Edward Van Halen: A Definitive Biography (4 page)

CHAPTER 4 

Pasadena High School

The Gladys D. Edwards Auditorium at Pasadena High School. Van Halen performed several legendary shows inside the auditorium. Photograph © Kevin Dodds

In school, Edward said his “friends could get away with murder and I was the only one to ever get caught at doing nothing.” However, he did admit to getting busted changing his grades while the teacher was out of the room. About changing his grades in his English class, he simply said, “Right when I’m doing it, the teacher walks in. Got nailed.” In general, Edward’s scholastic career would never be a real issue, as he and Alex were both destined for immediate admission to Pasadena City College upon graduation from Pasadena High School.

Edward was indeed popular in high school due to his skills. As was the norm, he was a sexually active teenager and his high school girlfriend once became pregnant. The decision was made to have an abortion. Eddie described the ordeal as “very confusing,” which included a trip to Planned Parenthood, the works. To their great relief, her parents were supportive and said they would’ve offered to help. It was a one-eighty from what Edward had expected, saying, “I thought they’d call us scum.” It was a rude introduction to the downside of sex.

Edward entered Pasadena High School as a ninth grader in the fall of 1969. Quick points of reference: Apollo 11 moon landing; Woodstock; Manson murders; Altamont. Extraordinary stuff for anything but ordinary times. As a sophomore, on November 21, 1970, Edward saw his first ever rock concert. He and Alex caught Eric Clapton and Derek and the Dominoes at the Pasadena Civic Center. “A friend of mine won two tickets from a local radio station,” he recalled, “and, knowing what a Clapton fan I was, gave them to me and Al. The show wasn’t sold out when I got there, so I paid a little extra money, upgraded my tickets, and ended up in the sixth row. It was great.” Alex later ribbed Eddie about bringing his binoculars to the show. Alex said, “We were sitting in the sixth row, but he had to see everything!”

While Ed was in ninth and tenth grade, he and Al began forming a menagerie of bands with an endless array of floating support musicians and practiced out in the family garage. In 1971, with their teenage sense of humor getting the better of them, the first band name they christened themselves with was The Trojan Rubber Company. Although it was said the name was abandoned when a bass player split, the change to The Space Brothers was a tad more practical, and ultimately, more printable. According to Eddie, “We had to change the name of the band to The Space Brothers, just so we could play these gigs at (a) Catholic school.”

1971 was a fateful year for Edward. He had a brainstorm during a Led Zeppelin concert at the Forum on August 21. To
Rolling
Stone
: “I was watching Jimmy Page going [sings hammering guitar lick], like that, with one hand, in ‘Heartbreaker.’ I thought, ‘I can play like that, and you wouldn’t know if I was using this finger [points to left hand] or this one’ [points to right hand]. But you just kind of move it around, and it’s like, ‘You got one big hand there, buddy. That’s a hell of a spread!’”

Edward’s Discovery of Finger-tapping

This would be the birth of Edward’s signature “double-handed” or “tapping” guitar technique that, when executed correctly, can present a sequence of notes at a theretofore unprecedented rate of speed on an electric guitar. On the surface, it would seem to be an obvious move—after all, you’ve got two hands. And the truth be told, he is not the inventor or discoverer of the technique. He himself said, “I didn’t invent the hammer-on technique. I just put it out there for people to listen to.” The origins of the move can be traced all the way back to Paganini in the 17
^th
century, and modern electric guitarists beginning in the 1950s have been well-documented using the technique. Regardless, the technique was not used even on a small scale, and Edward was never, at least not knowingly, exposed to it prior to discovering it himself at the age of 16. Later Eddie said, “As far as the hammer-on thing—I never really saw anybody do it, okay? I’m not saying ‘Hey, I’m bitchin’, I came up with it,’ but I never really saw anybody do it.” He began incorporating the move into his playing on a regular basis in 1972.

Ed spent countless evenings alone in high school figuring out everything he could do with his right hand now hitting the fret board in conjunction with his left. “I used to sit on the edge of my bed with a six-pack of Schlitz Malt talls. My brother would go out at 7pm to party and get laid, and when he’d come back at 3am, I would still be sitting in the same place, playing guitar. I did that for years.” Although the guitar helped him fit in, he was still shy and couldn’t easily relate to kids his age—most likely because other kids his age had not just unlocked the keys to a new musical kingdom.

