Edward Van Halen: A Definitive Biography (7 page)

The very first iconic photograph of Edward Van Halen from my own original, well-weathered
Van
Halen
album cover. Photograph © Elliot Gilbert (fair use)

CHAPTER 8 

Around the World

The band immediately hit the road with Journey and Montrose blanketing the U.S. in two months time. Edward and the other guys took to life on the road with enthusiasm. Sex, drugs, rock and roll, and competition was their way of life. Edward admitted, “In 1978, I walked around squeezing everything that walked.” In a 2009 Black Sabbath documentary, Eddie said, “It was our first tour. It was 1978. We were doing anything and everything we ever read about and then some.”

Sammy Hagar had long since departed Montrose, and Ronnie Montrose mostly befuddled Ed with his ridiculously complex set-up. Edward said, “I see Montrose with his $4,000 studio rack with his digital delay and his harmonizer and everything else, and I swear to God, I can’t tell he’s usin’ it. And then he laughs himself silly looking at my stuff. And then later on he’s going ‘Whoa, how do you get that sound?’”

Journey, though, was a whole other thing. Van Halen
hated
Journey. Alex once said he made one of them cry, and that he couldn’t say his name “but
he
sings
like
this
!” (in a mocking high-pitch tone). Steve Perry had only joined Journey about six months prior to the start of the tour, and Journey’s
Infinity
album (with “Wheel in the Sky”) came out just one month before
Van
Halen
. Steve’s somewhat sissy ways brought the wrath of the macho Van Halen down upon him. His penchant for wearing scarves supposedly to help his throat led to the band and their crew appearing on stage during a sound check wearing scarves tied around their dicks. How long did it take Eddie to get cocky? “When we first started touring, we were third bill. We opened for Ronnie Montrose and Journey. And within two months, they were begging us to stay,” he said.

Early on in the tour, the band acted out their rock star fantasies of hotel destruction in Madison, Wisconsin at the Sheraton, reportedly destroying the seventh floor. Dave and Al ripped out the screen of the window in Ed’s hotel room and sent his chairs and tables smashing down to the ground below. Very sneakily, Edward went to the front desk and, giving his name as David Lee Roth, secured a key to Dave’s room. While Alex and David hid away waiting for their time bomb to go off, Ed quietly and quickly moved all of the missing furniture from Dave’s room to his. The police arrived to find Ed’s screen gone but all of the furniture missing from Dave’s room. All in all, Edward said, “We were wild, man. Oh, God. We had fire extinguisher fights. There was like a foot of water in the hallway and it seeped through the floor to the other rooms down below us, so the people had to check out.”

The Unofficial First Interview

During the tour, shortly after the New Orleans show April 16, Ed gave his very first interview ever as a professional to
Guitar
World
. Much to his chagrin, however, the article was not published until 2010. He tells the story about his dad being a musician, moving over from Holland, taking piano lessons, him and Al switching instruments, the Teisco, building his own guitar, his effects, his modified amplifiers, the condensed version of the Gene Simmons story—the works. About learning the guitar he said, “I enjoy playing. That’s the main thing. It’s not like I was forcing myself. I wanted to be a rock and roll star.” This would be possibly the only time ever that Edward admitted to wanting to be a rock star—from there on out, he would insist that he was “just a musician” and not a “rock star,” usually in a very dismissive fashion.

When asked about album sales, Ed had all the figures at hand, and went on to bash Journey:

We’ve sold about 350,000. We’re like 29 with a bullet next week in
Billboard
. So we’re kickin’ some ass. When we started out with Montrose and Journey, we were brand new; I think our album was only out a week at the start of the tour. And now we’re almost passing up Journey on the charts and stuff. So they’re freakin’ out. I think they might be happy to get rid of us. We’re very energetic and we get up there and blaze on the people for 30 minutes—that’s all we’re allowed to play with them. They won’t let us use any effects. For my solo, “Eruption,” I do that every night live and I have this old World War II bomb which is six or seven feet tall and I put some echo boxes in it. Usually the thing blows up at the end of my solo with all the smoke bombs, but they won’t let me use it. We don’t get soundchecks; we don’t get shit. But we’re still blazin’ on the people, man—we’re getting a strong encore every night.

