Everybody Wants Some (26 page)

Van Halen’s singer agreed. “Ed and Al woke up in the morning, started drinking and, at the worst times, passed out two or three times during the day,” Hagar remembered. “They had to quit, because they didn’t have any brakes.”

Rather than push sobriety on his younger brother, Alex assured Eddie that the day would come when he would know it was really time to stop. “It used to be, the musicians are here, whip out the stuff. It was true, but things are changing,” he said.

Throughout this turmoil, Sammy was in the process of dissolving his marriage to wife, Betsy, after twenty-three years. The couple had two sons and had built their life together from the start of Sammy’s days as a professional musician. Beyond the emotional toll, the split was expensive—until Sammy discovered a fast way to ease his financial crunch. Geffen Records was interested in releasing a collection of Sammy’s greatest solo hits. Ed Leffler had previously kept Geffen at bay, but after the death of the manager, they approached Sammy again.

Hagar was only obligated to okay the package and to appear for a short time to promote the release. However, he negotiated a higher advance by recording two new songs, “High Hopes” and “Buying My Way into Heaven,” which he claimed had already been rejected by Van Halen. “The reason I did include two new songs on
Unboxed
was for the money,” he confessed in
Guitar World
. “I got Geffen to pay me exactly the amount of money I owed my wife for our divorce settlement. I paid her off with all the money I received for that album and didn’t make a dime off it.”

The album’s title appealed to a music retailer’s sense of humor by poking fun at the endless bloated box-set collections on the market, many of them just a greatest hits CD with an expanded booklet. The CD cover recalled Hagar’s distant past as a fighter—and he still remained an avid fight fan, following women’s boxing, attending prizefights, palling around with Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini. Reminiscing about his days as a quick jabber, he admitted, “I like to see a man get the shit beat out him!”

Unboxed
popped as high as number 51 on the back of evergreen material like “Heavy Metal” and “I Can’t Drive 55.” During a brief promotional tour, Hagar appeared on
Late Night with David Letterman
in March 1994, playing a red model of Eddie’s signature guitar. He allegedly canceled an appearance on
The Tonight Show
, however, after Van Halen refused to allow Michael Anthony to join him onstage. The band was still in mourning for Ed Leffler while its singer was out on the chat circuit, and Eddie resented seeing Sammy on TV every night.

The appearance of
Unboxed
started new battles within Van Halen. Eddie sounded clearly unhappy talking about Sammy’s “loony fucking solo career,” as memories resurfaced of another lead singer testing the waters with a solo record before abandoning Van Halen. Sammy, however, viewed each call for band discipline as an attempt to stifle his personal freedom, and he shook off suggestions to slow down.

Van Halen turned down an offer to headline the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Woodstock Festival in August alongside Green Day, Metallica, Nine Inch Nails, Aerosmith, and Bob Dylan. Their only live show during 1994 was the April launch party for Eddie’s Celebrity Golf Challenge, at the Hard Rock Café in Los Angeles. The band members took requests from a crowd of peers and friends like Dweezil Zappa, while guests like guitarists Jeff Beck and Steve Lukather joined them for a well-lubricated set of rock standards.

Following a troubled summer, Eddie entered rehab yet again, while the tabloids and TV news show
Hard Copy
stirred up rumors about an infidelity causing trouble to his marriage. Desperate to set things right, on October 2, 1994, Eddie took a big step forward and announced to the world at large that he was giving up drinking permanently.

Coming four years after
F.U.C.K
., Van Halen’s fourth studio album with Hagar arrived during a crisis juncture. No longer soaring freely across the floorboards, the band had become a cumbersome beast—an institution bound by tradition, big business, and otherworldly expectations. Yet written and recorded in just five months,
Balance
was the musical departure that its predecessor was not.

Van Halen’s tenth album was more emotionally shadowy than its autopiloted and horny predecessor. Van Halen were fighting to hold themselves together, while still struggling to forge a new signature sound. The album continued to show the band’s maturity, combining the reborn rock power of
F.U.C.K
. with the sadness hinted at during
OU812
. There were fewer overdubs and more guitar riffs, and if Van Halen seemed a little long in the tooth, they also showed their fangs.

The record was nearly named
Seventh Seal
, before the band settled on the calmer approach of
Balance
. “We were going through some inner band turmoil and disagreements,” Alex told
Metal Edge
. “Things got really out of kilter, but when we got into the studio and played . . . it’s like things were back into balance.”