His devotion to his craft was less like a love affair and more like a mad scientist sublimating a machine to do his bidding. His mother worried about him when hearing some of the sounds coming out of his bedroom. Edward said, “She always used to say, ‘Why do you have to make that high, crying noise?’” (Later, Ed would finally retort, “Well, it bought you a house, didn’t it?”) By high school, he had three steady companions: his six-string, his six-pack, and his cigarette pack (he would later state, “I started playing guitar, drinking, and smoking at the age of 12”).

By Eddie’s senior year, Alex was well into his studies at Pasadena City College, where surely to his mother’s chagrin, he was taking music classes. The Trojan and Space Brother days petered out. When a bass player named Mark Stone entered the picture, it was Ed’s ideal combo—a Cream/Experience-based trio, with himself on both lead vocals
and
guitar. However, it was a less balanced act than Cream (where half the attention went to Jack Bruce on vocals and half to Eric Clapton on guitar). It was rather more like the Experience, where Jimi was the focal point on lead vocals and guitar. But Cream was their main thing; even at the band’s earliest gigs, they basically were a Cream tribute act with Alex playing the famous “Toad” drum solo and Edward wowing everyone with his stellar recreations—not interpretations—
recreations
of the solos and fills on “Crossroads” and “Spoonful.”

With Cream having peaked in the late sixties, Ed had shifted his preoccupation to yet another English band while in high school. At one point, he was intent on naming the band Rat Salad, after the 1970 Black Sabbath song on
Paranoid
. “We played just about every Black Sabbath song. I used to sing lead on every Black Sabbath song we did,” said Edward. Genesis was they name the brothers eventually agreed upon and they began their run on the legendary Pasadena backyard party circuit under that name. Of course, it wasn’t long before they realized Genesis was already the name of an English group that had been around since 1967 with Peter Gabriel as a founding member. It’s not too shocking they had never heard of Genesis, though; kids in the early seventies walked out of the record store with either Black Sabbath
or
Genesis, certainly not both.

College Days

Because the family had so little to get by on, despite Jan working ungodly hours, the boys were forced to get creative to pay for drum heads, drumsticks, guitar strings, guitar picks, and guitar cables—and god forbid a guitar or an amplifier. Without the consent of any particular regulatory authority, Ed and Al took to repainting numbers on street curbs for a fee. Knocking on doors one by one. One holding the stencil, the other holding the spray paint. Short work, quick payoff. Their own resourcefulness funded their growing need to pay for the basic objects of the industry. Basically, Edward had just the two “real” jobs in his life: his “honest” job delivering papers, and the rather fly-by-night house number painting scheme. Both were used to finance music equipment.

Following the Genesis revelation, Mammoth was officially founded in 1972. Mammoth was arguably Edward’s first real rock group. With his brother on drums, Mark on bass, and himself on lead vocals
and
guitar, the band’s early repertoire included Grand Funk and Cream, as well as Deep Purple and, of course, Sabbath. Very briefly, Mammoth employed a keyboard player, but that tied Eddie down and filled up the middle where he belonged. The trio format was what he was always intent on, and it was to stay that way. Still, Edward would admit lead vocals were not his strong point. He could and he can sing. But the power and tenor of his voice as would be required for the rather heavy responsibility of lead vocalist clearly wasn’t there. He made up for it with his playing for the time being. “I used to sing and play lead in Mammoth, and I couldn’t stand it. I’d rather just play,” he said. In 1996, he added: “I never technically learned how to sing. So, I would kind of do a Kurt Cobain, after five songs and three beers my voice would be gone. You know, I would just scream it out and kind of waste my voice.”

Jan suffered a horrific accident, particularly for a musician. Edward recalled that, in 1972, Jan “tried to lift up a trailer and it fell on his finger and just chopped his finger off.” Jan essentially quit playing the clarinet. A critical component of his very livelihood had been severed.

Mammoth remained a relatively solid band throughout Ed’s senior year, and upon high school graduation in 1973, he would follow his brother directly into Pasadena City College—a campus that became the gathering point for the original lineup of an act that changed the world. A fellow student, Michael Sobolewski (who later took the stage name Michael Anthony), started out studying psychology but quickly moved to music. Mike fronted a band called Snake on the same little circuit as Mammoth playing similar music, although with more of a boogie-rock focus.

