Edward Van Halen: A Definitive Biography (12 page)

CHAPTER 13 

Take Cover

To satisfy Warner Brothers, as well as the market, the band decided to record and release a single for the new year to tide everyone over before they took the proper amount of time to write and record a brand new album. According to Edward, “When we came off the
Fair
Warning
tour, we were gonna take some time off. You know, and spend a lot of time writing and this and that, and uh, we—Dave came up with the idea of ‘Hey, why don’t we start off the new year with just putting out a single?’” Dave was pushing for “Dancing in the Street”—made famous by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas in 1964—but Ed could not figure out a decent interpretation. Frustrated, he said that initially he just could not get any kind of handle on the tune. “So I said, hey, look, if you wanna do a cover tune why don’t we do ‘Pretty Woman’?”, Edward said. “And it took one day, we went to Sunset Sound, recorded it. And it came out early, right after the first of the year.”

Infamously, there is an entire section of the song missing. This is because Edward and Dave were needling each other about learning the song correctly, they were so at each other that of course they ended up recording it incorrectly. And even though they realized their mistake on playback, they simply left it as it was. Quite possibly, it was simply a musical happy accident.

Dave had developed grandiose ideas for promoting the track and set about filming a quasi-mini-movie for the video age. The set-up was ludicrous. The description of the video is just supposed to sound so crazy that it would’ve had to have been great. These are Ed’s actual words he used when describing the video to Jas Obrecht:

We had a transvestite tied up and two midgets, like uh, you know, harassing her, squeezing her ass and doing this and that, and uh, and uh, Dave was Napoleon, Mike was a samurai warrior, Alex my brother was Tarzan, and I was like a gunslinger wearing leather pants and twirling the gun and stuff. And uh, I guess the plot was that, umm—and a hunchback was in it. He was up in like a bell tower looking down at these two midgets harassing this supposedly pretty woman. And he would hop on the phone and call each one of us. And I’d hop on the horse and come to the rescue, and so would Al, and Dave and Mike. And at the end, Dave pulls up in a limo. You know, he’s always the one that’s got the classy, crazy shit. You know, so he pulls up in a white stretch limo. And looks at her, and she starts running towards him like he’s her hero and she pulls her wig off and you see that she’s a dude.

The description is accurate. The video took 40 hours to film and was not even filmed with the timing or rhythm of the song in mind in any way whatsoever. Once it was all edited down and they put the song over the “movie,” they realized the video was longer than the song and that they were short of music to fit the final edit.

Thus was born “Intruder”—one of Van Halen’s classic instrumental works. David himself wrote the music on a synthesizer in about an hour and played it himself on the recording along with Alex providing the powerful drum track. Edward swooped in and really brought the track to life with some of the most amazing and outrageous sounds that anyone ever made with a guitar or any instrument. What started as a throwaway is now considered one of the most experimental and grinding brief rock song intros of all time, and it is a pure Dave-Edward combination. In fact, it is a beautiful piece of musical irony that something so dark (with its E and B flat bass notes on the synthesizer) leads into something well-known and old-fashioned, yet updated—as if going forward and in reverse at the same moment. It was something as darkly beautiful as “Intruder” that made all the potential hell they went through with each other worth it.

Once the video was finally released to MTV, they promptly banned the video for featuring a transvestite. The banning of the video gave the band some great controversial press, but it was in reality a dear favor to them. Dave’s first big video out of the gate was experimental, but it was comically bad, and not in a funny way. Back in the 80s and most of the 90s, there was virtually no way for anyone to see the actual video. In fact, the only clip of the video I myself ever saw as a kid was at the very tail end of the 1983 Us Festival video on the Showtime cable network. But the video is now at your fingertips here in the 21
^st
century. Upon review, it is amazing that Edward agreed to even participate in such a project with Dave at the helm at that time in their career. Fortunately, Dave would eventually improve upon his video making skills in a massive way.

Around this time in 1982, Edward made a seemingly random phone call to Frank Zappa simply out of mutual respect and later ended up producing a single for Frank’s then twelve-year-old son Dweezil. In 2010, Dweezil wrote on his website about the events after the phone call:

Twenty minutes later Edward Van Halen was at our house. He had a new guitar with him. A purple Kramer with a piece of tape covering the logo. Frank called Steve Vai and asked him to come over. What followed as the coolest night a 12-year-old guitar player could ever imagine, or perhaps any guitar player. Edward Van Halen, Steve Vai, and Frank Zappa all passed around this new purple guitar. Occasionally I would fumble around on it as well. Many things were played and discussed. It was amazing. Of course I asked Edward to play “Mean Street” and “Eruption.” He did and I got to watch it up close. The techniques he employed were burned into my brain forever. This jam session/discussion went on into the wee hours of the morning. Somewhere around 3AM. I had a little league game at 7AM. Even though I had pitched a no hitter the week before, I knew that night that baseball was no longer that important to me.

Edward said, “Yes, we had the milk and cookies sittin’ there, you blow a good solo—you get some milk and cookies.” He said that because of Frank’s off-meter material, Dweezil had a lot of trouble playing in regular time. “It’s really funny because his dad’s music, he couldn’t quite tap. He couldn’t count to four… . It wasn’t ‘Get Down Tonight.’ Dweezil had a rough time playing to a regular beat. So he just played, [I] captured it, put it together and it worked.” Edward told Jas Obrecht:

I met Frank Zappa right before he left for a European tour and he has a 12-year-old kid how plays guitar. And he called me up from Europe and asked me if I wanted to produce a single for him, you know, for his kid. So Moon sang on it, and Dweezil, is the kid’s name, plays guitar and Donn Landee and I produced it. And it cooks! It’s called “My Mother is a Space Cadet.” And the flip side is called “Crunchy Water.” It’s in the Zappa tradition. But uh, it’s funny because, oh, the guitar parts really sound like me. Like I played it. But the only thing that I did play on “Space Cadet” was the intro.

