Edward Van Halen: A Definitive Biography (11 page)

Valerie had only recently familiarized herself with Van Halen, having heard the debut album and then just before the show
Woman
and
Children
First
. She recognized “Everybody Wants Some!” from the radio, a song that never charted, but was growing into becoming the penultimate representation of Van Halen. Valerie also recognized that she found Edward attractive—his pose on the back of the album cover really captured her attention.

Backstage before the show, she posed for pictures and gave the M&Ms to Alex and then Michael. She was waiting for Eddie and Dave but was told they were “prepping for the show.” Eddie came out and stopped to give her a glance, but just smiled and waved and headed for the stage. Valerie watched the show from Ed’s side of the stage and he flirted with her throughout the show. After the show, she gave Dave his M&Ms. Valerie claims she semi-flirted with a charming Dave for several minutes. Dave’s version is that he had “no idea who she was. Had no interest at all, so she fixed her eye on the door to Ed’s dressing room.” She was then taken to meet Ed who was in the middle of a conversation with his brother. Valerie said that they politely brought her into their conversation. Eddie asked her if she like
Women
and
Children
First
and she told him that she loved it, but admitted Elton John was her main thing.

After talking for a while after the show, the party moved to the motel where the band was staying where Valerie and Ed and the entourage sat around the pool smoking and drinking the night away. During their conversation, she was surprised to learn that Ed and Al did indeed still reside at home with their parents when they weren’t on the road. Before long, without even a kiss, Ed boarded the bus with Valerie’s number and promised to give her a call. Valerie was shocked and mystified that Ed did not call for three days. But when he finally did, he invited her to join him in Oklahoma for their next show. She hopped on the next plane out and was there.

She again watched him from the wings of the stage and Ed admitted she made him nervous. Given that Ed was also performing for thousands of other people, Valerie was sure that was a fair sign something was definitely brewing. After the show, they finally started to really share their stories and Eddie told her all about coming to America and his mom and dad. Valerie prodded Ed more about the revelation that he and Al still lived at home. Eddie essentially just admitted that they were on tour for ten months a year, so it was just easier for the time being. But he also confessed to Valerie that his mother Eugenia continually had no faith in the band and still expected Ed to continue his education as soon as possible. Like a gentleman, Ed had gotten Valerie her own room that night, and even though Valerie made overtures, Edward, for reasons of his own, chose not to bed her until he got to know her better.

Valerie continued to travel on the road with Edward through most of the rest of the tour, often sleeping on her own private bunk on a tour bus. A solid month into their blossoming relationship, Ed revealed to Valerie that at some point earlier in his life, a long-term girlfriend cheated on him with a supposed close friend. That apparently burned him on opening himself up to any woman seriously, and also explains his sexual rampages on the early tours. After a brief break, Valerie joined back up with Eddie on September 15 in Phoenix. Yet again, Eddie had gotten Valerie her own room, although it was adjoining. Valerie opened the door between the suites and found Edward in tears.
Guitar
Player
had just named him Best Rock Guitarist yet again, and apparently, for whatever reason, it set Dave off and Dave gave Ed a really hard time during sound check that afternoon, allegedly making claims that Ed thought he was “hot shit.” Obviously, it was a textbook case of jealousy and rivalry. This one seriously hurt Ed and belittled him. As he wept with Valerie, they told each other they loved each other and made love for the first time.

After the band played a two-night stand in September in L.A., Valerie officially met Eugenia and Jan, who treated her very sweetly. However, Jan originally highly objected to the affair when he first heard about it, telling Edward he disapproved because Valerie was only 15. Ed humorously explained to his father that he had been watching reruns, and assured him that Valerie was actually 20.

In Valerie’s autobiography
Losing
It
, she revealed that Edward had to handle an ugly paternity case from “a girl from his past.” The suit ultimately proved false, and the budding couple finally had a brief amount of time to spend with each other one on one. Ed finally moved out and into Valerie’s place, which they were sharing with Valerie’s brother Drew and his girlfriend. While Ed and Drew generally got along, Valerie did once come across them in a full-blown fist fight outside of the house. Nevertheless, they were enjoying a bit of domesticity and privacy at Valerie’s estate, although they were often besieged by groupies on the prowl for Edward.

The two extremely young, famous people had fallen hardcore for each other and there was no turning back. Marriage was being discussed openly and not so subtle trips were made to jewelry stores. They even decided upon the exact $8,000 ring they would buy if they were to actually get married. Ed tricked Valerie into thinking he hadn’t purchased the ring only to break it out on December 8, 1980. He proposed to her on one knee. Ed said, “By the way, I bought the ring. Will you marry me?” Valerie immediately accepted and they began to celebrate only to experience a very rude interruption. A runner from
One
Day
at
a
Time
was bringing a script to Valerie and walked into their glee with the question, “Did you hear?” He broke the news to them that John Lennon had just been shot and killed. They began talking non-stop about John and The Beatles and stayed glued to the TV for information. Valerie experienced her first pangs of anxiety about the groupies that followed Ed and the band incessantly.

CHAPTER 12 

“Does it seem cold in here to you?”

