Everybody Wants Some (30 page)

In their glory days, Van Halen had defied parody because they were more fun than the funnymen. There had always been a big fat joke hanging in songs like “Hot for Teacher,” and peeling off the black fishnets to find the punch line was part of the appeal. But somewhere along the way, everyone got seriously distracted and Van Halen became an unwitting source of laughs. In Adam Sandler’s 1998 retro-comedy
The
Wedding Singer
, set during the 1980s, his lovable loser character warns his fiancée to stop disrespecting a Van Halen shirt for fear his favorite band will break up. Only a dope could still have faith.

Undaunted, Sammy set about showing the world how much fun he was having without Van Halen to slow him down. The Red Rocker turned a gray-sounding fifty in October 1997, ringing in the years at his Cabo Wabo club with a bongo-laden south-of-the-border retirement version of “Right Now.”

Hagar’s 1997 solo album
Marching to Mars
was recorded with nearly a half million dollars of his own money. He flaunted his new freedom with all-star guests like Huey Lewis, drummer Matt Sorum and Slash of Guns N’ Roses, funk bass legend Bootsy Collins, and Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead. He fell far afield from hard rock, revisiting “Amnesty Is Granted,” a song he wrote and performed on a 1995 Meatloaf album.

Angry about his public bashing at the hands of Eddie Van Halen, Hagar depicted the guitarist in his “Little White Lie” video as a clueless chimp slapping a guitar. The song was about Van Halen secretly rehearsing with Roth, only to have the reunion attempt backfire. “My God, these are sick dudes, man!” he told
Rolling Stone
. “They stabbed me in the back, and now they’re trying to throw dirt on me and bury me!”

After twenty years, Sammy buried the hatchet with Ronnie Montrose, inviting him to play guitar on
Marching to Mars
’s “Leaving the Warmth of the Womb.” As Montrose said, “I did fire him from the Montrose band because he was on to his own thing and had many more things that he wanted to do as a band leader than he could do in our format. One of the running jokes is that it took Van Halen a lot longer than it took me to fire him!”

While Van Halen figured out what to do with Gary Cherone, just like in 1985 the band’s phone rang off the hook with helpful applicants for the job of singer. One caller was Billy Squier, the radio rocker whose band Piper had been signed by A&M instead of Van Halen in 1976. The band was also strongly rumored to be courting a singer who had been moonlighing onstage in
Jesus Christ Superstar
—former Skid Row singer Sebastian Bach.

“The way I think of it, we can make any singer sound good,” Michael Anthony noted. “We’re going to be known as the band that can take any singer and make him famous.”

As mainstream news outlets were still learning how to filter the information morass of cyberspace, a news story based on a fake Internet interview hit wire services claiming that former Whitesnake singer David Coverdale was recording with the band. Coverdale soon denied the allegations, saying he had last seen Eddie in a hotel room in 1993 where the guitarist drank a beer while Coverdale and Jimmy Page had their afternoon tea.

Also under the microscope during summer 1996 was Sass Jordan, a British singer with a music career in Canada. She lived seconds away from Eddie, and even while Sammy was in the band, Sass, Eddie, and Alex spent a lot of time together in 5150. Alex insisted he was casually interested in advancing her career, but Jordan later told Wall of Sound, “I was talking to their manager Ray Danniels and I said, ‘I swear to God, I think they were thinking of having a female singer in the band.’ And he said, ‘Of course they were! Why the hell else do you think you were up there?’ ” Instead, she went on to become a judge on the north-of-the-border talent search show,
Canadian Idol
.

The editor of a music industry tip sheet issued an open letter in the summer of 1996, saying he knew firsthand that Van Halen were probably not rehearsing with Roth before Sammy left, but that they
had
hired another singer—not Cherone. In fact, according to North Dakota country rocker Mitch Malloy, he was hired as Van Halen’s replacement singer in early summer 1996. He had been sleeping in Eddie’s guesthouse, rehearsing with the band and recording a five-song demo including “Jump” and “Why Can’t This Be Love?” On the third day, the band called him to the control room, hugged him, and congratulated him on joining Van Halen.

When the Dave reunion suddenly happened without his knowledge, Malloy claimed he wrote a letter to manager Ray Danniels backing out of the arrangement. “I thought it was a mistake and that they had just made it nearly impossible for any singer to come in and be successful cause now everyone thought Dave was back,” he told MelodicRock.com. He didn’t hear from the band again for several weeks.

