Everybody Wants Some (22 page)

Roth had the good sense to bring Poison on the road with him—lightweight hair metal with box-office draw but not a hope in hell of upstaging the master. “I feel like a shining example, but I’m not sure of what,” Roth said to
Creem
about his influence on L.A. glam. “I think the key is to steal from more than one influence, though. Van Halen’s computer program wasn’t written by any one programmer.”

Roth was losing his patience with the rock scene, and his ebbing interest showed. Seeking fulfillment outside the VIP area, he went scrambling up hills with rock-climbing clubs around the world while on tour. Instead of waiting in the hotel until showtime, he tucked his hair under a hat and walked the streets in search of adventure. He would drag along some of the crew to go biking or walking until they were lost beyond all hope in a strange city, then call the front desk of their hotel demanding an immediate rescue.

Roth returned to England’s venerated Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington, where Van Halen had sparred with AC/DC four years earlier. Joining more aggressive acts like Iron Maiden, Megadeth, and the sleazy new lords of the Sunset Strip, Guns N’ Roses, Roth’s colorful plumage looked like a good hunting target for the British press. First, a security scuffle erupted onstage when Roth’s guards pushed a grounds security man away from the microphone. Unfortunately, two fans had been crushed during Guns N’ Roses’ set earlier that day, and the festival guard was desperately trying to tell the crowd to take a step back before anyone else was hurt.

Roth came away looking like the ultimate callow American. At the time, the British rock press was extremely influential in the United States, rightfully taking credit for breaking every major band from Twisted Sister to Mötley Crüe to Metallica. Falling in their bad graces had repercussions—they could dictate who moved ahead and who needed to retire. There was life beyond MTV in the big wide world.

Shortly afterward, the Roth camp tangled with opening act Great White following a show at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. Directing the tour, Pete Angelus kicked the unlucky Great White off the remaining dates. Then guitarist Vai left Roth after the tour, joining the more mature, levelheaded hard rockers Whitesnake.

Roth had another platinum record on his wall, but while he was literally at his commercial peak his mind seemed to be up in the thin mountain air. While in Japan, Roth appeared in a series of rarefied television spots for Toshiba-Japan, dancing on the wing of a plane and twirling for high-end electronics under the “Quality & Fitness” brand concept. The spots isolated Roth as an airbrushed version of himself, trying to stay one step ahead of reality, striving for a starring role in the popular imagination.

After
OU812
went platinum in eight weeks, Roth shrugged off the widening gap in album sales, reminding journalists that he didn’t have to split his earnings four ways. He was taking on larger-than-life dimensions in the Van Halen universe. The band hadn’t contacted him, and they professed to have not heard his new album. They had built him up as a punching bag and a scapegoat, but now wanted to steer clear. “I haven’t talked to him,” Eddie grumbled.

Roth had nothing but contempt for his replacement, calling Hagar a “mediocre talent” on Howard Stern’s radio show. “Sammy would sell the property rights to his butthole to get fame, because he was a complete failure until Van Halen came along.” Dave compared Van Halen to a men’s lodge and slagged their change in sound. “It’s a nice quiet domestic upper-middle-class kind of rock and roll existence, and I don’t want any part of that.”

With two number 1 albums, Hagar had earned the right not to sing “Jump,” a song he felt “had Roth written all over it.” In its place, Van Halen’s music had indeed become less visceral. They were now so musically acceptable that Billy Joel contacted Eddie in 1988, asking if the boy wizard would produce his next album,
Storm Front
. Drinking excessively, disorganized, and overwhelmed by Van Halen’s plans for a major summer tour, Eddie turned down the piano man.

Reigning over a nation of heavy metal one-hit wonders, Van Halen marshaled the troops for a grand tour of the kingdom. During the summer of 1988, they licensed the “Monsters of Rock” trademark from the European company that hosted the annual events at Castle Donington. Packaging a big festival the likes of which the United States hadn’t seen since the seventies, Van Halen would be headlining over Scorpions, Dokken, Kingdom Come, and newcomers Metallica.

Van Halen were elder statesmen. Though considered leaders of eighties metal, they hatched during the tail end of the era of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. Van Halen had actually competed with those legends in the late 1970s. “A lot of these guys today like Bon Jovi are eight years younger than me,” Michael Anthony told
Rolling Stone
. “It doesn’t make me feel old—but it kinda does.”

