Edward Van Halen: A Definitive Biography (8 page)

He also said, “By the time we graduated from high school, everyone else was going on to study to become a lawyer or whatever, and so we stuck together and started playing in cities in California—Pasadena, L.A., Arcadia.” The board of regents of Pasadena City College sure missed out on their big publicity moment. This was before it was cool to be a rocker and a college student.

About the band, he said, “I do whatever I want… . Everyone pretty much does whatever they want, and we all throw out ideas, so whatever happens, happens.” He also tells the story about getting signed, about building his own guitar, and his amplifier modifications. Critical of some of his fellow compatriots, he said, “I know a lot of people who really want to be famous or whatever, but they don’t really practice the guitar. They think all you do is grow your hair long and look freaky and jump around, and they neglect the musical end.” With Edward, you got the whole package: practicing guitar and keeping up the musical end—
and
long hair, looking freaky, and jumping around. One thing he said that was not published at the time was about jamming, and remembering those jams: “Most of the time I’m so high I forget them!”

Something else Obrecht revealed in a 2009 interview was that Edward called him up after the original article had been published and said, “Hey man, if you put me on the cover, I’ll tell you all my playing secrets.” Edward desperately wanted the recognition, his face on the magazine cover, and even bartered to make it happen.

Early Success and Domination

In late August, Van Halen and Sabbath hooked back up for string of American dates that ran through November. On September 22, the band played a one-off headlining show in Fresno that was captured on film. The footage shows a band making a triumphant return back to California to stand on their own. Edward is fully engaged in his showmanship, leaving his G chord to ring open while raising his arms over his head to lead the crowd along with the “Hey! Hey! Hey!” part of “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love.”

Their rise over 1978 was meteoric. By October,
Van
Halen
was platinum. Edward spoiled himself with a sports car, a Porsche 911e Targa. Earlier in the year he bought himself a modest CJ Jeep Renegade. His taste changed as sales increased.

The band made a huge decision to fire Marshall Berle before the year was out. According to Eddie, “We got rid of our first manager because he had a heavy ego problem. He wanted to be the big manager, in control of everything. We’d say, ‘Hey, don’t do that. For better or worse, we want it our way,’ and he couldn’t handle it. Went through a big lawsuit. It’s just fucked. This is all stuff that I never imagined I’d get into. I just figured, ‘Hey, I can make my music—period.’ But I’m handling it. I’ve learned things you can’t learn in any book or any school.” The band hired Noel Monk as their new manager. Noel was a stage manager at Woodstock and the Fillmore East. He was well-seasoned and would manage the band up until 1985.

Van Halen played Oakland and San Diego to end the year’s live shows and returned to the studio with Ted to begin work on the follow-up to their absolute ass-kicking smash of a debut. Just before the year was out, Edward was named Best New Talent by
Guitar
Player
Magazine
; the first in a long line of awards to come.

Several aspects of Eddie and the band set them apart from both the bands of their day and the bands that inevitably followed in their footsteps. For one thing, the band was always smiling rather than scowling and looking mean or forlorn. Ed’s smile is a trademark one—it is infectious and endearing. They jumped around and put on a show—they were by no means shoe-gazers. Dave as well as Eddie engaged the audience directly. And for another thing, they were all well kempt, good looking guys; tough but not ill-tempered. By virtue of the latter, they would draw far more women to their shows which would in general give the band a much larger audience than that of their peer group at the time.

CHAPTER 9 

Van Halen . . . Again

Work on
Van
Halen
II
commenced on December 10, 1978, and would go fast. The formula that worked for the first album would not be tampered with, and the band would tap a well of already tried and true live hits like “Somebody Get Me a Doctor,” “Bottoms Up!,” and “D.O.A.”

The tour of 1978 was essentially a ten-month long bachelor party times twenty. Following the tour, the band celebrated with a five-day vacation in Balise, an island in the middle of the South Pacific. Getting back into the studio presented some challenges for the band and it was Edward himself who stepped in and took action to get the band prepped and ready to knock out studio tracks. He said, “I was trying to wake the guys up, saying ‘Hey guys, we’ve to chill out a little bit, because we’ve got another record to do.’” Again, like
Van
Halen
, the album was recorded almost completely live with very few overdubs and a little extra time to get the vocals right.