Amazingly, he mentions exploring keyboards as early as April 1978: “Who knows what lurks in the future? Me and my brother both play keyboards, too—I’ve been thinking about getting a synthesizer. But who knows? I might not.” In the interview, he also refers to having just bought a new Les Paul in New Orleans. During one funny exchange, the interviewer asked if Ed played acoustic, to which he responded: “I have never in my life owned an acoustic guitar… . I guess one of these days I’ll buy one. I don’t know anything about acoustics. I know what I like in electric guitars, but acoustic I’m lost. I don’t know what’s good.”

Edward’s answer to one particularly innocent question would eventually lead to much more serious questions later in his life. When asked what picks he used, he replied, “Fender mediums. What I used to do was use a metal pick. A friend of mine worked in a machine shop and he always used to make me metal picks. And they were really cool—but hard to hold onto when you’re sweating. They’d fly out of my hand and I’d be bummed out.” In early 1978, Edward stated that he simply used Fender mediums, that he had tried metal picks but no longer used them.

Touring with Black Sabbath

At the beginning of May, Eddie and Alex returned to the Netherlands as professional musicians, exactly like their father. Considering the difference in the weather, it’s funny to note that they added “Summertime Blues” to their set for a show at The Paradiso in Amsterdam. After playing a few more shows in Paris and Hamburg, Van Halen finally met up with Black Sabbath, a band they truly loved and admired. They embarked on a one-month U.K. tour that is legendary for its crazy partying. There is a well-known picture of both bands mooning the camera at some point on the tour—likely par for the course. Edward recalled, “When we toured with Black Sabbath in 1978, they scared the shit out of us. I’ll tell you a funny story that I’ll never forget. I walked up to Tony and began to ask him, ‘Second song on side two of
Master of Reality
 . . . ’ Tony looked at me and went, ‘What the fuck, mate?’ By that time Black Sabbath had several records out, but we had only one album out so I knew where every track on our first record was. A few years later somebody asked me a question in the same way, and I was going, ‘Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.’ The first thing that popped in my head was that incident with Tony! At first I thought it was odd that he couldn’t remember what was on his records, and then it happened to me.”

Black Sabbath was at its lowest point when Van Halen—fellow label-mates on Warner Brothers—joined their tour. Because Van Halen was so fresh and riding so high and Black Sabbath was so tired and riding so low, the joint tour eventually sunk Black Sabbath, who kicked Ozzy out of the band and later hooked up with Ronnie James Dio. Warner Brothers shifted its promotional focus to Van Halen and away from Sabbath. Edward recalled, “We were kind of double-edged sword to them, I guess, because we forced them to have to rise to the occasion, so to speak, to follow us.” A live recording of the May 28 show in Ipswich reveals a rising Van Halen absolutely on fire. Their short set included nearly every song from
Van
Halen
except “Jamie’s Cryin’” and “Ice Cream Man,” and they closed with “D.O.A.,” which Dave promised would be on their next album.

In mid-June, the band went straight from the U.K. for a string of solo dates in Japan, some of which was captured on video including an interview with Dave. While in Japan, Ed had his first encounter with endorsements. He said, “When we were in Japan, some company wanted me to endorse their stuff. They gave me this guitar that’s got like 20 knobs on it; I couldn’t figure out how to work the thing!”

Upon their return from Japan, the band—barely even four months on the road—flew straight into Dallas for the then-annual Texxas Jam festival at the Cotton Bowl on July 1, 1978. The only thing that didn’t fly straight into Dallas was Edward’s amplifiers. “On the way back over,” said Eddie, “all my good shit got ripped off. Got lost in air freight—by [shouts into microphone] Pan Am, ya fuckers!” Fortunately, about six months later, Ed got his amp back. He said, “Thank God, I got it back. This is the one I bought when I was a kid. I didn’t even know what I had until now… . It used to be the house amp at the Pasadena Rose Palace; whoever played there has played through it.”