Once he quit drinking, Alex Van Halen remained sober. But after flunking Betty Ford, the only thing that temporarily stopped Eddie was a tropical sickness contracted near the Turtle Island luxury resort where he and Valerie went to celebrate their seventh wedding anniversary. While fighting a 105-degree fever and recovering for over a month, he developed a new appreciation for health. He admitted he had been half-cocked for over a decade, cracking beers open before eating breakfast. “It feels like something’s missing, but if my brother can do it, I should be able to do it.”

Not helpful was touring for months with bands like Metallica, a band that riotously nicknamed itself “Alcoholica.” To help keep himself on the straight and narrow, Eddie gingerly suggested a new backstage rider request not to have alcohol available. The band insisted it was still a wild and crazy bunch of guys. “I guess you could say as far Van Halen calming down,” Mike told
Rolling Stone
, “we’ve calmed down to everybody else’s party level!”

Calmed down or not, the biggest rock event of the summer inevitably drew fire from religious groups decrying rock’s depravity. The lyrics to “Black and Blue” and “Sucker in a 3 Piece”—both typically raunchy and single-minded Sammy compositions—were read on
Good
Morning America
. The would-be censors raised an interesting point—why Van Halen would go to the trouble to make music designed to rock the masses and then dent their commercial appeal with blatantly artless songs about fucking.

From its first night in East Troy, Michigan, the tour faced the full brunt of PMRC-inspired antirock forces all summer. The PMRC—Parents’ Music Resource Center—had its origins as a group of political wives in Washington, D.C., that had initiated public hearings on rock lyrics in 1985, leading to Parental Advisory Warning stickers on objec-tionable music. From a certain skewed viewpoint, the giant green dinosaur mascot on Monsters of Rock tour merchandise was misinter-preted as a satanic demon. In Foxboro, Massachusetts, on June 12, Van Halen won a legal action brought by concerned parents’ groups that would have canceled the concert. The band agreed to trim the nine-hour event to six hours, a stressful solution to a needless hassle.

At the L.A. Coliseum soon after Metallica ripped up the stage with its thrashing assault on a corrupt society, Van Halen played “When It’s Love” for the first time. They had waited a long time, but they finally had their first official power ballad worthy of ten thousand spent Bic lighters. “There were about 90,000 people there, doing the swaying arm thing,” Alex told
Guitar
. “During the ride out at the end everybody lit matches and were singing along. The whole building was shaking, because it has a very deep, clean sub-bass that rattled everything.”

Around that time, Michael Anthony added an offstage synthesizer to his elaborate bass solo that he triggered using foot pedals. His routine wasn’t so much an expression of musical virtuosity as a chance to fill the physical bowl of the arena with gut-ripping low-end tonal sweeps. Eddie’s solo dazzled the eyes and the brain, but Mike’s showcase could terrorize a crowd with its sheer powerful force.

Monsters of Rock was ultimately a modest moneymaker, and its main cultural importance was showing how incredibly popular Metallica had become, going platinum without the help of MTV or rock radio, and rivaling Van Halen in T-shirt sales. Cashing in on the massive popularity of hard rock they had pioneered in the 1970s and dominated in the 1980s, Van Halen embraced “When It’s Love” and moved onward. Their heavy metal days were behind them.

To complete the
OU812
tour cycle, Van Halen hired the infinitely tamer opening act Private Life, a female-fronted light rock band that Eddie was producing. Even the stodgy
New York Times
, though incorrectly citing Eddie’s style as needing “an arsenal of effects,” noted the band straining to balance its bad-boy origins with the new “goody-goody” material ushered in by Sammy. “Its newer directions aren’t encouraging,” the review concluded.

A fitting harbinger of the times was the digital compact disc, which outsold vinyl albums for the first time in 1988. Eddie Van Halen had learned to play Eric Clapton licks by slowing down Cream albums to 16 rpm. The CD format was a fixed-speed delivery system, putting an end to slowing down, scratching, skipping, or stacking. The album art was smaller and more sterile. Groups began to eschew hot recording spots like Sunset Sound Recorders in favor of digital boards. There was much less room for teenagers to roll joints on a CD jewel case than they’d had on an LP jacket. The hang-loose, forgiving freak scene that spawned Van Halen was gone, replaced by the modern-day metal machinations of righteously angry and precise Metallica and Megadeth on one hand, and technologically enhanced pop schmaltz on the other.