The first three Van Halen albums were recorded in that exact manner. Ed, as well as Dave, used the pace of their studio recording time as a bragging right. They knocked bands that spent months and months recording, overdubbing and overdubbing to get a highly polished product. However, the way Van Halen recorded was anything but easy. It’s true it was simple; simple in the sense that you are capturing three instruments live all at the same time which prevents wasting time on overdubs, retracking, and double-tracking (the latter rarely utilized by VH). So, in that sense, it was simple. But was it
easy
?

With sketch artists and painters, it is fairly simple to determine the quality of raw hand skill that any given artist has. It is possible to produce a great piece of art without excellent hand skills; it simply takes a lot of time and patience. On the other hand, a sketch artist can look at a face or a skyline and in minutes produce a near photographic rendering. Both can be great artists and produce great pieces of art, but, honestly, which is more impressive? Many artists are notorious for never being satisfied with their work, constantly tweaking a piece and struggling to find a suitable endpoint to call the work finished. Even heralded filmmaker George Lucas is now somewhat infamous for never being completely satisfied with his work, having re-edited and added new scenes to his incredibly famous and successful films. The ultimate artistic argument is not completely based upon the final product, necessarily. The step to deeper appreciation of any artistic work is to understand the method of its creation. Such discovery inevitably adds to or even takes away from its artistic relevance or importance.

Ed bragged about how “easy” it was to record the first few albums. Edward said, “We finished the music in six days, and the whole album took eight. I don’t understand how people can take any longer.” The truth is that Edward (and Alex and Michael to an extent) had excellent hand skills, using the apt analogy. Songs like “You Really Got Me” were recorded all in one take, from the intro through the guitar solo to the outro. Could anyone else have done so? All in one take? Anyone that has spent a decent amount of time in a recording studio will tell you, simply, “No.”

The recording of
Van
Halen
II
went fairly fast and the album was similar to
Van
Halen
in many ways. However, two songs were
very
different, indeed.

First Sign of a “Pop” Mentality

The second album opens with a cover of “You’re No Good,” a song written by Clint Ballard, Jr. and originally recorded in 1963 by Betty Everett, but was a huge 1975 hit for Linda Ronstadt—one of the principles of the Avacodo Mafia of Southern California. The Van Halen version is no doubt a rocking track, but at heart it is a heavy take on what was essentially a soft rock hit. As good as it was, Linda’s hit was pure soft rock, adult-contemporary. Alex blamed Ted Templeman for the inclusion of the song, saying it was “somebody else’s idea of a hit single.” Once again, the band redid another established hit to ensure a hit of their own, but this was no “You Really Got Me.” It should be noted as well that “You’re No Good” begins with a
bass
solo.

Song two was a whole other ball of wax. Late 1970s. Disco. “Dance the Night Away.” Get it? At its roots, the song is reggae-inspired; the I-V-IV-I-IV-V progression is pure reggae. Throughout the song, Edward utilizes his “false harmonics” technique where he hits the fret board with his right hand exactly one octave above the note he is fretting with his left. The melody and pattern he comes up with, combined with the naturally percussive sound of the false harmonics, intentionally or not, approximates the sound of steel drums. The attack and delivery is unique, but the set-up is pure pop. Dave came through with catchy pop lyrics and melodies. The song is void of a guitar solo if you don’t count the phased false-harmonics passage before the final chorus. Otherwise, there is not a single bend or any vibrato in the entire song. Edward also layers a second guitar throughout—apparently no problems at all with overdubbing this time around. The first chorus and from the second chorus through the end of the song, there are two distinct guitar lines that interact with each other quite beautifully.

This was without a doubt a blatant attempt to secure a pop hit. It was about face from commercially
unfriendly
tunes like “On Fire,” “Atomic Punk,” and even “House of Pain”—which continued to be a live staple of the band in its original form up until 1977. “Dance the Night Away” is positive, it’s in a major key, and it’s about dancing. It was the only song that wasn’t written before the band entered the studio, with Edward apparently stopping to test the musical waters at that moment and “Dance the Night Away” is what happened. It likely would not have been as big a hit if they had gone with Dave’s original chorus lyrics and title “Dance, Lolita, Dance”—it was Edward’s idea to dance
the
night
away
.

