Wonder’s “Superstitious.”
Eddie still felt frustrated when the covers sounded too much like Van Halen, not enough like the originals. Part of the problem was that Roth never bothered to learn the words—he faked the rhythms phonetically and improvised the rest. As he recalled one of his colorful uncles telling him, “Dave, the key to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made!” The band would fight over the set list outside the venue until the last minute, but when they hit the stage it was all smiles and high fives.
Sensing opportunity in upscale San Marino near Pasadena, they struck up a band business spray-painting house numbers onto curbs for five bucks a pop. Appearing on doorsteps in blue overalls holding stencils, they informed housewives of an obscure and imaginary city requirement for visible street addresses. The proceeds from this quasi-scam went straight back into the band to buy gas, drumsticks, and guitar strings.
Van Halen never heard of a basketball court or a basement too small to jam. They played in a parking lot to publicize the opening of a new supermarket. This around-the-clock commitment became a pain in the ass for bassist Mark Stone. Unlike the Van Halen brothers, for whom school was a promotional opportunity, Stone was a straight-A student with career aspirations beyond this backyard rock band. Obviously, he had to go. The fall from local celebrity to face in the crowd was difficult for him. “For a long time, it really hurt,” Stone said.
During the spring of 1974, Mike Sobolewski was invited to become part of the Van Halen gang. He apologized to his bandmates from Snake, and then bounded away to join the offputting Roth and the friendly Van Halen brothers. Sometime between leaving the high school marching band and meeting David Lee Roth, good-natured Mike Sobolewski became known as Michael Anthony, a crazy bass wildman, one step closer to the musical all-star team. “When my father found out I’d joined, he got really angry and kicked me out of the house for dropping out of school,” Michael said.
Besides bringing a rumbling bottom-end sound that complemented Alex’s thunder perfectly, Mike was also an unrivaled backup singer. His uncanny high-end harmonies expanded the available range of cover songs, and eventually crafted the Van Halen sound significantly. More coveted for the time being, however, was a system of light pedals he rigged to play using his feet. He met the requirement to help the band’s career by advancing their stage show.
With the addition of Dave Roth from Red Ball Jets and Michael Anthony from Snake, Eddie and Alex had swallowed the local competition. Van Halen now featured the main guys from the three most happening bands in the region. Possessing more than just musical ability, they were outgoing people who knew how to use a telephone, how to draw a crowd, and how to put on a great show. Plus they all had great smiles.
Billing themselves as “the pride and joy of Southern California,” Van Halen were a homegrown grassroots phenomenon whose popularity grew by word of mouth. As it was for the local hardcore punk bands Black Flag and the Germs, and later Sunset Strip glamsters Guns N’ Roses and Poison, the grapevine was all-important in the spread of the band. They ruthlessly promoted their appearances with cheap ads in local news circulars, and especially through flyers and handbills. Before a show, the hustling Van Halen would put thousands of hand-drawn flyers printed for a penny apiece into every locker in local high schools—and not just their high schools but also the dozens of others within an hour’s drive.
The backyards were better than the bars for building a fan base—you didn’t have to be twenty-one to get loaded underneath a palm tree and pass out on the lawn. But eventually Van Halen landed gigs playing as many as four sets a night at beer bars like Walter Mitty’s Rock N Roll Emporium. “To me that was the epitome of a rock and roll club,” Alex said. “And every night we played there I had this vision that we were playing some sort of large arena.”
Los Angeles is a big city with a lot of neighborhoods. Several nights a week Van Halen played at Perkins Palace, Walter Mitty’s, the Proud Bird, the Civic Auditorium, Barnacle Bill’s, the Swiss Park, or the occasional pizza parlor. And as the band grew up and started playing more clubs, its audience came of age or got fake IDs and followed. For some reason, Van Halen still couldn’t get booked in Pasadena bars. “We couldn’t even get work at the local club, the Handlebar Saloon!” Eddie later told Creem.
After failing the audition at least once, Van Halen won a regular spot beginning in April 1974 at Gazzari’s Teen Dance Club in Hollywood, playing cover songs for over three hours a night. Eddie bought platform shoes for the occasion and nearly broke his ankles. As documented in The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization 2, Gazzari’s was a bawdy, go-go scene relic that survived into the 1970s with rock excess and a touch of vaudeville. The best dancer in the crowd won thirty dollars—incentive to copy the moves on Soul Train and American Bandstand and hopefully bump into the girls standing nearby.
Roth honed his stagecraft by emceeing the dance contest between singing songs. His joining the band had opened the door to Hollywood—club owner Bill Gazzari famously called him “Van,” assuming the band was named after the singer. Though considered by many to be obnoxious, the band’s only impediment to sure success, Roth was already choreographing stage and lighting moves that made every little lick memorable. The Van Halens handled the music, and he took care of the rest.
“We’re playing dance music for people who like to party tonight,” Roth chatted up a Pasadena crowd. From his earliest moments onstage, he was riffing on song titles, talking a mile a minute, looking to burn through his awkwardness as fast as possible and become a seasoned stage master. “No sense trying to be high-class and play nonsense shit. We’ll play something maybe you can relate to. At least you can get up and dance, man, find out if that honey you’ve been looking at wants to look at you.”
With his windblown hair and hairy exposed chest thrust outward, Roth was a fusion of pop icons Farrah Fawcett-Majors and Burt Reynolds—but he wasn’t hanging next to Robert Plant on bedroom walls just yet. In 1975 he was still a loose, chatty kid, rattling off stage raps just to hold back the hecklers. He taunted rocker boys to “get mellow and imitate Soul Train,” then laughed when they shouted their disdain for soul music. Nevertheless, while the strong bass lines and Alex’s drums punctuated the California air, the young ones danced boldly.
Even as the band scored entry-level Hollywood showcase gigs at Gazzari’s—a glamorous position compared to the bowling alleys of Pasadena—they were taking home less than a hundred bucks a night, hardly enough for four guys in their twenties to keep their enterprise rolling. Eddie’s mother badgered her baby to take his future more seriously. With her musician husband cheering the boys’ progress with every step, it was up to Mrs. Van Halen to think sensibly. She insisted that Edward allow her to sign him up for computer classes at the DeVry Institute of Technology in Phoenix, Arizona.