Everybody Wants Some: The Van Halen Saga

* ""Good band, even better book...Essential reading for fans.""xa0 ( Record Collector , December 2007) ""Respect is due to authorxa0Ian Christe.xa0 His book is perfectly pitched, capturing both the flamboyant excitement and inherent absurdity...""xa0 ( Classic Rock UK , February 2008) From the Inside Flap What kind of a band turns rock music inside out, sells 75 million albums, and sets concert attendance records, then vanishes—not even appearing on the night of their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Come backstage for a complete close encounter with the multitalented and misunderstood Van Halen, the ultimate American rock stars. For the first time, Everybody Wants Some tells the complete uncensored story of Van Halen, whose charming smiles and musical chemistry survived misfit childhoods, sibling rivalry, nasty bouts with tabloid snoops, painful divorces, bitter band breakups, long-term substance abuse, and harrowing brushes with cancer. You'll follow Eddie and Alex van Halen from their quiet but music-filled boyhoods in Holland through their transformative years in Southern California, where seeing the Dave Clark Five on the Ed Sullivan Show turned them away from classical music and into stone rockers overnight. You'll meet David Lee Roth, whose hyperactive childhood was a prelude to his manic adult life as the ultimate rock showman. And you'll discover why easygoing bassist Michael Anthony, who lent the Van Halen brothers equipment even though he played in a rival local band, responded to his first meeting with Roth by saying, "Get that guy away from me." You'll sit with Sammy Hagar, whose struggles for acceptance as replacement singer led the band to unexpected places—including four consecutive number one albums. And don't forget Gary Cherone—Van Halen's much younger, and nearly forgotten, third singer. After years of struggle as a cover band from Pasadena, ?Van Halen exploded out of the Hollywood rock scene in 1978, and the rest is history . . . and myth . . . and legend . . . and rumor . . . and gossip. Ian Christe separates fact from fiction in his account of the band's most stunning exploits, as they elevated fun with groupies, circus-like stage spectacles, MTV videos, and bizarre contract riders to hedonistic art forms. Christe also reveals the truth behind Roth's separation from the band, Van Halen's great success but difficult relationship with Sammy Hagar, and Eddie's marriage to sweetheart TV actress Valerie Bertinelli. Now firmly ensconced in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Van Halen still grabs headlines whenever someone whispers the magic words, "reunion tour." Everybody Wants Some brings the saga of Van Halen—from young lions to troubled monarchs—to vivid life in all of its exuberant, decadent, vulnerable, and awesome dimensions. The first definitive biography of the ultimate American rock band How did a pair of little Dutch boys trained in classical music grow up to become the nucleus of the most popular heavy metal band of all time? What's the secret behind Eddie Van Halen's incredible fast and furious guitar solos? What makes David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar so wacky? And, are all those stories about groupies, booze bashes, and contract riders true? The naked truth is laid bare in Everybody Wants Some—the real-life story of a rock 'n' roll fantasy come true. Ian Christe is the author of Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal , the definitive "bible" of heavy metal music and culture. He has written about music and technology for Reuters , Spin , Guitar World , Popular Mechanics , Wired , Salon.com , and Blender . He appears frequently on VH1, VH1-Classic, MTV2, and in documentary films, and he comments often for media outlets like Fox News , MSNBC , and USA Weekend . Since 2004, his Bloody Roots show has appeared weekly on Sirius Satellite Radio. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Everybody Wants Some The Van Halen saga By Ian Christe John Wiley & Sons Copyright © 2007 Ian ChristeAll right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-470-03910-6 Chapter One THE IMMIGRANT SONG Like the stories of other great Americans from Henry Ford to Walt Disney to Fievel the Mouse, the saga of Van Halen begins in an ancient land, far from the United States and its constant supply of hot water and electricity. As a narrator would say in the old movies: Among the windmills, tulips, and wooden shoes of lovely Amsterdam, Holland, there once lived a kindly musician named Jan van Halen. Born in 1920, van Halen played saxophone and clarinet everywhere, from political events to radio orchestras to circus tents. During World War II, he was reportedly captured while fighting the Nazis, and forced to tour Germany as a prisoner playing propaganda music for the hated Third Reich. When he was released after the war, he traveled to Indonesia, where he met and fell in love with an Indonesian beauty, Eugenia van Beers. She was older, born in 1914, but they married and returned to Amsterdam, to