It worked. The single was released on April 2, 1979 and peaked on the chart that July at #15.
Van Halen II
was platinum by May thanks in no small part to the hit single. Oddly, there was a Cream song on 1967’s
Disraeli Gears
also called “Dance the Night Away,” but that was never an issue. There were over a dozen songs on the charts in 1979 alone with the words “dance” or “dancing” in the title. During the last year of the decade that was the 1970s, Van Halen had a hit on the singles charts.

“Dance the Night Away” also marked the moment that Van Halen first entered my life. The song was in the top 40 when my seventh birthday came around in April 1979, and my grandmother routinely bought my brother and I all of the Top 40 singles —”45s”—at the time of our birthdays and Christmas. “Dance the Night Away” was in there with “Sailing” by Christopher Cross. Both acts were on Warner Brothers, so the 45s looked exactly the same to me. So, being seven, I initially wasn’t sure if it was the same person or not. I also remember being absolutely certain that Van Halen was a person—first name-last name—just like Christopher Cross. I loved “Dance the Night Away” then and still love it today. It makes me happy.

Van Halen II
opens with a bass solo that segues into a cover of a soft rock song, followed by a pop song about dancing. It was a clear attempt to soften the band’s edge and steer their image. Fortunately, the majority of the rest of the album was considered amongst my peer group, and the world at large, to be either the ultimate summer album or the ultimate party album of all time. Either classification will do.

For Edward’s follow-up to “Eruption,” he went acoustic. Ted Templeman hosted a New Year’s party at his home, and Ed came across an acoustic guitar and played some passages that once again caught Ted’s ear. With Ted’s encouragement, Eddie came up with “Spanish Fly,” a flamenco, nylon-string acoustic workout that features false harmonics, extended tapping sequences, and absolutely unbelievably fast right-hand picking. It’s a short segment, but elements of the track remain a part of Edward’s spotlight solo to this day. Once he proved he could do on acoustic what he did on electric, though, he didn’t record another instrumental guitar track for three years.

In his estimation, the second album fell short of the debut. “We didn’t spend as much time getting the sound,” he said. “I like the guitar, but I’m not particularly pleased with the drum sound. I like the drum sound on the first album much better.”

The 1979 Tour

Following the release of the album in February 1979, the band embarked on their first ever headlining tour. Their behavior on the road was the things legends are made of. The common things are all there—trashing hotel rooms and throwing TVs out of windows. Not so common, and little discussed, is the fact that the band engaged in production of their own pornographic films. They first started out with 8mm film and later purchased one of the first home video recording machines. The guys dressed the girls up in nurse costumes and schoolgirl outfits, while the crew that would film the band dressed as nuns. One can only hope that these films are secured away somewhere safely in a deep, dark vault…

Edward was regularly using cocaine, alcohol, and pot. The latter is hardly controversial, but coke and alcohol abuse, especially when combined, leads to dangerous places.
Cocaine causes irritability, paranoia, mood swings, restlessness, and auditory hallucinations. Excessive use of alcohol damages nearly every vital organ, including the brain. Hardcore alcoholics suffer a variety of medical and psychiatric disorders including avascular necrosis (loss of blood supply to certain bones, including the hip) and degeneration of cognitive and brain function, confusion, panic attacks, and depression. Abuse of either drug affects you socially—and destroys families. Unfortunately, Ed was destined to become addicted to both, as well as nicotine. In 1985, Dave proclaimed to
Rolling
Stone
, “Drink as well as cocaine—those are the two big ones. They kill your creativity and your spirit.”

Guitarist Adam Brenner, who later went on to front Adam Bomb, followed the band for ten shows during the summer of 1979. Adam was only fifteen when he first met Edward backstage in Seattle. Adam described Edward at the time as, “The absolute coolest, most beautiful person, let alone rock god, I’d ever seen.” Ed spent nearly three hours with Adam and his friend, signing autographs and talking about guitar licks and techniques. Adam recalled watching Eddie snort a bump of coke off of a guitar pick right in front of them. Ed told them he would have shared with them but he didn’t have enough—a standard line used by many a cocaine abuser. Edward also had some pot that he said he used to help him get to sleep at night. Ed spent nearly three hours with Adam. Upon reflection in 2010, Adam said, “He was the nicest rock star I’ve met still to this day.”