Obrecht: Is that the first thing you’ve done outside the band since Nicolette?

EVH: Oh, yeah. That’s the only–I mean, you know, this was a production thing–I spent about month doing it.

Obrecht: Too much!

EVH: Hey, the whole band was fucking twelve years old. They couldn’t play for shit! You know? But when you hear it it will blow you away. Man, his guitar solo was a composite of about nine different takes after we sifted out the other eighty takes. It took about three days of five hours a day trying to get him to get his solo together.

Where’s the Album?

So that “(Oh) Pretty Woman” could have a B-side, the band sang “Happy Trails” a capella. Again, initially considered an absurd throwaway, it is a Van Halen classic. All four band members were singing in four-part harmony all together live in the studio and cracking up while doing it. It became a huge part of their live act. Edward said, “Hell, we’re even doing it in the show, man, and people go nuts for it!” It showcased a completely different side of the band.

Fortunately or unfortunately—mostly unfortunately relationship-wise—”(Oh) Pretty Woman” was a smash hit upon its release. The song was only the second Van Halen tune up until that point without a guitar solo, and it was their biggest selling single. Eddie said, “It almost makes me feel bad. It shows you how much guitar solos mean to people… ’Pretty Woman’ is like our only legitimate hit.” The track hit #12 and was the highest charting Van Halen single to date at the time. That song they threw together to appease the record company; that song they didn’t even record correctly; that song they made a horrible video for that never got played—that song was a
huge
hit.

This had the opposite effect than was intended. Instead of putting out a single and having Edward take his time writing a new record and spending time apart from David, the fact that the song was a hit had Warner Brothers putting the heat on them to deliver the album that they felt that song was supposed to be on. Edward said to Jas Obrecht, “We’re going, wait a minute, we just did that to keep people, to keep us out there, so people know we’re still alive. But they, you know, they just kept pressuring—’We need that album. We need that album.’ So we jumped right back in without any rest, you know, without any time to recuperate from the tour, and started recording.”

The process of recording
Diver
Down
was completely different than anything Van Halen, or any other band for that matter, had ever done. Every single song was recorded one at a time. Whereas on the earlier records, they would lay down the bed tracks and go back later and add vocals and solos. For
Diver
Down
, the band would not move on to the next track until the one they were working on was completely finished. Eddie said, “Instead of going into the studio and doing ten basic tracks, we would do one basic track, come back the next day, or the same day later on in the evening after dinner, and do the back-up harmonies and the lead vocals. And then that one was gone. You know? That one was in the bag. And then we’d record the next basic track and sang, and do leads and whatever. So we took each song, you know, one at a time as opposed to doing ten songs all at the same time.”

The album was recorded in twelve days and released on April 14, 1982. Of the twelve tracks, three are instrumentals that are all less than two minutes long. Of the remaining nine, five are cover songs. In the open, he was defensive of the cover-heavy record. He told Jas Obrecht, “The fucking critics having been giving us shit about that. But uh, I think it’s a bunch of crap.” He continued, “I mean like say ‘Dancing in the Streets,’, ‘Pretty Woman,’ uhh, ‘Where Have All the Good Times Gone?’, you know, stuff like that, it’s not like the original… . Whenever you do a cover tune, like say on the second album when we did ‘You’re No Good,’ uhh… Whenever you redo a cover tune, I don’t think you should do it like the original. And I don’t think any cover tune we’ve ever done has been like the original. You know? And uh, it takes almost as much time to make a cover tune sound original as it does writing a song… . So fuck the critics.” At the time, Eddie said his favorite track was “Secrets.” Ed told Obrecht: “You know, like ‘Secrets’ to me is the first ever real mellow thing we’ve ever done, you know? That’s why I like it so much, because it’s still Van Halen. It’s not like Journey, purposefully you know, doing fucking tear-jerking pop tunes to make money.”

Valerie said that
Diver
Down
was “one headache after another for Ed.” The inclusion of “Where Have All the Good Times Gone?” doesn’t require a lot to work to read into. Valerie didn’t have a complete handle on what exactly was going on with Ed and Dave, but she just knew that Ed came home unhappy and “dazed and distraught” during the recording. Valerie noted that Edward’s drinking had become increasingly worse during this period. They had only been married about a year before Valerie had her first thoughts of intervening to take care of Ed, but she did not, ultimately deciding that Ed was a grown man.

In the mid-1990s, Edward reflected upon it with Billy Corgan for
Guitar
World
. “Half that album was damn cover tunes, and I hated every minute of making it,” Eddie said, “David… had the idea that if you covered a successful song, you were half way home. C’mon—Van Halen doing ‘Dancing in the Streets’? It was stupid. I started feeling like I would rather bomb playing my own songs than be successful playing someone else’s music.”

Jan Gets His Due on
Diver
Down

Despite everything that was going on, the search for tracks for
Diver
Down
led Dave to bring a song to the table that dated back to 1924, and gave him the idea to do something truly special for the album. Dave stumbled across “Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now)” and brought it to the band. As a beautiful gesture, Dave then suggested that Eddie and Al get Jan to play clarinet on the track. Edward told Jas Obrecht in detail: