Edward Van Halen: A Definitive Biography (13 page)

You know, it was actually Dave’s suggestion. He said, “Shit dude, listen to this, man! Get your old man to play it!” We said, “Sure!” It was so funny, because, uh, I tell ya, I couldn’t play the song for you right now. I had to read—excuse me one second. I had to burp. Umm, there’s so many chords—ding ding ding—you know, stuff like that, that I don’t know, I just couldn’t remember it. So, here’s my father sittin’ to the left of me, with, you know, sittin’ on a chair, with a music stand and sheet music in front of him. I’m sittin’ next to him with a chair and with sheet music and a stand. And Mike too—he’s playing like an acoustic bass. I don’t know it’s kind of weird, it’s just like an acoustic guitar—you know like when you go to a Mexican restaurant and, you know, they come up and play in front of your face and aggravate the shit outta you—you know the kind of bass guitars they play? He played one of those. And uh, I don’t know, it was funny as shit, we had a great time. It looked like an old 30s or 40s session

Jan Van Halen was finally getting his due. But he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the prospect at all. Edward said, “He hasn’t played his clarinet in 10 years. Because he lost his left hand middle finger about 10 years ago… . He was nervous as shit. And we’re just telling him, ‘Jan, just fuckin’ have a good time. Man, we make mistakes, that’s what makes it real.’ Um, I mean, I love, I love what he did.” Despite his appearance on the record, Jan had absolutely no plans to join the band onstage. Ed said, “I asked him if he would when we played L.A. and he said ‘NO WAY!’”

The highlight track of the album is “Little Guitars.” For the intro, Ed had come up with an amazing flamenco acoustic piece for which he “faked” traditional flamenco finger-picking. “I came up with ‘Little Guitars Intro’—the Spanish sounding thing—and I bought a couple of Montoya records, and I’m hearing, you know, I’m hearing this guy going ‘dadadadadada’ finger-picking!” Eddie said. “And I’m going like, god, this motherfucker is great. I, I can’t do that. So what I did is kind of listened to it, to that style of playing for a couple of days and I cheated.” Instead of finger-picking, he used his unique trill-picking style on the high open strings while hammering on with his left hand. When his pal Steve Lukather of Toto first heard it, he said, “How the fuck did you do that? You overdubbed that, huh?”

The main track was written by Ed on an actual little guitar. It was a miniature Les Paul copy given to him by a fan. Because of the string length, the guitar is actually tuned to G instead of the standard E for guitar. The end result is that Ed came up with a very unique riff that actually used finger-picking to an extensive degree. The song is a brilliant combination of styles and has a pop-edge to it, but is still very unique. The little guitar itself did become a bit of a gimmick. The pictures of Ed playing the guitar were always greeted with a bit of a laugh, and unfortunately for Ed, there is indeed a scene in
Spinal
Tap
that shows Christopher Guest’s character Nigel Tufnel playing a little guitar—a direct parody of Edward himself.

Dave’s influence was high on
Diver
Down
. He had written and played the synthesizer part on “Intruder,” he conceived and created their first real “video,” he brought Jan into the fold by bringing a song especially suited for the brothers to perform with their father, and he played the acoustic guitar intro and harmonica solo on “The Full Bug.” The album sold well and hit #3 on the U.S. charts. After its release in April, there would be no new Van Halen music for over a year and a half. The interim between albums would be an extremely interesting, exciting, and wild period of time.

CHAPTER 14 

Public Relations

The
Diver
Down
tour, nicknamed the “Hide Your Sheep Tour,” was the biggest tour of its kind to date with over 170 tons of equipment required to put on the stage show. The tour didn’t kick off until July—much later in the year than on previous tours. On July 30, while in Louisville, Ed gave an hour-plus long interview yet again with Jas Obrecht who was still writing for
Guitar
Player
at the time. The full, unedited audio tapes of those interviews reveal some astounding examples of where he was at the time. The tapes were actually stolen from Obrecht, the only such seizure in over 800 interviews he has conducted. Edward and Obrecht were both very unhappy that the full tapes made their way to the internet. Jas has successfully had the interview removed several times, but it simply will not go away, not in the 21
^st
century.