After preproduction at 5150, the band headed to Bryan Adams’s Warehouse Studio to Vancouver, Canada, for three weeks with producer Bruce Fairbairn. They worked eight-hour days starting around noon, recording vocals at Adams’s house and studio. Hoping to catch an immediacy missing since the relatively carefree days of
Diver Down
, Fairbairn usually held Eddie to the first or second take of a solo. He assured the still self-critical Edward that bursts of inspiration still beat polished perfection every time.

If the hard mood of
F.U.C.K
. showed the band’s cloudy moments, “The Seventh Seal” was a full thunderstorm, named after an Ingmar Bergman film about a medieval crusader who returns home to find his homeland ridden with plague. Complete with chanting monks and dangling metal bells, the song unveiled a vast, open, U2-like guitar wall that propelled through the darkest terrain Van Halen had ever tackled. The guitars were giant and methodical, with the rhythm galloping like Led Zeppelin’s “Achilles Last Stand.”

The mystical overtones originated in part from Eddie’s newfound sobriety. His therapist since 1992—when Eddie still came to her sessions drunk—was Sat-Kaur Khalsa, a Sikh woman. She pushed the notorious drinker to let go of his beer-can safety raft and swim like mad toward his spiritual shore. “She had me do all kinds of crazy breathing exercises, then had me relax with my eyes closed and try to go to that place where I am after a six-pack,” he told
Rolling Stone
. “Because all the booze really did was lower my inhibitions. In actuality, it was blocking the light.” After viewing cigarettes, beer, and his guitar as a holy trinity for twenty years, Eddie tried songwriting sober and churned out three songs in one thirty-minute blast of desperate absolution.

All too quickly,
Balance
moved squarely into maudlin Sammy territory with “Can’t Stop Lovin’ You,” a divorce ballad on par with Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” or John Waite’s “Missing You.” The song was Sammy’s attempt to assume his ex-wife’s point of view—that she was still madly in love with him. The band fared better when it poured its anger into hectic rock like “Aftershock,” an emotionally straining fist-shaker complete with a borrowed Metallica lick. The tune was one of several songs where Eddie unplugged his Peavey 5150 amp and put two mics on his recently rebuilt old Marshall Super Lead.

Following the honky-tonk rocker “Big Fat Money” came “Strung Out,” eighty-eight seconds of avant-garde piano terror documenting an episode from ten years earlier. While renting film composer Marvin Hamlisch’s beach house in the early eighties, Edward had investigated the sonic properties of a Yamaha grand piano with the delicate use of hammer, saw, AA batteries, and silverware. The recording of scrapes and snapping strings cost over $10,000 in keyboard repair alone, and was culled from six hours of raw tape—potentially the most edgy Van Halen bootleg never released.

The material on
Balance
reflected a lot of sorrow—like the syrupy piano ballad “Not Enough,” featuring strings and Michael Anthony’s first encounter with a fretless bass. Eddie still lived on site at 5150, and Alex’s house was two miles away. The pair operated as they always had, throwing themselves into their work as they dealt with the death of Leffler, Eddie’s drinking, and a new crisis—Alex’s recent separation from his wife of ten years, Kelly, the mother of his young son, Aric.

Outside the Van Halen family, Michael Anthony now had two daughters himself, and like Sammy he was less able to drop whatever he was doing with his family when the brothers called. This divide carried over into the studio, where Alex described increasing tension in the air. Sammy did not seem to enjoy being there. “Sammy would only come in between three and five,” engineer Mike Plotnikoff told
The
Inside
, “and he had dinner reservations at six, so you had to get what you could of him in that amount of time, and that was it. I think that was why Eddie and Sammy weren’t getting along.”

The first of two back-to-back instrumentals, “Doin’ Time” was Alex’s first album solo, concocted from drums and effects during one day alone in 5150. The sweeping vamp “Baluchitherium,” named after an extinct fifteen-ton land mammal, actually had recorded vocals until producer Bruce Fairbairn suggested they be nixed. Sammy felt the song was too melodic, so his replacement singer was Eddie’s Dalmat-ian, Sherman—Eddie taped a hot dog to the microphone to keep the dog interested and howling.