After the proposal, Edward sunk himself into the creative process for
Fair
Warning
. Often characterized as Van Halen’s “dark” album, it really is Van Halen’s first “serious” album. As per Valerie, Ed was working with his faithful engineer Donn Landee around the clock capturing ideas and experimenting with different studio tricks until Edward “ran out of booze, coke, energy, inspiration, or all of the above.” Valerie admitted that Edward’s nocturnal schedule and her daytime shooting schedule simply did not mesh, and she kept up with Eddie by drinking and doing cocaine through the night. The couple went to the priest who was to perform their ceremony for the typical Catholic Church pre-marriage compatibility exam. According to Val, “As we filled out the forms at home, we each held a little vial of coke. If you ask me, these aren’t two people who should be making decisions about the rest of their lives.”

“Between 1980 and 1984, I did a lot of blow,” Edward told
Rolling
Stone
. “And drinking… . I always got hammered to be able to cope. I have zero social skills.” Consequently, he said that he would get drunk and make an ass out of himself.

Nevertheless, they plowed on and began planning the wedding. Apparently, the guys in the band suggested that Ed slow down, after all, they had only known each other for four and a half months. Dave especially urged him to hold off and later admitted being surprised when Ed went through with it. The wedding planning caused the first real friction between the couple when Ed once yelled at Valerie to just leave him alone. Apparently, Edward then went off to the studio and composed the hauntingly beautiful, psychedelic, dark, groundbreaking synthesizer masterpiece “Sunday Afternoon in the Park.” When Ed told her that he came up with the track after a fight they had, she replied that she was flattered to “inspire cheerful songs.” Whatever the inspiration, the rock world was better for it. It is simply one of the most amazing pieces of aural art ever captured.

Unfortunately, during the creative process for
Fair
Warning
, Dave and Edward’s relationship became more complicated than ever, most likely over petty jealousy over who was getting more attention from where. In fact, Eddie said that Roth was really pissed off about the marriage. “I think it pissed him off because all of the sudden I got a whole other side of the limelight he wanted. The tabloids and
People
Magazine
kind of shit.” On the other hand, a poster of Dave—and Dave alone—was included inside the album jacket along with the record when
Women
and
Children
First
came out. It is a now famous image which was captured by world renowned photographer Helmut Newton. That poster went up on the wall of every girl’s room that bought the album. In January 1981,
Guitar
World
featured Edward on the cover with the tagline, “The World’s Greatest Guitarist?” Dave alone was on the cover of the May 1980 issue of
Circus
. The deal certainly went both ways.

Dave had also just returned from a solo journey through the jungles of South America and eventually had a heavy life experience in Haiti where he had been absorbing the colorful life of the Third World until he came across a man who was literally starving to death and it changed him. Almost immediately, Dave was done with everybody wanting some and was moving onto walking these stinkin’ streets past the crazies on his block. That was another element of the “darkness” of
Fair
Warning
.

During this window, things apparently got so bad that Edward, clearly not in his right mind, approached Gene Simmons about joining KISS in some capacity. Ed apparently showed some of the synthesizer material he’d been working on (possibly “Sunday Afternoon in the Park”) and suggested he join and bring in the keyboard and make a change to KISS’s makeup. Possibly not taking the whole situation seriously, as it shouldn’t have been, Gene pointed him back to Dave and told him to work it out.

Fortunately, things did work out and the band produced their greatest work to date, and possibly of their career. “Mean Streets,” with its mind-blowing instrumental introduction that literally came across as simply
impossible
to play, to the pre-eminent Van Halen stadium rocker “Unchained,”
Fair
Warning
was a
masterpiece
from start to finish. The album was full of great variety with out and out stompers like “Sinner’s Swing!” and the smooth “Push Comes to Shove” to the incredible—and finally realized—synthesizer work on “Sunday Afternoon in the Park” and its companion piece “One Foot Out the Door.” The album is a landmark in rock history. The album took longer to record than any other Van Halen LP because, as Ed later told Jas Obrecht, “I did more overdubs, and it just took more time. There were more things on tape that had to be mixed. You know? I did so many different guitar parts and stuff, that the mixing took longer.”

At that exact same time, Ed and Val were still trying to plan a wedding. Apparently, Ed was upset that Dave turned down his request to be a groomsman; who knows what had been going on that particular day. But Dave made up for it by buying Ed’s white tuxedo that he would wear during his exchange of vows.

The day of the wedding, April 11, 1981, Ed had a bout of nerves and ended up drinking a bit too much, nearly fainting several times. However, he pulled it together in time for the ceremony, which went off without a hitch. Alex was his best man. The wedding ended up becoming a huge event, with over 400 people invited, mainly because Ed and Val didn’t want to leave anyone out. The ceremony was a Catholic affair, reflecting both Eddie and Valerie’s background and upbringing, and took place at St. Paul the Apostle Church in Westwood, California.