Michelangelostraat, where a baby boy, Alexander Arthur van Halen, was born on May 8, 1953. Mr. van Halen worked his horns in every venue imaginable, but a musician's life was unsteady and nomadic. Shortly after the birth of second son Edward Lodwijk van Halen, on January 26, 1955, the young family moved to Rozemarijnstraat in Nijmegen, Holland. The proud father wanted his sons to someday become famous musicians, and he set the bar high for his second son-naming Edward Lodwijk after master composer Ludwig van Beethoven. The van Halen house was alive with music. Always working on his tone, Jan played along with classical records at home, and the family always listened to his radio broadcasts together. When Jan joined the Dutch air force band, his little boys paraded through the house banging on pans and pot lids while their daddy practiced military marches. "The earliest memories I have about music are from our father," Alex said. "You couldn't help but be touched by music-we were surrounded by it." Since Jan didn't have the patience to teach the boys about music, he sent them to lessons to become concert pianists. At six years old, Edward was already studying piano with a strict seventy-two-year-old Russian teacher. He and Alex remained in lessons, practicing Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, for nearly ten years. On one rare occasion when Alex didn't feel like practicing, he recalled his mother placing his hands on the kitchen table and rapping them sharply with a wooden spoon. When they were old enough, Alex and Edward joined their father at his gigs. Reaching his finest form, Jan joined the Ton Wijkamp Quintet, which took top prize at Holland's esteemed Loosdrecht Jazz Festival in 1960. As they traveled all around Holland and sometimes across the border to Germany, the boys saw the practical aspects of a musical career firsthand, and on some of the more rustic and ribald nights they discovered the perks-Alex reported losing his virginity at age nine after one of his dad's gigs. Letters from Eugenia's relatives told of a better life in the United States, and slowly lured the van Halens to try their luck in the land of opportunity. At the end of winter 1962, Jan and Eugenia gathered their two boys and the family's Dutch-made Rippen piano and set sail on a nine-day Atlantic passage with little more than seventy-five Dutch guilders in their pockets. Jan played with the band aboard the ship to pay for the expedition. Eddie and Alex also showed off their piano training, passing the hat among passengers for tips. And so the musical urchins arrived in the New World, all seasoned and ready to work. A familiar part of many immigrant stories, Jan's first fateful move on reaching New York was to Americanize his surname, upgrading the antique "van Halen" to the slick "Van Halen," symbolically starting over as a new man. After the stopover in New York, the newly minted Van Halen clan boarded a four-day train to California, in the corner of the country where the American dream was still available for no money down. They found a small bungalow in Pasadena where they would live together as a family for almost twenty years. Bushy-headed Alex and little Dutch boy Edward arrived in California with the splinters from wooden clogs still in their feet. Speaking almost no English, they smiled and said yes to anything. The second English word they learned was "accident." Edward remained extremely shy, and his bolder brother, Alex, protected him. The pair bonded tightly-comparing notes every day after school on what they'd learned on the playground. They began to blend in, riding bikes with neighbor kids, climbing into their tree house, and beating the hell out of each other. Mr. Van Halen continued playing in wedding bands at night but kept several day jobs. He worked as a janitor, and when necessary walked five miles each way to wash dishes at Arcadia Methodist Hospital. He reinforced the boys' enthusiasm for music, smiling as they played along with the radio on cardboard guitars, using empty ice-cream tubs for drums. California was living up to its promise of paradise-if only there were more kids in the family: "I always asked my mom where our bass player was," Eddie said. Around the holidays, the family played music together, with Eugenia seated at a huge electric organ. Yet Mrs. Van Halen was more traditional, and very concerned with taking care of the family. Though she pushed the boys to practice their music lessons, she hated the idea that they would eventually become musicians. Sometimes she was as much a mother to playful Jan as she was to her sons. "The whole time I was growing up," Eddie told Guitar World , "my mom used to call me a 'nothing nut-just like your father.' When you grow up that way, it's not conducive for self-esteem." When they reached the fourth and fifth grades, the Van Halen brothers began imitating acts from The Ed Sullivan Show like the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five, whose "Glad All Over" awoke Edward to a new kind of popular music. These were the first bands to break into the pop charts