“Don’t Tell Me (What Love Can Do)” was a melodic hard rocker that put Hagar’s well-practiced screams on a pedestal—supported by Eddie’s finger-step guitars, Alex’s pounding pace, and Michael’s golden backing vocals. “The whole slant of that song was one of universal love,” Alex told the
Album Network
, “that it can cure all and fix all, and the planet will be alright. Well you hear so many people talking about, but I don’t want to hear it. Show me. I’m sick and tired of people telling me this shit.” The album closed with “Feelin’,” another magnificent minor-key rock epic with a string section and heartrending vocal performance unlike anything Sammy had previously brought to Van Halen. The track brought a solid ending to a stormy record—and would soon prove to be a resounding finale for the Van Hagar era. Afterward, the band put aside four complete songs that only needed vocals and called the album done.

Another crucial relationship for the band appeared to be on the rocks, when MTV passed on the video for “Amsterdam”—shot on location that January during Van Halen’s first return to the city in nine years. After a decade of world premieres, lost weekends, New Year’s parties, and special accommodations, Van Halen were shocked to be spurned. But the channel was moving on. Music was no longer its priority—least of all not middle-aged rock music. “That was bullshit,” Hagar complained to
The Inside
. “They said that the drug connotations kept them from playing it. That’s a pile of crap, because they’ve got rap bands singing about anything they want.”

Sammy’s smoked-out sentiments didn’t pass muster with Eddie and Alex either, who felt the song did their birthplace a disservice. Sammy refused to budge, pushing his vision of the Dutch capital of “dope and pussy” over the memories of the Van Halen family homeland.

Released in January 1995,
Balance
became Van Halen’s fourth consecutive number 1 studio album. It went platinum by March, shuttering sideline claptrap about whether a hard rock band could survive in the mid-1990s. The
Balance
so-called “Ambulance” tour began in March with a sickly spring cough, as flu-stricken Sammy Hagar struggled to make dates. Eddie’s knees wobbled the first night in Pensacola, Florida, as he looked out over a capacity crowd of over nine thousand fans and prepared to play sober for virtually the first time in his career. He found that he liked being aware of the audience and enjoyed the process of coming out of his shell.

The updated stage show was elaborate—and expensive. Bringing living room comfort to a country of couch potatoes, Van Halen commandeered the same giant Jumbotron screens that hung over Times Square, becoming the first act besides Barbra Streisand to use them in arenas. One of the stranger video effects was a projection of Sammy Hagar’s face on a giant dollar bill.

The band also hired a high-tech Autopilot system so that lights would automatically follow the musicians using infrared and ultrasonic cues. They were the second band, after ZZ Top, to adopt the system—a quantum leap ahead of the lighting stomp pedals Michael Anthony had brought with him from Snake when he joined Van Halen twenty years earlier.

A total of seven stage cameras brought the sweaty details of every performance to the back rows, just like at a sporting event. With short hair, work shirts with name patches, and ripped blue jeans, Van Halen now looked like a bunch of guys who had just finished hanging drywall in the basement and decided to jam a few Top 40 tunes.

Sammy’s ailing throat forced the band to cancel a night in Orlando, Florida, and then three shows in California in early April. Some nights his vocal outages became a boon for fans, like when the band broke from its preordained routine for a ten-minute jam on the longed-for “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love.” Some nights, Eddie would pop into the intros for old unheard ghosts like “Mean Street,” “Romeo Delight,” and even “Runnin’ with the Devil.” He seemed to be chafing at the bit to play original Van Halen classics despite Sammy’s reluctance. Fans definitely wanted to hear them—those first six albums continued to garner multiplatinum sales—and crowds screamed while Eddie teased them.

The still-inscrutable Alex appeared to be taking bizarre drummer behavior to new heights, performing with a Freddie Mercury walrus mustache and a neck brace. The neck support was not just a weird wardrobe choice, however—Alex had ruptured three vertebrae while hoisting his son onto his shoulders. Eddie mentioned a childhood tree-house accident and a teenage spill, earlier injuries whose effects had accumulated with time.

Eddie continued leaping high, but his moves were increasingly curtailed by a throbbing pain in his hip. Thinking he had taken a bad swivel on the golf course, he underwent CT scans and MRIs. He was diagnosed with an avascular necrosis—a loss of blood supply to his joint that had made the ball joint of his hip collapse. Doctors recommended surgery immediately. Instead, he bought a cane and continued with the tour. “I’m hobbling, yeah,” Eddie said. “It’s from years of hopping around onstage and drinking, not feeling what I’m doing to myself. I’m almost seven months sober now, so the pain is a lot worse.”