Everybody Wants Some (35 page)

Goldmine
reported ex-manager Ray Danniels saying that Eddie’s problem was that he’d been a rock star all his life, and had lost touch with reality. “That’s an understatement!” Danniels emphasized. 

Sammy Hagar agreed there was a problem. “Otherwise he’d be playing music, and the guy hasn’t played music for I don’t know how long,” he told MelodicRock.com. “Yes, I’m really down on Eddie for wasting his life.”

In 2003, Van Halen became eligible for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, raising hopes that they would be inducted—an excellent inducement to leave the house and play. “It’s very rare that you run into a McCartney-Lennon or a Jagger-Richards kind of thing,” Roth told Howard Stern. “That’s a luck scenario that you should happen to geographically collide with somebody with the same inspiration and enthusiasm. And I treasure it and salute it whenever I hear it on the radio. Makes me drive a little bit faster.”

Van Halen made the first cut of thirty potential candidates, yet the band seemed to be a can of worms the Cleveland rock boosters didn’t want to touch. The museum put Mike’s original Jack Daniel’s bass on display and left the rest to conjecture. “I don’t know how Sammy would react, and it really doesn’t matter at this point,” Alex once mused to
The
Inside
. “If anyone would feel awkward playing together, it would be Roth.”

Asked about reuniting for the Hall of Fame by the
Oregonian
, Roth described the scene in his head. “I’m going to look at Mike Anthony and say, ‘It was a great time, and you were there.’ I will look at the drummer and say, ‘We were creative and fearless, and you were there.’ I will look at Eddie and say, ‘Hey man, we made a contribution, and you were there.’ I will look at Sammy and say, ‘You weren’t there!’

“There will have to be an intervention with Eddie before we even start talking again about going out on tour or making an album,” he continued. “I don’t want to get everybody worked up again with all of the millions of dollars of expectations. On the positive side, I think ‘hope springs eternal’ is an axiom to live by.”

Six years after Van Halen last toured supporting
III
, Sammy Hagar passed through California for a family wedding. While in the area, he phoned Alex Van Halen, and the two estranged friends spent a day together testing the water, fishing for whatever might be left of their chemistry. While Sammy had at least been on the road playing Van Halen songs with Michael Anthony and the Waboritas, Alex had only infrequently been able to rouse his main collaborator, Eddie, for an occasional jam session. After spending dinner talking about brighter times, Alex was ready to consider playing with Sammy again—if Eddie felt the same.

Eddie had not exactly deluged the world with soundtrack music or solo records in the four years since Van Halen had virtually shut down. He claimed to have countless hours of songs ready for release, material he described as “a fat fucking cabernet.” Vowing to “serve no riff before its time,” he was very aware that the world was still waiting for his next notes, and insisted he was being productive. “If I dropped dead right now, there’d be music for at least twenty to thirty CDs,” he said. Caught at home early one morning by Iowa radio hosts Dwyer and Michaels, he played and sang them a song he was working on: “Death by Hollywood, a little too fabulous for his own good.”

According to MTV, Eddie’s guitar had come out of the case in early 2003 during a bizarre audition for Limp Bizkit, who were then conducting a national public search for a guitarist. When Eddie jammed with the band, they reined in their typical down-tuned rap metal and played sharp hard rock in the vein of classic Van Halen. Not exactly a pipeline to the future of rock music, the real-life mash-up was a crazy tear in the fabric of the rock universe. The story grew strange, however, when Eddie allegedly returned to the rehearsal area twenty minutes after leaving, agitated and looking for his guitar. They insisted he had taken it with him, but he persisted in grilling them suspiciously.

Shortly after his reconciliation with Alex in early 2004, Sammy took a deep breath and called Eddie. “It’s like old times as friends, but nothing more than that,” Hagar said afterward. “It’s great to have open communications with some old friends again, much better than being in a maze.”

Before long, temptation called the Hagar era of Van Halen back into active duty. No apologies were offered, but the band could communicate enough to work together. “Some people have different memories of what happened,” Hagar said. “We decided to leave it at that. We started out like it never happened.”

Now that he and Sammy were back on the same team, Alex offered CNN his opinion on the 2002 Sam & Dave tour: “I felt bad for Sam, I’ll tell you the truth!”