Via my correspondence with Obrecht, he has allowed me to use a bit of the bell that cannot be unrung. Part of the transcribed interview addressed growing problems with Dave with specificity in a way that was never publicly revealed for 25 years:

EVH: “Cathedral,” I’ve been doing for, you know, over a year and I wanted to put it on a record… . It’s just that, uhhh, Dave said… “No more fucking guitar solos.” You know?

Obrecht: He’s crazy.

EVH: No, I mean, you know, he’s, he’s got—he’s on an ego trip. He has always been… . But uh, he just, you know, he just said, “Fuck this, man. No more guitar solos.” And uh, you know, Ted didn’t know that that’s the way Dave felt. And uh, so one day when Dave wasn’t there, I said, Ted, what do you think of this? And what do you think of that? You know, I played him “Little Guitars”, the intro, you know, the little flamenco sounding thing, and, uh, and “Cathedral” and he’s going like “God! Why the fuck didn’t you show me this earlier?!” And I explained to him, Dave just said, “Fuck the guitar hero shit, you know, we’re a
band
.” So Ted just said, you know, “Fuck Dave.” So we put it on anyway.

That seems to match up with Valerie’s story of how Dave belittled him after winning his 1980 guitarist of the year award. If Dave was worried that Ed was going to be doing things on his own, in retrospect he had every right to fear just such a thing.

Before they set out on tour, Edward received a late night phone call from famed producer Quincy Jones who was producing
Thriller
throughout most of 1982. Ed originally thought the call was a prank and hung up the phone. Eddie’s friend Steve Lukather was the principal guitarist on the track “Beat It.” At some point, the idea was born to bring in the all-star Edward Van Halen to add a unique touch to the hard-hitting Michael Jackson anthem. Jackson himself set out to write what he described as “the type of song that I would buy if I were to buy a rock song… That is how I approached it and I wanted the kids to really enjoy it—the school kids as well as the college kids.”

Edward was originally given what was called a sketch of the song and suggested rearrangements that were made to suit the solo section. Ed was truly out of his element in the legendary Quincy’s studio—the quintessential opposite of the Van Halen approach. God only knows how many individual tracks there are on the final version of “Beat It.” Again, like so many times before, it has gone down in lore that the solo was done in one take or two takes or pieced together from two or three takes. Regardless, surely no one knew the impact Ed’s solo, all of thirty seconds, would have on the music world at large at the time it was cut. For the mean time though, Ed’s stepping out would remain in the closet for about a year. He told no one about his participation. At the time, Eddie claimed he simply thought nothing of it.

Whose Band Is It?

Throughout the tour during the fall of 1982, Edward absolutely felt that his control over the band was slipping permanently away to Dave. A photo shoot for
Life
magazine that September was proclaimed wife-free by David, and the married men complied. For Dave’s guidance, the spread was littered with images of sexually-charged excess and rock and roll mayhem. It was the standard Van Halen image that the band had started out with, except now half the guys were married, so the image did not necessarily match the reality of the situation. But Van Halen was an extremely valuable brand, and Dave knew exactly what the public wanted.

However, Edward’s wife was not an unknown. She was an extremely high-profile celebrity at this point in time, and her good-girl image was being tarnished by the Van Halen image. Somewhere, this was not sitting well with someone, and Ed and Valerie were trotted out on
Entertainment
Tonight
to salvage Valerie’s image by obviously softening Edward’s. The opening voice-over gave a clear indication of what was to follow: “The odds of Hollywood marriages lasting are pretty slim these days particularly considering the long working hours and time apart… . They seem to come from different worlds. So when these two teen idols decided a year ago to marry, many of their fans and friends said it wouldn’t work.”

If ever there was a clearly obvious PR move, the interview featured Eddie and Valerie sitting in nearly matching white sweaters on a couch in front of a fireplace. Additionally, the interview featured an obviously fake cut of Edward actually flipping a pancake in the kitchen while Valerie awkwardly laughs along. They’re also shown cuddling with a set of tiny, white kittens. Stars go on
Entertainment
Tonight
for public relations purposes, especially if the only angle is the state of their marriage. The interview featured the following transcribed exchanges:

Interviewer: The two of you seem to be so different. Valerie, you’re kind of the goodie two shoes and the rock world is supposed to be so insane.

Valerie: That’s it—you just said the key word—supposed to be. I mean I’ve seen more insane people in the TV world than I have in his world. I mean, you know.

EVH: I’ll verify that.

