Edward Van Halen: A Definitive Biography (17 page)

This night was a triumph for Letterman as he landed Johnny Carson’s first ever late night talk show turn as a guest rather than an interviewer. Immediately upon the conclusion of David’s huge interview with Johnny, as Carson walked off to huge applause, Ed was poised at one of Paul Schaefer’s keyboards and started “Jump” as soon as the camera hit him. After the first bar, the drums and bass came in wrong and Edward looked up with a slight scold and opened his mouths is of to say “Ahh!!!” to the other musicians. After the commercial break, Ed moved to guitar and Paul has taken over the keyboards. Edward delivered a spectacular improvised solo over the main riff of “Jump.”

After Paul called the song for Dave’s next segment, the crowd gave a huge ovation. Letterman said, “Very nice! Very nice! You know, Eddie—Eddie… you could lose those other guys. These, these are the ones.” The audience claps as Ed smiles quite uncomfortably, given that the world didn’t yet know what had transpired over the previous month and a half. Letterman followed that up with, “Does… does David get on your nerves?” Eddie laughs quite loudly and he jokingly lifts his guitar up to cover his head, but visibly nods ‘uh-huh’ with a smile. But he turns away and purses his lips tightly, choking back great discomfort. Letterman goes on to ask Eddie if he’ll come back for the Monday show. Eddie says back, “I don’t think you’ll be here Monday,” to which Letterman replies, “Oh yeah, that’s right!”

Feeling a bit redeemed after standing on his own, Ed returned to the Letterman show the following month, the same night his wife would be on as a guest promoting her latest TV movie. The interview with Valerie was simply awkward, especially when they brought up the fact that Paul Schaffer had dated Valerie when she was sixteen—right in front of Eddie. Even though it was late June at this point, nothing at all in the interview acknowledged the fact that Van Halen was broken up or that Dave had left in any way. The only tidbit that Valerie allowed to slip was when she said, “He doesn’t go out on the road any more”—a comment that was left untouched by Letterman. Edward even performed “Panama” with the Letterman band, with Paul providing the vocal line on the keyboard—which came off awkward.

Dave’s departure simply didn’t become public knowledge until CBS bought Dave’s movie deal for $10 million and Sammy Hagar officially joined Van Halen. Personally, I only remember hearing about it through the grapevine at our local guitar shop. Sammy would ultimately make the declaration publicly from the stage in September 1985.

With Dave went the entire road crew as well as Noel Monk, the band’s manager since 1979. Noel was loyal to Dave. Edward said flatly, “Noel Monk was Dave’s goddamn puppet… . We wanted a manager that managed the band—not someone who did only what one person said.” After being let go, Noel promptly filed suit against the band.

That summer, “(Oh) Pretty Woman” was featured in a prominent mall scene in the cult classic
Weird
Science
starring Anthony Michael Hall. Also, Steven Spielberg’s massive summer hit
Back
to
the
Future
had a pivotal scene that centered around Eddie himself. Marty McFly, played by Michael J. Fox, attempted to scare his 1955 father into asking his 1955 mother to the dance. To shock him from his sleep, Marty takes a Walkman and inserts a tape that says “Van Halen”—but above it to the left it says “Edward” in smaller letters. When Marty hits play, it is a sound bomb of whammy-bar dives and harmonic screams which then leads into an extremely short but incredible segment of a thundering tune he had leftover from
The
Wild
Life
soundtrack. Michael J. Fox also mimicked Edward’s patented finger tapping during another scene. Since the movie itself was set in October of 1985 and we saw the movie in July, I myself was personally positive that it was a track from their new album that they had leaked to the film company as a tie-in. We were sure of it, yet that was simply hopeful teen logic gone awry.

CHAPTER 18 

A Tabloid Marriage and a
Random Phone Call

At the end of the
1984
tour, Valerie brought Eddie out to see the band Scandal led by Patty Smyth. The video for their pop-rock hit “The Warrior” was running non-stop on MTV. Patty, Valerie, and Eddie all really hit it off together, so much so that they even went on tour with the band for a few days. Ed sat in on several live songs alongside Scandal guitarist Keith Mack. But it was Patty that really caught Edward’s attention.

Patty was actually pregnant at the time. She was married to musician-poet Richard Hell, and they were having a tough go at marriage. Patty, Valerie, and Eddie made a nice little team for a while, but Valerie noted that Patty and Ed “gravitated toward each other through their mutual experiences in music.” Valerie admits she was naïve. “I had such trust in Patty that I had no qualms about her staying at our house with Ed when I went out of town,” she said. “Likewise, he palled around with her on an occasion when he was in New York. Eventually I heard him talk about Patty did this or Patty said that or Patty likes this designer one too many times, so that I asked if anything was going on between them. He said no.”

When Dave left, Patty was the first person Edward asked to replace him. Patty—at eight months pregnant—says she declined because she knew it wouldn’t work, although she did have some regrets later on. Most Van Halen fans could not or would not believe it, and it wasn’t published or publicized at the time at all. “It was like an urban myth, but it was true,” said Patty. “It was just not the right time for me… I was a New Yorker, I didn’t want to live in L.A… . and those guys were drunk and fighting all the time.” Looking back, she added, “I would have liked to have done one record with him.”

About Patty joining the group, Valerie said, “The other guys vetoed that idea, but it didn’t end Ed’s friendship with Patty. His infatuation with her seemed to intensify after she had her baby, and soon I was listening to him compare my hair and makeup to Patty’s.” Valerie admits that at that point she was essentially determined to even the score with Ed.

During a trip back to Shreveport to visit family, Valerie’s brother Patrick took Ed and Val to see a band called Private Life led by a vivacious female lead singer. Ed took a liking to the band and offered to produce a record for them at Val’s urging. In the process, Valerie developed a deliberate crush on Private Life’s drummer Craig. During a band trip to Japan in August 1985, Valerie and Craig had an affair, leaving Valerie only with incredible guilt. She chose not to tell Eddie anything about it, and, as she has made a small industry out of publicizing, she turned to overeating to cope.

No Idea What to Do

Following the ill-fated and ill-advised invitation to Patty to take Dave’s place, Ed’s next idea was to do a project with Pete Townshend. Ultimately, that did not work out and Pete was none too pleased. “I feel really bad about that,” Edward said. “I think Pete Townshend is really pissed off at me. We talked—actually he never called—but he sent telegrams. I tried calling him back, and he telegrammed to say he doesn’t like to work in the States, that he wanted to work in England. That kind of threw me for a curve, because I was kind of planning to do it in the studio at home.” Eddie continued, “But that wasn’t the main reason. He wouldn’t have been able to start until November… I was tired of waiting to do something. Also, here are Alex and Mike, who I love… I couldn’t exactly just leave them out. I just hope he’s not mad at me because I never got hold of him to tell him, ‘Sorry, I can’t do it.’”

Warner Brothers even put pressure on Ed to take some time off from the band and make a solo record of his own. Hoping that the original band would ultimately come back together, the idea was to satisfy Edward’s personal musical appetite, but he was completely disinterested. “No way,” he said. “If they think I’m going to experiment and futz around, doing a solo project as opposed to what I really want—just to wait and see if Roth comes back—they’re off their nut.”

Eddie had yet another other idea to do an album featuring several different lead singers including Joe Cocker, Phil Collins, and Mike Rutherford. “But Alex talked me out of it,” he said. “He said that would just be a one-shot project, and it made me realize, yeah, I want a family, I want a solid thing.” Oddly, it would take a high-end auto mechanic to bring together a new Van Halen family—rocky marriage number two.

Among the many things Ed is famous for is his car collection—a normal habit amongst the high-earning rock celebrities. He had a special penchant for Lamborghinis, and as per usual, his Lamborghini was often in the shop. His auto shop of choice was a high-end place in Van Nuys run by an Italian car dealer named Claudio Zampolli. Sammy Hagar was such a regular at the shop that Claudio was even featured in Sammy’s “I Can’t Drive 55” video for MTV. That summer, Edward was in Claudio’s shop: “He’s a friend. I hang out at his shop to talk about cars. And I told him, ‘Hey, man, our singer left, he quit.’ And he said, ‘Hey, well, I just talked to Sammy and he’s coming to town.’ So he gave me Sammy’s number and I called him up.”

Enter Sammy Hagar

In more detail, Eddie told an interviewer in Canada: “My car broke down. OK? And it just so happens that Sammy and I both buy cars from the same dealer… I was bummed out, you know, my car broke down…
and
a
few
other
reasons
. And uh, his name’s Claudio Zampolli. And he goes, ‘Hey, I just spoke to Sammy today?’ I go, ‘Sammy Hagar?’ He goes, ‘Yeah!’ And I told him, you know, our singer just quit the band. He goes, ‘Why don’t you call Sammy? Call Sammy!’ I called him right there from the shop, and, um, three days later he came down. And that was it.”

That one phone call changed everything. The band Van Halen, fueled by the creative friction and passion of Edward and David, took at least a ninety degree turn at that moment—if not a complete one-eighty. Sammy took the call excitedly, but decided that an up-front formal meeting was a better idea that to just dive in and play. Ed called it a business meeting. “He wanted to come down to meet us first and see what kind of condition we were in. Because he’d heard some horror stories about my being… way out there, a space case.” Ed had relished at being a “5150”—and referred to himself and Donn both as “5150s”. But he went on the defensive about him being called weird, even though he’d called himself weird and “diffirnt” quite often (not to mention “a sick fuck”).

With Sammy came his manager, Ed Leffler, who would play a major role in Van Halen’s career until his death, and who summarily replaced Noel Monk. When Sammy and Leffler felt assured that Van Halen was looking for a permanent member—not just a one-shot deal, they went ahead and held a jam session. Edward said, “He came down the next Monday and we jammed, and that was it. The first tune we did was ‘Summer Nights.’ And from then on it was just straight up. In twenty minutes we had a complete song.” The music tracks for “Summer Nights” and “Good Enough” from the
5150
album were both two tracks that the band worked on with Dave just before his departure, with Ed noting that “we rehearsed [with Dave] for maybe a total of a week within a month’s time.”

When it came to the keyboard ballad “Dreams,” Eddie said, “We never even got to work with Dave on that.” It clearly was the tune that Dave had described as a “melancholy power ballad” over which he would have been forced to commit “poetic felonies.” Obviously, with Dave, it surely would never have been called “Dreams,” but that is clearly beside the question—Dave likely would have never agreed to work on the track. While Dave’s departure was in fact a perfect storm of many years of complicated issues, the timing of the introduction of that tune with Dave’s departure must certainly be included as one of those issues. It is obviously not the sole reason, but could clearly have been the back-breaking straw for Dave.

Sammy fell in immediately like a long-lost brother. Sammy Hagar is a nice guy, a friendly and honest fellow. As the lead singer of Montrose, Sammy and Ronnie Montrose couldn’t get along, even while producing classic tracks like “Rock Candy” and “Bad Motor Scooter.” Sammy had a fairly successful solo career and made his own videos for MTV, including the aforementioned “I Can’t Drive 55” video, which was, in fact, completely in the style of Dave’s video vignettes. Sammy, in effect, didn’t have much to prove and entered the project as a new challenge for himself—to be a consummate band member, not for it to be the Sammy Hagar Show, or the Eddie Van Halen Show, for that matter. Ted Templeman had, in fact, even produced Sammy’s 1985 album
VOA
immediately after working on Dave’s
Crazy
From
the
Heat
EP.

Edward characterized Sammy’s joining the band as bit like hitting the reset button. He discredited the notion of friction causing passion by pointing out how well he and Sammy got along, saying “Sammy and I are in tune with each other… The theory that opposites attract is not valid in this case.” Even with a few contractual obligations to settle on Sammy’s part—some that would return at the worst possible times—the band forged ahead with the recording of the new record in Ed’s backyard. Valerie said, “Ed became completely occupied with work. Recording of Van Halen’s
5150
album filled our driveway with Lamborghinis and Ferraris and the studio with music. I enjoyed the harmonious atmosphere as the guys began referring to themselves as ‘the real Van Halen’ and devouring chips and beer and cigarettes all house of the day and night as if they were a troop of grown-up boy scouts.”