After a run of shows in Japan, the
OU812
tour wrapped in Hawaii in early 1989. Sammy told Alex he wanted time off, and the band obliged, laying low from February 1989 until March 1990. During that downtime, Eddie built up his 5150 studio, doubling the room of his racquetball court–size facility, replacing the main mixing board, and at the far end of the recording floor adding an isolated drum room in his brother’s honor. When he was finished, the facility also featured a small video-game and pinball arcade. For shuttling the yards between his home with Valerie and 5150, he bought a golf cart and had it cus-tomized with his trademark guitar stripes.

Eddie performed at a tribute to Les Paul, the elderly pioneer of electric guitar and multitrack recording. When MTV launched its
Unplugged
series in 1989, the network invited Van Halen to perform acoustic versions of their hits, but the band had no interest—they stated that they meant for their songs to be heard with feedback and distortion intact. Eddie’s free time led him quickly back to music, and he commenced plans for a new house apart from 5150 that would be his domestic nest with Valerie and their hopefully soon to be expanded family.

Around this time Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley called Eddie to ask about his home studio. Eddie was worried, because 5150 was still officially zoned as a racquetball court, not a recording studio. Not calling to enforce the zoning law, the mayor simply wanted to hold Eddie up as an example—the Hollywood Association of Recording Professionals wanted the city to crack down on home studios, claiming their owners were renting them out and hurting traditional sound production rooms. Eddie’s studio proved otherwise. “I don’t want people recording here, putting a mojo on the vibe,” Eddie said. “I like keeping it to myself.” For his celebrity testimony in this political squabble, he was given the proper zoning variance to legally make music at his house, already one of the most successful studios in Southern California.

Then on April 22, 1990, Van Halen performed at the opening of their Cabo Wabo Cantina, a bar and restaurant in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Looking to plant some of their earnings in a warm coastal party spot, the band had joined manager Ed Leffler and a Mexican investor, sinking $1 million into construction. MTV dedicated “Viva Van Halen Saturday” to the event, broadcasting a full day of campy vacation footage of the extremely sunburned band cavorting on the beach, eating tacos, and riding ATVs through the city marketplace, leading up to their late-night barefoot performance to a packed house of contest winners and vacationing guitar heroine Lita Ford.

Their move to the coastal town turned out to be prescient. All during the 1990s, while decrying the illegal Mexican immigration problem, thousands of Americans poured into Baja California in search of cheap coastal property, warm, beautiful weather, and an endless fiesta fueled by beer and tacos. Seeking nothing more than an investment that sounded fun, the band bought in on the ground floor.

Diversifying his line, Sammy also launched Red Rocker Hyperactive clothing in 1990 at the Action Sports Retailer convention in San Diego, introducing a whopping fifty items of endorsed apparel based on his stage gear, including blue jeans, sweats, and what he called “loose and crazy clothes.” At the time he was heavily into biking around Mill Valley, California, and he also produced a line of Red Rocker mountain bikes manufactured by Fisher.

Van Halen’s vacation was starting to look like retirement. Stepping onto the neatly trimmed fairway, Eddie golfed in his first of many fund-raisers at the First Annual World Music Invitational Pro-Am Celebrity Golf Tournament in Dallas. At the same time, he entered the 1990s with the distinction of being
Guitar World
’s “Player of the Decade” for the 1980s—not only was the honor appropriate, it was essentially unchallenged, but it came with significant pressure to be just as meaningful in the 1990s.

Van Halen regrouped in March 1990 to begin to grapple with the new decade. During the three years since they had recorded an album, popular music had registered tectonic shifts. In a strange harbinger of changing tastes, Van Halen indirectly scored a number 2 single in early 1989 and a subsequent number 1 album via slush-mouthed rapper Tone L o-c’s “Wild Thing,” a springy party anthem built entirely on a looped sample of “Jamie’s Cryin’,” licensed almost as an afterthought for a flat fee in the free-for-all pioneer days of digital sampling.