Yet another Pasadena City College student was present amongst the backyard party circuit. This guy was also taking music classes. He was even in the exact same classes as the brothers. Musically, he was all about being up front and singing lead. His dad was a doctor, a rather highly regarded doctor at that. He entered into a signed contract with his father for a PA system which he was to work off. Having your own PA is like everyone asking you to help them move when you own a truck. If you have a PA, people come calling to use it. This guy charged though—ten bucks a night for it. He had an entrepreneurial streak. His name was David Lee Roth.

CHAPTER 5 

“Van Halen” in the Third Person

Ten dollars per show ended up being a lot of money for Ed and Al to fork over every time they rented Dave’s PA. “I figured it would be much cheaper if we just got him in the band,” said Eddie. In quite a ballsy move, Dave went to the Van Halens home one day and knocked on the door. He said he wanted to sing with them. Alex and Eddie told him to learn “Crossroads” and a Grand Funk song and come back the next week. David came back the following week, and it did not go well. Eddie said, “It was terrible. He couldn’t sing.” The brothers simply did not believe that what they saw and heard that day was enough to overcome the rental fee for the PA. Dave’s versions of their beloved Cream songs were not note-for-note, spot-on, Jack Bruce sing-a-like vocals. They were described as free-wheeling. Something about the whole situation weighed very heavy on Edward though, and he actually left the room so Alex could tell Dave it was a no-go. Eddie obviously couldn’t bear Dave’s reaction when told he wasn’t what they were looking for. Ed maintained that Roth still holds a grudge against Alex for turning him down. In 1995, Ed said, “To this day that’s why Roth still has a hair up his ass about Al, because he was the one who told him, ‘Sorry, man. It ain’t working.’”

Dave had already observed Edward from afar on the circuit. Dave had seen Mammoth “doing note-for-note,
verbatim
renditions of The Who,
Live
at
Leeds
, or Deep Purple, ‘Smoke on the Water,’ or shit from Woodstock, when Alvin Lee comes out and plays ‘Goin’ Home’ faster than any known human being on earth, or at least up until that time—Edward could do
that
lick. You know. It was
amazing
stuff.” Dave added, “I’ve always had a tremendous amount of respect for their musical ability—particularly Edward’s… . I listened to him play, I watched him play, and I said, ‘You know, what he does with his hands, I wanna do with my feet, I wanna do with my voice. He was kind of a mentor of mine.”

Again, David was taking the same music classes as Edward, as well as Alex and Michael. Dave described their days at Pasadena City College as “treading water until a band got launched. I spent most of the time in junior college in music courses—theory and orchestration. I was not very good at it. Mathematically, I count to four and then start over… . The Van Halens were far superior to anything I could do in that area. So was Michael. They won all the awards.”

Following his failed attempt to join the brothers, Dave formed Red Ball Jets, whose direction was similar to many bands at the time—vamped up seventies rock versions of fifties rock staples. Mammoth, Snake, and Red Ball Jets were constantly crossing paths on the tiny circuit. Dave said, “Playing those parties got competitive fast.” Battle of the bands events would inevitably pit one of the bands against the other. Not everybody always won. Ed’s vocals were not blowing anyone away and his stage persona was not yet hatched. He was bound to both the guitar amp and that damned microphone.

Before long, Alex reconsidered his and Eddie’s earlier opinion of Dave and his peculiar style. Ed’s vocal struggles and hindered front man abilities got Alex thinking about a band that had the whole deal—a trio plus a front man. The 1970s rock band template was a quartet (trio plus front man, that is): Sabbath, Zeppelin, etc. Dave’s work ethic showed, plus he came with a PA, a rehearsal space, and transportation. Perhaps Dave’s unique interpretations of the Mammoth cover song bible might just provide a nice segue into original music. Dave dryly noted, “Basically what I had to offer at that time was that I knew how to dance. I knew what was good dance music, and, hence, could get us into clubs.” Eddie later maintained that he still considered what he was doing was playing in a trio, but just, in his words, “a trio with a throat.” About Dave’s vocal abilities at that time, Eddie said, “He got better—otherwise we wouldn’t have continued on with him.”