For the Texxas Jam, Edward would have to play on borrowed equipment, but nonetheless completely rocked and floored the sweltering crowd in excess of 60,000. After the Dallas show, they headed south for a gig in Austin and then out to Long Beach for their own shows (they drew over 8,000 people at Long Beach). They then headed to New Orleans to open for the Rolling Stones and the Doobie Brothers; Superdome attendance was over 80,000. They played a few more festivals that summer, concluding with a monumental day at Bill Graham’s Day on the Green show at Oakland Coliseum on July 23, 1978 with AC/DC, Foreigner, and Aerosmith. Here, Edward would famously give his first
published
interview with Jas Obrecht of
Guitar
Player
Magazine
. These days, Obrecht is one of the single-most respected and admired rock guitar journalists in the field.

Edward’s First Official Interview

Jas originally went to the show to interview Pat Travers, but Travers dismissed him immediately, too busy cleaning a mirror and entertaining a few women to grant an interview to a punk kid. Jas was pissed. “I’m a hothead from Detroit at that time. 24-years-old, what do you expect? And I didn’t wanna go back home to the magazine and my buddies empty-handed.” Jas stumbled upon a backstage quarter-length basketball court and started taking a few shots. In 2009, Jas recalled:

I went over and picked up a basketball and started to shoot. And a couple minutes later this kid comes over and he goes, “Hey, man! Can I shoot with you?” And I’m like, yeah, sure. So we play a real spirited game of one-on-one for about 15 minutes. I remember he whooped me. Uh, muscular, wiry, pimply faced kid a couple of years younger than me. So we get all finished shooting basketball and we sit down at the side of the court and he says to me, “Hey, man, what band are you in?” I said I’m not in a band and he goes, “What’re you doin’ here?” Well, I said I was here from
Guitar Player Magazine
and I was supposed to interview Pat Travers but Travers blew me off, and he goes, “Why don’t you interview me? Nobody ever wants to interview me.” I said, well who are you and he goes, “My name’s Edward Van Halen.” I was like whoa! Because his new album
Van Halen 1
(sic) had just come out and there was a song on there called “Eruption” which was about to redefine rock and roll guitar in a significant way. Eddie introduced a new way of playing, which was like hammering on the frets, which nobody was doing in rock and roll. And so, um, we sat down and that was Eddie Van Halen’s very first interview (sic).

The article would appear in the November issue (released in October) of
Guitar Player
and was titled, “Heavy-Metal Guitarist from California Hits the Charts at Age 21”—thanks to Dave’s age-trimming scheme (indeed, Edward stuck to the plan and gave Jas the incorrect birth year of 1957 rather than 1955). This was now the first time all of his early stories were actually published. Again—his father being a musician, emigrating from Holland, taking classical piano training, he and Alex switching instruments, the Gene Simmons demo. He revealed that Eric Clapton was his “main influence… I realize I don’t sound like him, but I know every solo he’s ever played, note-for-note, still to this day.” He was also very complimentary of his vocalist: “Dave, our singer, doesn’t even have a stereo; he listens to the radio, which gives him a good variety. That’s why we have things on the
Van Halen
album… like John Brim’s ‘Ice Cream Man.’ We are into melodies and melodic songs. You can sing along with most of our tunes, even though many of them do have the peculiar guitar and the end-of-the-world drums.”

But in reference to Dave, Eddie dramatically over-simplified his joining the band, saying only that, “He used to rent us his PA system. I figured it would be much cheaper if we just got him in the band, so he joined.” For positive publicity, it’s a good idea to condense things down into easy-to-repeat stories, but certainly this is a white-wash over his struggles with lead vocals and Dave’s first failed audition, as well as the showmanship and lyric and melody writing that Dave brought to the band.