Incredibly, Michael Anthony may have also had a hard time getting his calls returned. The band appeared not only to be playing musical singers. According to Roth, the Van Halen brothers were also practicing with new bassists at 5150 at the same time they were testing the waters with him.

Ultimately, the singer Van Halen had quickly tapped to replace Hagar was much younger howler Gary Cherone. Plucked fresh from a Boston production of
Jesus Christ Superstar
himself, Cherone had fronted Van Halen–influenced light metal band Extreme, who disbanded in 1996 after four albums. Cherone had just left Extreme to pursue his solo career, with their next album already halfwritten, shortly after guitarist Nuno Bettencourt left the group.

Like Hagar, Cherone was not discovered through an all-points fifty-state star search. Extreme also happened to be managed by Ray Danniels, who sent over Cherone’s audition demo. The band was reportedly not wowed, but Eddie Van Halen felt differently about Cherone after meeting him. Cherone was a modest, unpretentious rock stylist with a decent track record and some dashing stage moves. For singer number three, Van Halen didn’t want to take over the world again—they just wanted someone they could work with.

Before hiring Cherone, Van Halen put him through the ropes with a handful of songs like “Panama” and “Why Can’t This Be Love?” representing the back catalogs of both other singers. Within an hour they had compiled the first song with their new lineup—“Without You,” originally written to start with the line, “Hey you, wake up, get your shit together.”

“There’s not a hint of LSD—Lead Singer Disease,” Eddie told
The
Inside
. “He’s a brother, a normal guy like Alex, Mike, and me.”

Born north of Boston in the suburb of Malden, Massachusetts, on July 26, 1961, Cherone came into a Catholic household headed by an Army sergeant father and a gym teacher mother. He was the third of five brothers, including his fraternal twin, also a musician. In that sense, Van Halen could joke that they were keeping a spare singer on hand.

Almost fourteen years younger than Hagar, Gary grew up listening to Van Halen. As a teenager he aspired to play basketball but injured his knee and turned to music. In the late 1970s he formed a cover band called Myth with future Extreme drummer Paul Geary. Hardly surprising considering the era, they played Van Halen songs like “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love” and “Dance the Night Away.”

After changing their name to Cherone and the Dream in 1981, the band won MTV’s
Basement Tapes
in 1985, an early call-in talent search where successful regional bands battled for record contracts. Cherone learned the ropes during the 1980s, and then caught the tail end of the glam rock craze with Extreme, whose self-titled debut was released in 1989. The antithesis of airhead West Coast metal, Extreme offered deeper tunes and natural hair. The number 1 ballad “More Than Words” from 1990’s
Extreme II: Pornograffitti
CD was a career high point. Afterward, Extreme supported David Lee Roth’s band on tour. Always open about their Van Halen influence, on their final tour Extreme added “Hot for Teacher” to their set list.

Though he was a much-younger suitor calling on the mother of American hard rock bands, Cherone’s idols came from the same old guard that had inspired Van Halen: Freddie Mercury, Roger Daltrey, and Mick Jagger. Marking a serious notch in his belt, at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in 1992, a long-haired Cherone took the helm of Queen, leading the legendary hard rock band’s three surviving members in a hyperactive rendition of “Hammer to Fall.” His performance endeared him to Queen fans and spoke for his potential beyond Extreme.

Oddly for a rock singer chasing their coattails, Cherone had never seen Van Halen live until joining. Describing how it felt to be chosen for the job, he joked, “It doesn’t suck.”

Van Halen welcomed Cherone to the family like a cute puppy who would one day be called on to pull the sled of their career. Gary took over Eddie’s guesthouse, and Valerie reportedly nicknamed the new singer “Schneider,” after the ever-present handyman character on
One
Day at a Time
. “This is it for life,” said Eddie. “He’s in. If it doesn’t work out for whatever reason, that would pretty much be it for Van Halen. Al and I would just move on, score movies, whatever.”

Eddie delayed his much-needed hip surgery again in anticipation of a quick tour, but he ended up spending a lot of time alone in the 5150 studio. He began recording in his bathroom, writing “on the pot” where he believed God gave him frequent inspiration. His safe haven, the toilet-based studio came complete with rack effects for serious bursts of divine intervention.