In late 1973, when Eddie was a freshman in college, David Lee Roth officially joined Ed, Alex, and Mark in Mammoth. The most important thing Dave provided Eddie was intangible. Dave gave Edward the freedom of movement and concentration that he had absolutely never had in his performance career to date. His playing style would shift to playing fills off the vocals rather than awkwardly playing around his own. Edward summed up the early college scene: “We played everywhere and anywhere, from backyard parties to places the size of your bathroom. And we did it all without a manager, agent, or record company. We used to print up flyers announcing where we were going to play and stuff them into high school lockers.”

Mammoth played odd gigs, to say the least. One of which would no doubt be a traumatizing incident for anyone young or old. Edward recalled: “We did forty-five minute sets each night while these bikers drank and got crazy. One night, two bikers started arguing about whose motorcycle was quicker. One guy whipped out a hunting knife and stabbed the other one right in front of us while we were playing ‘You Really Got Me.’ The biker’s guts were hanging out and he died the next day… The next night we moved our equipment about two feet from the wall so we could get out fast if there was any trouble.”

David Lee Roth Names the Band Van Halen

Shortly after the New Year, the band would find out that their name was, again, already taken. It turned out that the use of the name Mammoth was indeed copyrighted. This warranted yet another name change.

David had a suggestion that sounded a little odd at first. He suggested Van Halen. Dave gets all due credit for settling on the band name that would not only dominate rock music, but would immediately raise Edward’s, and his brother’s, and their mother and fathers’ profiles. Edward would take an enormous sense of pride in putting his family name on the line, so to speak. In no time, Edward was referring to the band “Van Halen” in the third person, as his family name was now indeed something bigger than just himself.

Dave said, “I figured if we named it after a human being, especially Van Halen, it sounds strong. It sounds like it has power to it. At the same time a classical piano player could be a Van Halen. Also in that way the band can evolve. But if you call yourself the Electric Plotz, three years from now you’re expected to sound like an Electric Plotz.” Dave later added the he felt the name Van Halen was essentially the same as Santana. It’s just a name—it’s not tied down to any one thing at all. And it was unique.

With the naming of the band Van Halen, Dave also ends up perpetually intertwined with the surname himself. Some could argue that at times, Dave would’ve been the first person one thought of when the term Van Halen was used in the third person. In fact, Dave was early on referred to as “Van” when doing business with club owners who thought Dave’s name was actually Van Halen (first name-last name); this was specifically true about Bill Gazzari. It’s a bit of the Jethro Tull/Marshall Tucker syndrome except that Van Halen is a
real
person’s name. Yet Dave, literally by virtue of his center position on the stage, became the front and center representative for Van Halen (in the third person).

Dave was bearing the weight of representing Eddie and his family name as the band’s unofficial leader. No one intended to fail. Between Dave’s street smarts and the brothers’ experience in music thus far—and their father’s experience heaped on top—the marriage of David Lee Roth and Edward Van Halen was sown. However, their partnership would ultimately prove to be more complex than just any regular marriage—this particular relationship is not that simple.

On a more complex level, Edward turned over his fortune to Dave in many ways. There on, Edward handed over vocal responsibility to Dave almost one hundred percent totally and completely on both cover arrangements and lyrics and titles for original songs. What Edward wrote—what were just pieces of music to him—were given titles by David. These titles are synonymous with Edward himself: “Runnin’ with the Devil,” “Dance the Night Away,” “Unchained,” “Hot for Teacher” . . . The background vocals and harmonies that Edward would become famous for delivering came from the words and melodies crafted by someone else. It was a simple “I do the music, you do the words” arrangement.

When wondering just how different Edward and David were, David summed it up: “Right off the bat, two entirely separate record collections and everything.” One was what the other wasn’t and the other the same. One just wanted to concentrate on the music and the other wanted to systematically conquer the scene, and sing, too.

When the rechristened Van Halen hit the circuit, they were truly human jukeboxes able to play just about anything required or requested of them. Edward and the band wanted to play the clubs but their initial forays were unsuccessful, particularly at Gazarri’s Teen Dance Club in Hollywood. With Ed all about the music and Dave all about show business, Dave laid it out: “They weren’t getting the shows in the bars. They couldn’t understand why. I explained to them one day, ‘It’s because you play all twenty minutes of ‘I’m So Glad’ by Cream, complete with drum solo, live, note-for-note, and it’s very impressive, but you can’t dance to it.’ That’s not ‘Excuse me, do you come here often?’ music. The club owners described it as ‘too psychedelic.’ The band couldn’t get arrested.” Ed said, “We had to audition there at least three or four times. A guy would come running up in the middle of a song because I was too loud.”