But the wedding day partying level was slightly out of control. Dave recalled, “Cut to the upstairs at the reception, the Beverly Hills Hotel, and Ed and I are doing blow and taking turns holding each other around the waist so we don’t plunge head first into the toilet from dry heaving.” Valerie claimed the night ended with her passing out on the bed still in her wedding dress while Ed fell asleep in the bathroom. On their way home the next morning, Ed was pulled over for speeding and the officer noticed an open bottle of champagne in the car. The cop recognized Ed and let him off.

Two weeks after the wedding,
Fair
Warning
was released and went to #5 on the
Billboard
charts. Even though the album was an artistic masterpiece, there was not a single track Warner Brothers deemed worthy of release as a single. Worse yet, in purely numerical terms, each Van Halen record had been selling slightly less and less. Of course, it is hard to consider that a problem when the albums are still going platinum. But pressure from above started creeping into the situation which only served to further heighten tensions between Ed and Dave, and Ed and Dave and the record company.

The
Fair
Warning
Tour

The five-month
Fair
Warning
tour that started in May of 1981 would be their shortest yet. The following month, their Oakland shows were filmed which produced the live “Unchained,” “So This Is Love?,” and “Hear About it Later” videos that became staples of very early MTV. One of the earliest iconic images of Eddie was from these videos: shaggy black hair, shirtless, white half-pants, and red-striped stockings performing his classic trademark bent-legged jump. This was the first time a great deal of people got a glimpse of what Ed looked like while actually playing. I was only nine and I remember coming away from those videos thinking, “Man, those guys are tough.” Three out of four were shirtless, which, around 1980, was about the toughest an older guy could look to a little kid, not to mention the gong being on fire. They reminded me of the gang members I had seen when
West
Side
Story
came on TV.

That June, Edward would cross paths with Geddy Lee yet again. Almost exactly a year later, Van Halen and Rush were booked at separate venues in Las Vegas. For whatever particular reason, Rush put it out there that Van Halen was officially banned from their show. Who knows if VH asked to be invited or if Rush was just preemptively telling them to stay the hell away. Most likely, this was all the work of their handlers. Unwittingly, one of Edward’s bodyguards made a bad situation a whole lot worse. Geddy was passing through a casino and by coincidence came across Edward. One source claims that Lee attempted “to mend ways with Edward,” but Ed’s bodyguard wasn’t letting Geddy have anything to do with Ed at all. Roth told
Creem
that Geddy “puts up his hand to shake hands. Now one of our security guards didn’t have the vaguest idea in hell who he was and body-tackled him… threw him out.” The Rush family and the Van Halen family would continue to cross paths for years.

The short tour came to a close on October 24, 1981 at the Tangerine Bowl where they opened for the Stones. Their ceremonial final bow and celebration was photographed and used for the back cover of
Diver
Down
. At one point during the tour,
The
New
York
Times
gave the band a positive review, but their reference to Edward as Dave’s “right-hand man” could not possibly have gone over well with Ed in any way whatsoever. In fact, they were absolutely determined to spend time apart from each other, and even came up with a plan to spend as little time together as possible. But it backfired on them.

Enter the PR Machine

Edward was yet again named
Guitar
Player
’s guitarist of the year in 1981, now for three years running. Valerie’s shacking up with a rock god forced some higher-ups somewhere to put an awkward PR spin on their relationship. In a November 9 issue of
People
, an article appeared titled “
One
Day
’s Sweetheart: Valerie Bertinelli’s Happily Over the Deep End About Her Rocker Husband, Eddie Van Halen.” The article included the ridiculous line, “So the question remains: What’s a nice girl like that doing with a guy who plays guitar with his teeth?” Apparently, Edward had morphed into Jimi Hendrix in the interviewer’s mind. Valerie was defending Eddie with statements like “He’s not the typical rock star” and “It shocked me that he was so normal.”

For tawdry shock value, the article mentioned that Dave had taken out paternity insurance with Lloyd’s of London. This is another one of those salacious tidbits of VH lore which, like the brown M&Ms clause, was taken out of context. In comparing Ed to Dave, Valerie said the public perception of Eddie’s image was “by association only,” referring to Dave. The factual irony is that the only reason Dave had purchased paternity insurance was explicitly related to what Edward had been through—not Dave. In a
Rolling
Stone
article several years later, Dave explained: “What happened was that, about four or five years ago, a guy in the band had a suit from a woman claiming her kid was his. All the tests proved conclusively that that never was his kid. So I took out insurance in order to make someone think six times before she does anything.” The “guy in the band” was Edward.

The goofy
People
article closed with what some might call famous last words. “We’re both monogamous people,” Valerie said. “I trust him, he trusts me, and there’s no way anything would ever happen.”

Late that year, Michael Anthony was interviewed by Jas Obrecht for
Guitar
Player
. “There’s a lot of time when I’ll get frustrated because I can’t play what I want to play,” he said. “The other guys’ll say, ‘Why don’t you just sit back and play this,’ and I’ll kind of grit my teeth and go, ‘Well, okay.’” He added that “It’s a little restricting playing behind a guitarist like Ed, but it feels good because of who he is.” The days of “everyone pretty much does whatever they want” were essentially over. Dave and Ed ran the show even though their relationship was becoming ever more fractious.