The interviewer suggested that their lifestyles were fairly incompatible and that reports were flying that their brief marriage was already on the rocks. Valerie was exasperated that some magazines and journalists went so far in an attempt to simply take down the seemingly happy couple. She stated that they were such normal people as far as they were concerned, which was a notion that she didn’t think others believed or could process.

On another tabloid television program,
PM
Magazine
, the couple again went on the PR defensive about their marriage in an interview with Maria Shriver. Valerie again expressed frustration that she felt forced to repeat over and over that they were a happily married couple. Their potential incompatibility was reinforced by referring to the couple as the “all-American Valerie” and the “all-electric Eddie.” Edward said that he was much happier being married and having a home than he was constantly living on the road with hotels as his permanent address.

When Shriver noted the general belief that a “rock star’s life is groupies, drinking, late hours, and hard drugs,” the following exchange took place:

Maria Shriver: But does it apply to Edward Van Halen?

Edward: Take a guess? No.

Maria Shriver: ‘No. None of it.’ . . .

Edward: The late hours and drinking, maybe, yeah.

Maria: But the groupies…

Edward: Of course, not! I’m married. I wouldn’t do that.

Valerie: I hope not.

This was part of a calculated effort to soften Ed’s public image, but also part of an effort to portray Valerie not as a young 15-year-old sweetheart, but a 21-year-old married woman in order to placate the tabloid criticism of their “incompatibility.” Edward appeared edgy and defensive (and shown on television both smoking and drinking).

As the tour rolled on, tensions ran high as Dave’s circus-like partying ways clashed Edward’s attempt at a softened image on behalf of his wife’s career. A family friend of the author named D’Lesa attended their September 24 show at the Summit in Houston, and managed to take several classic, here-to-fore unpublished photos, most of which show a band with an audience that worshipped them aggressively.

Van Halen at the Summit in Houston in 1982. Photograph © D’Lesa Plunk

Busting a Few Things

The entire tour was sold out—every single arena they played. The record company wanted to capture the band live on both video and audio for a potential live album and/or VHS release. A two-night stand in Largo, Maryland was filmed and recorded on October 11-12, and the band played in Uniondale, New York immediately following on the 13
^th
. The footage from Largo was never publicly released, but is widely available for review online. The video shows the band a tad sloppy and even featured some weak choreographed moves. However, the band is incredibly well-received and absolutely adored by the crowd. The video is also fully edited from multiple camera angles, obviously at a great expense.

During “Unchained,” Dave stopped the song during the breakdown part to say the following: “We got some… we got some good news here tonight! He’s a little bit… he’s a little bit shy about this kind of thing and he’s gonna get on my case about it later. But ladies and gentlemen, we received word about half an hour ago that says for the fifth year in a row [sic], from
Guitar
Player
international magazine, the guitar player of the year—EDWAAARD!” Ed did not smile. He just tersely saluted the crowd. He stood there for a moment, took a brief bow, but turned to Alex to get the song going again as quickly as possible. It is likely that Dave’s gesture was an attempt to make up for the previous years of jealousy. It is also possible that Dave would boast with pride in front of a roaring crowd, but not in private.

Regardless, things bubbled over in Pittsburgh immediately thereafter on October 14. Edward fractured his left wrist. Originally, this went down on record as the result of “fooling around in his hotel room”. Ed told the press, “I was lucky that the break was to my left hand instead of to my right. If it had been the other way around I probably would have been sidelined for a couple of months… The accident has made me more aware of how quickly this can all come to an end.” Acknowledging that it was not horseplay, Ed later admitted, “I hit walls when I get mad. I’m obsessed with music, and sometimes things don’t go right.” It is possible that an immediate review of the tapes from Largo were deemed unfit for release for one reason or another or something that night in Pittsburgh set him off. Whether it was Dave or himself he was mad at, the fracture landed Eddie in a New York hospital and three subsequent shows were canceled and had to be rescheduled.

Impossibly, Ed was only down for five days as the tour resumed in Philadelphia on October 19 and he played through the pain. Reaching new heights in popularity, the band played three straight sold-out nights in a row in Worcester, Massachusetts, with October 25 being officially declared “Van Halen Day” after circulation of 25,000-signature petition by a local Worcester radio station. The overly successful tour carried on through early December and took a one-month break before a South American and European tour planned to start in January of 1983.