In March, Van Halen hired a booking agent at the William Morris Agency. The band also signed with a manager, Irving Azoff, after nearly five years adrift. Longtime minder of Journey and more recently Christina Aguilera, Azoff had also looked after Sammy Hagar’s business for several years. The allegiances of managers with potential conflicts of interest had caused problems in Van Halen before, but at this stage the band desperately needed a cohesive business strategy.

Hagar put the Waboritas on temporary hold while Van Halen booked a massive summer reunion tour. Offers reportedly materialized from Kiss, Aerosmith, and Bon Jovi to assemble a package, but Azoff proceeded with caution. Calling the process “admittedly dysfunctional,” he kept press interviews to a minimum and distributed only one new photo of the band. Bringing Van Halen back to life was a delicate operation—for example, most of the band’s crew now worked for Hagar and were reticent to return to Van Halen after being unceremoniously dumped during the late 1990s.

“I’ll speak for myself,” Alex told
USA Today
about how things went down in 1996. “We made a mistake. The whole thing unraveled. We were buddies for 11 years, and all of a sudden it stopped. We’ll take full responsibility for what happened, but there were outside forces that tried to drive wedges between people, and you don’t always get the full picture. Before you know it, decisions are being made for you.”

After Sammy and the Van Halen brothers were on board, Eddie astonishingly didn’t want Michael Anthony involved in the tour. The two men had not spoken to each other in two years, and Mike claimed he was forced to take a pay cut in order to participate, that basically he and Sammy were contract employees. “I don’t know how he was going to call it a reunion,” Anthony told
Burrn!
“but I basically had to work out a deal with Irving Azoff’s management company in order to be part of this thing.”

Said Mike, “I had to sign off on any kind of rights I had as far as the name or the logo or anything I do with the band. That was something that Eddie was controlling.”

The brothers had been subtly knocking the bassist for years, often telling interviewers they didn’t bother putting bass in their stage monitors. Outside the band, few knew how tenuous his position had become. “I’ve always felt sorry for Mike,” Sammy Hagar later commented to
The
Road
. “I was the only guy who stood up for him. He’s in trouble now, because he’s got no one to stick up for him. I fought for Mike all the time. The brothers just got him by the balls.”

With their house coming in order, the refreshed Van Halen signed a one-record deal with Warner Strategic Marketing for another greatest hits compilation. The double-disc
Best of Both Worlds
was released on July 20, 2004, and went platinum in six weeks—reassuring everyone that the commercially flatlined
III
was just an aberration that could be blamed on pushing the record-buying public one singer too far.

Suffering from oddball sequencing,
The Best of Both Worlds
opened with “Eruption” and more or less zigzagged between Roth and Hagar songs, an agonizing dilemma for loyalists from both camps who dreaded sitting through “Dreams” to hear “Hot for Teacher,” or vice versa. Curiously, not a single picture of Roth appeared in the package except on two postage-stamp-size album covers, and he was only mentioned twice in the liner notes. Worse yet for Gary Cherone, none of his songs even made the cut.

Like
Best of Volume I
’s new tracks with Roth in 1996,
The Best of
Both Worlds
featured three new Sammy cuts: “It’s About Time” was a caustic staccato nod to nineties headbangers like Pantera. “Up for Breakfast” was a raunchy dirt-road rocker with sexual metaphors by Sammy based around breakfast food. The third new song, “Learning to See,” was a soul-searching bag of countrified sap out of Bon Jovi’s hymnal, recorded using a waterlogged guitar that Eddie clamped onto barstools and played horizontally like a jerry-rigged lap steel.

After returning to Eddie’s creative incubator, Hagar vouched for the library of unreleased songs scattered around 5150. “There is enough music for one hundred years in that studio laying on the floor,” he remarked. Yet for the first time in Van Halen’s history, these new compositions were not credited to the entire group. Michael Anthony was excluded. In fact, Eddie played bass on the three new songs, strength-ening suspicions he had recorded bass on other tracks throughout the years—a practice Roth claimed began as early as
Fair Warning
. By the time Mike was asked back, all that was left for him to do was add backing vocals to the essentially finished tracks.

The collection made it pretty clear which world the band thought was best—besides beginning with three new Hagar songs, the double-disc set ended with three live Hagar versions of “Jump,” “Panama,” and “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love.” While punishing Roth for being a pain in the ass during negotiations, the whole package served as tour promotion: a reminder to Van Halen fans to put the kids to bed and sneak out for a pricey night on the town with Van Halen.

Van Halen’s 2004 tour began on June 11 in Greensboro, North Carolina, their first show since 1998. The stage was a giant VH circle logo, with the band running around the rings or confined to the triangular center, while a chosen group of fans watched from within the stage in the vein of Metallica’s famous Snakepit design from the early nineties. Unknown bands like Silvertide, Shinedown, Laidlaw, and Rose Hill Drive were chosen to open various shows—mainly to make sure the equipment was working while the crowd arrived and found their seats. Guitarist Nick Perri from Silvertide said admiringly that Eddie still disappeared into a backstage “closet”—now a large dressing room—to warm up for hours before a gig.

Compared to the jolly tranquility of the Van Hagar era, this meeting of Van Halen and Sammy Hagar rocked way harder. The band teased its way through the night, tossing off familiar riffs then jumping into different songs. The show began with a bang, as Sammy shouted, “Hello, baby,” signaling the start of “Good Enough,” only to rip into “Jump.” In fact, Sammy performed plenty of songs he had shied away from during his ten years in Van Halen, even the notoriously Roth-stamped “Unchained.” Standing right in the eye of the storm, the band also played “Humans Being,” the song from
Twister
that had contributed so much to their breakup, while giant video screens ran clips of tornado footage.

Dressed in red stage clothes with a “Red Rocker” inlay fretboard on his guitar, there was no masking of Sammy’s solo artist identity this time. After marinating in the Waboritas for five years, his voice was loose and raspy, and he was wisely willing to howl in a lower range. For some reason, the hard rock heartthrob Sammy Hagar I had immediately become the soft rock siren Sammy Hagar II when he joined Van Halen in 1985. The recent years as a solo artist saw the rougher edges flourish again—this thick, squat Sammy Hager III finally had the balls to own the microphone and sing for Van Halen.

Unfortunately, when Sammy cleared the stage for solo showpieces like “Eagles Fly,” the sappy “Learning to See,” or Bob Dylan’s dopey “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”—better known as the “Everybody Must Get Stoned” song—the Sammy Hagar II of headset microphones hijacked the night. During the unlikely segment that resembled a Bryan Adams concert more than a Van Halen reunion, Sammy played guitar solos while the rest of the band sought refuge behind the amps.

As could be expected given his lowered status, Michael Anthony’s bass solo was painfully short, but with his Jack Daniel’s bass recalled to duty he remained the raging bull of the evening, squalling into his wall of amplifiers and bounding over the stage. Trading off for the short solo, he sang most of the lead vocals to long-lost classic “Somebody Get Me a Doctor.” Sammy pitched in, but Mike’s impossibly high backing harmonies still rang clear.

Alex seemed to be bashing for his life. Far from out of practice, time away from the band seemed to have honed his chops. He had only begun practicing classic drum rudiments in the early 1990s, with eight Van Halen albums already under his headband—a career point where most drummers slack off considerably. Though he continually came across as aloof and detached after shows, his lack of interaction was just advancing with his hearing loss—his long-suffering ears were now ringing down to the brain stem.

Back from the edge after beating cancer, Eddie was screaming to be useful—a lit-up hellion, not the smiling waif of past tours. He indulged in onstage jamming when the mood struck. His lengthy solo tied “Eruption” with “Cathedral” through a flurry of connected riffs. He used his whammy bar like a clarinet player would use breath control, swooping notes upward then downward with extra momentum. Though no longer an enfant terrible, he looked as fit as Bruce Lee and couldn’t stop the high jumps and knee slides he had been doing since Van Halen started playing stages big enough to fly across.

When at his blazing best onstage, Eddie proved to still be the original high-speed shredder, in total command of the guitar. Some nights, he seemed to be off his bearings, as in Chicago, where he petered out and excused himself to the fans, saying “I done run out of gas!” He insisted he was following through on his newfound freedom. “This was the first time ever that I wasn’t nervous when I got onstage,” he told radio hosts Dwyer and Michaels. “I was actually writing onstage, coming up with stuff while I was playing.”