The songs just kept coming from Eddie—he briefly wanted
III
to be a double album. Much of the new album featured songs passed over by Roth during sessions the previous summer, though in that time Eddie had conjured dozens more song ideas.

Out of left field, the band chose producer Mike Post, a golfing buddy of Eddie’s and a five-time Grammy-winning legend in soundtrack music. Originally a musician, he played guitar on Sonny and Cher’s hit “I Got You Babe” but soon became engrossed in writing emblematic cops-and-robbers music for television. His experience in rock album production began and ended with Dolly Parton’s
9 to 5.

Post penned one of the most memorable TV theme songs of all time for
The Rockford Files
, not to mention the themes for
Hill Street Blues
,
L.A. Law
,
NYPD Blue
, and
Law & Order
—basically any legendary show with a badge. He also composed for
ChiPs
,
Kojak
, and
Knight
Rider
. His last brush with rock was the 1990’s cult show
Cop Rock
, a Steven Bochco–produced abomination that was like
Cops
meets the “I Can’t Drive 55” music video, where police officers make busts then burst into song.

Most recently Post had worked on
Lethal Weapon 4
, and the worn-out action franchise seemed like a good comparison to the blockbuster Van Halen. If the Van Halen saga had become a long-winded television series, Gary Cherone was a character brought in like Ralph Macchio in the later seasons of
Eight Is Enough
, or George Clooney at the end of
The Facts of Life
. As a late-season replacement, at least he was in good company.

Befitting its strange new cast, season
III
of Van Halen was an eclectic, sometimes incongruous collection. The album began with an instrumental prelude, “Neworld,” with producer Post on piano and Eddie on acoustic guitar, hitting harmonics that led into the first single, “Without You.” Eddie played the scrappy guitar lick using a quarter as a pick. He attached little pieces of Velcro to get a better grip.

“Dirty Water Dog” was an asteroid chunk that had been orbiting around Eddie for ten years, since he first performed the riff on
Saturday Night Live
. “Once” was more of a departure—white soul in the vein of eighties Wham! or Tears for Fears. It was the kind of urban lounge music Roth had been dabbling in during the nineties but couldn’t cool down his personality enough to successfully master.

Cherone’s gritty and emotive voice was not a radical departure from Hagar’s, but he sounded more natural because he was not constantly singing at the highest limits of his range. His background in musical theater was most obvious on “From Afar,” a dramatic showpiece that resembled something by Stephen Sondheim. Many songs on
III
were captured in two or three takes. The guitar solo to the Zeppelin-like “A Year to the Day” was done in one try.

Post’s soundtrack experience surfaced on sound effects like the helicopters at the start of “Fire in the Hole.” He let Eddie loose in his digital sample library, resulting in the timpani booms and other manipulations heard throughout the recording.

“Josephina” was completed late in the process, while an earlier song titled “That’s Why I Love You” was pulled. Written quickly during a phone call, the latter song sounded too firmly planted in Van Halen’s past—a dangerous place to be, Eddie felt, if the new band was ever to be accepted as legitimate.

For opposite reasons, a track called “Why? Because.” featuring Wolfgang Van Halen on vocals was left off the album, judged as too “eclectic.” Eddie did not want to press the patience of “all the Budweiser-drinking guys in the Midwest.”

Van Halen’s not-so-secret weapon Michael Anthony was mostly muzzled on
III
, as Eddie sang more backup vocals, insisting that his voice meshed better with Cherone’s. In fact, “How Many Say I” showcased another side of the Eddie altogether, a pounding rumination on soured friendship that found him seated behind a piano croaking out acrid lyrics like Tom Waits in the late afternoon. Cherone stood off to the side somewhere singing softly in high-pitched harmony. The song was inspired by words Cherone wrote—lyrics Eddie praised as “not all about female body parts,” unlike both Roth’s and Hagar’s.

Cherone was the first Van Halen singer to hand lyrics to Eddie before songwriting, instead of improvising dexterously around the guitar parts like Roth or scribbling lyrics on the hood of his Ferrari in the studio driveway like Hagar. One night while lying in bed with Valerie after putting their son to bed, Eddie read the lyrics to “How Many Say I” while his wife skimmed a script. Apologizing for interrupting their alone time, he scrambled downstairs and composed the music.