because schoolkids liked them-and Eddie and Alex were schoolkids who could already play music. So at Hamilton Elementary School they formed their first band, the Broken Combs, with Alex on saxophone like his father, Edward on piano, and various schoolmates including Brian Hill on drums, Kevin Hill on an Emenee-brand plastic guitar, and Don Ferris on second sax. Playing original songs like "Rumpus" and "Boogie Booger" at hot venues like the school lunchroom, Alex and Eddie overcame their awkwardness adapting to American ways. Forget about fitting in-now they were somebody special. "Music was my way of getting around shyness," Eddie later told Guitar World . There were other ways to steel a timid heart. When Eddie was twelve years old, he was attacked and bitten by a German shepherd while on a family trip a few miles from home. To quell his younger son's distress and numb the pain, his father prescribed a shot of vodka and a Pall Mall cigarette on the spot-inducting the kid into two lifetime habits. By junior high school, the Van Halen brothers had both picked up the violin, and Alex was good enough to make the all-city orchestra. But the television tempted them with a wilder kind of music. Eddie remembered sitting on the couch, plucking out the cool detective theme to Peter Gunn on his violin strings. Classical music didn't stand a chance-the boys wanted to play music standing up. Hoping to keep Alex's musical progress on the level, his parents bought him a nylon-string guitar and sent him to flamenco lessons. Meanwhile, Eddie started a paper route. "The only honest job I ever had," he later joked. He bought a $125 St. George drum set and began studying songs by the Dave Clark Five. Alex learned slowly on the guitar. He upgraded to a cheap electric and a Silvertone amp but remained frustrated by his progress. So while Eddie was out making collections for his newspapers, Alex slid behind the drums and started banging away, copying licks by Buddy Rich. Soon he mastered the primitive caveman rolls of "Wipe Out" by the Surfaris, a high mark of distinction in any school yard. Feeling somewhat frustrated at the unfair turn of events, Eddie picked up Alex's guitar to show that turnabout was fair play. When he impressed his older brother by learning "Blues Theme" by the Arrows, the true natural order of things quickly became obvious. By age twelve, Edward owned a $100 four-pickup Teisco Del Ray electric guitar from Sears and was tackling instrumentals like "Walk Don't Run" by the Ventures. His first guitar amp was a chicken-wire model handmade by a friend of his dad's. Eddie's early guitar instructor in absentia was Eric Clapton, the heaviest player of the day, as Eddie figured out every riff and solo that Clapton recorded with the Yardbirds and Cream. He tried painfully to mimic the records but later admitted his versions never sounded quite right-his biggest fault was being unable to avoid his own style. As they surrendered to the growing rock and roll scene, the Van Halens became infatuated with Jimmy Page in the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck from the Jeff Beck Group, and the unpredictable Jimi Hendrix. Surprisingly, considering the comparisons that came later, Eddie was not so into the wilder, free-form playing of Hendrix. "He used a lot of effects, and I couldn't afford the wah wah pedals and fuzzbox," he said. Whenever Eddie broke the rules or neglected his piano, Eugenia Van Halen would lock his guitar in the closet for a week, the ultimate punishment. Friends at school also recalled Eddie getting in trouble for touching the sacred Steinway concert piano, the pride of the music department-but the penalties were light thanks to his aptitude and his impish grin. Remaining in lessons until age sixteen with a new, typically strict Lithuanian teacher named Staf Kalvitis, Eddie took top prize at Long Beach City College's youth piano competitions for three years running. The first year, he missed accepting the prize onstage. Sitting in the stands when they called his name, he froze, pretending not to hear the announcement. He didn't know how to accept an accolade. Though his fingers were dazzling, Eddie could never read sheet music as well as he should have. Alex was an excellent sight reader, but Eddie's performances were painstakingly crammed into his brain note by note, phrase by phrase, in advance. The judges at piano contests praised his unusual interpretations, but as far as he could tell he was playing it straight. "The only reason they ever wrote music down is because they didn't have tape machines," Eddie later complained. "Do you think Beethoven or Bach would ever have written things down if they had twenty-four-track tape machines?" Since the Van Halen home was too small to host band practice, the brothers keyed into jamming with local kids whose houses had garages. They formed a band called Revolver, and progressed from the Ventures to heavier covers by Cream and Mountain-power trios centered around guitar and drums. "I approached the drums not as an instrument, per se," Alex remembered, "but more as an