Henceforth, Dave vowed to “check every song for
danceability
.” They stuck with rock obviously, but focused on ones with groove, like “Just Got Paid” by ZZ Top and “Walk This Way” by Aerosmith. Following Dave’s lead, the band did finally land a regular gig at Gazzari’s starting in April of 1974, where they made $75 per show. According to Dave, “We started working forty-five minute sets a night, running the dance contest and so forth.” Looking to make a big impression, Ed once commandeered the stage with a new pair of platform shoes that required a little more lead time to get used to than he realized. Actually, the shoes were part of his following Dave’s orders, the latter now the self-appointed fashion leader of the band as well. “He always told me I looked like shit,” said Eddie. “So around the time we auditioned for Gazarri’s on the Sunset Strip, I got some platforms and nearly broke my ankles.” According to Michael Anthony, his first gig with band required him to wear a gold and silver lamè shirt, not his first choice under any real circumstance actually, much less a backyard Pasadena keg party. For the same show, Edward even wore a cape!

“Eventually we were a fixture at Gazzari’s,” said Dave. “We knew two-hundred songs by other people.” To show how far the band went down the danceability route, they even covered “Twist and Shout.” A 1974 live recording shows that it’s not really the Isley Brothers or The Beatles. It sounds like Van Halen. Edward definitely packs in the guitar fills, but it is an excellent early example of how Edward and Michael’s background dual harmonies worked so well against Dave’s lead. This classic, gospelesque tune is specifically written as an old school call-and-response number for a lead singer with a background choir, if you will. It would end up becoming a songwriting/performance technique that Dave and Ed and Michael would perfect and become a signature of the classic Van Halen sound. Edward said that the unique VH harmony backing vocal sound stemmed from attempting to duplicate the horn parts vocally in the R&B covers the band so regularly performed.

Other recordings would take place that year. One was an original song called “Glitter”—obviously a nod to the glam scene. Ed’s trademark bends are there, but overall his playing style is a tip of the hat to Tony Iommi, even though it still sounds like Eddie. In the eyes of some Van Halen purists, this song definitely has worthy moments and would have been able to have been altered and/or improved into a better track (which would become a common songwriting practice for Ed).

The Oldest Recordings

A great deal of what was captured on tape around this time shows that Edward’s mind was in absolute musical overload. He pumped out easily over a dozen riffs during Van Halen’s earliest few years that would be reworked or revived and eventually become some of the greatest classic rock songs of all time. Some original songs captured on tape at this time contained the bulk of what later became “Mean Streets,” “Somebody Get Me a Doctor,” and “Hang ’Em High.” This is all in addition to having to learn hundreds of other peoples’ songs to play the clubs.

A 1974 home audio recording of Eddie playing shows that his right-hand picking execution was already absolutely amazing. The nine minutes of audio also demonstrate a burgeoning mastery of mixing in bits of finger picking/plucking—a little known but quickly recognizable trademark of Ed’s. He is working out a lot of different ideas during this recording which is clearly for his own posterity—there are pauses, starts and stops. A lot of it is heavy drone rock riffs with very distinctive/odd sounding changes. As an experiment he tunes his low E to low A and while noodling around he cranks out the main riff of “Somebody Get Me a Doctor.” This experimental tuning style is a technique he would return to over a decade later for the
5150
song “Good Enough.” The audio continues on and shows how Edward works fastidiously on cranking out the “Somebody Get Me a Doctor” riff.

This recording actually ends with some humorous audio of the band in a hotel room with some girls. The conversation is spirited and mostly revolves around Dave sending someone to get an extra room key. There is clearly flirting going on with the girls. Edward is quiet for the most part, until near the end, he clearly says, “Why don’t you make… make sexy noises for him?” after which there is a pause and someone in the background points out, “They’re recording you.” Ed is then heard replying to a query, “Nah, man, I can’t make that noise myself…”