attitude-viciously attacking something" with the biggest, heaviest drumsticks available. At thirteen, Alex began subbing for the drummer in his dad's wedding band, keeping time to jazz and salsa tunes driven by clarinet and accordion. Eddie frequently joined on bass, playing the oompah music lines. "One of Al and my first gigs together was with my dad at the La Merada Country Club," Eddie recalled. "We'd be the little freak sideshow while the band took a break. I would play piano or guitar and Al would play drums." The first night on the floor, the boys passed a hat around to the dancing couples and collected twenty-two dollars. Their father gave each of them five dollars, and said: "Welcome to the music business, boys." * * * David Lee Roth was born on October 10, 1953, in Bloomington, Indiana, where his achievement-oriented father, Nathan, went to medical school. After the senior Roth graduated, he moved his family several times, first to a small ranch in Newcastle, Indiana, where Dr. Roth became the caretaker of a menagerie of horses and swans. Next the parents took David and his two sisters, Allison and Lisa, to the East Coast, settling on East Alton Court in Brookline, Massachusetts, outside Boston. David was an energetic kid, but he was plagued by allergies and fought with health problems that forced him to wear leg braces from almost the time he could walk until age four. Then he was shipped off to therapy for the better part of a decade. At nine years old, he began three intensive years of clinical treatment for hyperactivity. He had a few healthy outlets-Roth's parents called his dinner-hour routines "Monkey Hour," when he acted out cartoons and sang revved-up vaudeville songs for dinner guests. Though his mother, Sibyl, taught high school music and language classes, Roth claimed his parents were nowhere near as tuneful as the Van Halen family. "I had no musical influences to speak of," he told MTV. "My idols were always Genghis Khan, or Muhammad Ali, or Alexander the Great, or the guy who invented McDonald's hamburgers." By his telling, he wasn't suffering from lack of concentration. Everyone else was simply having trouble playing their part in his continuous mental picture show, a fast, animated flipbook of Mad magazine and Playboy . Dave was obsessed with Bugs Bunny, Tarzan, and blackface song-and-dance man Al Jolson, whose songs he played on old brittle clay 78s. Later, he loved Elvis Presley-but not the music, just the movies. While Roth's head was swimming in pop culture, his roots were knotted tightly around the Old World-his grandparents were Ukrainian Jews who traded the mountains and steppes of Eastern Europe for the sweltering cornfields of the Midwest. In fact, all four of his grandparents spoke Russian. "My great-granddaddy died dancing," he later joked with a TV interviewer, "at the end of a rope." When Roth was seven, his movie-buff dad took him to see Some Like It Hot , the classic Billy Wilder film where Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon dress in drag to get close to Marilyn Monroe. "Life turned into an ongoing quest to be in that movie, just somewhere in that movie," Roth told Rolling Stone . On the way home that night, while his eyes were still boggled, his dad detailed the plot to Robin Hood -the movie Mrs. Roth thought he was taking their son to see. The rambunctious David found a kindred spirit in his uncle Manny Roth, a bohemian hepcat whose small Caf Wha? on MacDougal Street was a nexus of New York's Greenwich Village beatnik scene in the early 1960s. Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen, Bill Cosby, and Richard Pryor all tempered their antiestablishment acts there before a highly engaged cosmopolitan audience. "New York certainly reflects the dinner table I grew up with," Roth later told an interviewer. "Obviously it encouraged me." Summer trips to New York impressed on young David Roth that, guidance counselors and behavior therapists be damned, there was a big wide world that craved and coveted extravagant personalities. Uncle Manny bought him a radio for his eighth birthday, hoping to feed the kid some inspiration. "I put it on, and there was Ray Charles singing 'Crying Time,'" David said, "and I just knew I had to be on the radio." The Roths left the East Coast for California in 1963, when Dave was ten, just in time to fall under the spell of the Beach Boys in their prime-America's only real defense against the Beatles. From his new home in Altadena, young Dave shuffled off with his tousled hair and tennis shoes to fourth grade at the Altadena School. Meanwhile, Dr. Roth's ophthalmology practice thrived-he became a successful eye doctor, and was also active in local theater productions. Throughout junior high, Roth remembered a poster hanging over his bed given to him by his father, picturing two chickens meeting a turkey above the caption "To thine own self be true." (Continues...) Excerpted from Everybody Wants Some by Ian Christe Copyright © 2007 by Ian Christe. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. 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