Everybody Wants Some (15 page)

After a quick trip to the tropics, Roth was ready for the road. Having exhausted every stripper routine he learned in Hollywood, he was kickboxing and running six miles a day to maintain his famous physique. “Everything I am, I was not born,” he said. “I had to kick it into shape.” He summoned monkey-style kung fu master Paulie Zink for a crash course in sword dancing, showcased in the “Panama” video. He also claimed to be learning Portuguese, Spanish, tap, dancing and bagpipes in his spare time—whatever it took to stay challenged and challenging.

“Being onstage is like being in the jungle,” he told an interviewer. “You hear all the noise and the volume, and they’re smoking in there, and people are throwing stuff up on stage, scarves and brassieres, and the keys to their house and car, and it’s just a big mess—just like my hotel room, man. And it gets really hot, reaches about 110 degrees by the second song, and you’re outta wind, and you’re limping and you barely make it to the next song. And that’s only the second song. You feel like an animal. It has great therapeutic value. I have a good time, that’s why I got this job.”

Van Halen and the conspirators at MTV colluded with dizzying power when MTV announced its “Lost Weekend with Van Halen” contest. The network soon received over a million postcard entries for a chance to spend three days with the band, doing everything that they did. The lottery couldn’t have found a more perfect average Joe than twenty-year-old Kurt Jefferis, a department store loading dock employee from Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. Kurt had tossed half a dozen cards in the mail, before deciding to improve his odds and chuck another handful of entries in the post box—his winning card came from the second batch.

Kurt’s catch was the American boyhood dream, 1984-style. His prizes included a VCR, a camcorder, an Atari game system, a private screening of
Footloose
, and a couple days spent tasting the life of Van Halen. Kurt’s hometown newspaper ran the headline, “Would You Let Your Son Spend a Weekend with These Guys?” His mother quipped that she wished her boy had won a lost weekend with Perry Como instead.

For the blur of time from being picked up at his parents’ house by limo and flown on a private jet to Detroit, Kurt Jefferis was like Charlie after winning the golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s candy factory. He shotgunned beers with David Lee Roth, strapped on Eddie’s striped red guitar, and endured the torments of the band’s pint-size security staff—all for the vicarious thrills of viewers at home. At the end of the show, the band brought its pupil onstage, smashed a giant tray cake over his head, and soaked him with a dozen spurting bottles of champagne.

The band had been egging on audiences throughout the tour by pretending to film them with empty cameras, but that night the twelve thousand fans at Cobo Arena, intoxicated by the biggest rock band of the year and ignited by the obvious presence of MTV just as the network was beginning to break, were completely aware of the real cameras after weeks of build-up. When the house lights came up, the band could still see the shining white teeth screaming all the way to the back of the floor.

“If it’s not some chick taking off her clothes, it’s someone’s hair getting torched because a sparkler lands on their head,” Michael Anthony told
Bass Frontier
. “When I’m looking out at 50,000 faces, I’m watching as much of a show as they are.”

Afterward, Van Halen whisked Jefferis past the backstage greeting line of music writers, local record store managers, and groupies hoping to rekindle encounters from 1979. The band gravitated toward the unassuming fan and doted on him, the realest guy in the room. Eddie blew smoke rings for him. They all sang “Happy Trails” together. At the end of the night, Dave started a massive food fight. “Everyone was involved,” Jefferis told
The Inside
, “the band, Valerie, and the midget security guards. Mike and Valerie dumped potato salad on each other’s heads. There was shit everywhere—broken plates and glass—it was amazing.” Not fully aware of what they’d done, MTV had presented its first reality television show, and it was a smash success.

The entire tour felt like a celebration, and every single night was sold out to capacity. Eddie played a never-ending outpouring of crisp notes and riffs, teasing with short quotes from well-known songs. Mike was a constantly tumbling brick avalanche. Alex pounded on a humon-gous Ludwig kit covered in tiny square reflective mirrors, an environment built on six massive bass drums. Dave was now at his finest as ecstatic emcee, ringmaster of an unbelievable party. “We’re a flame that burns for 24,000 people a night,” he explained.

In New York, Roth had to be talked down from staging an expensive stunt at Madison Square Garden, releasing $10,000 in one-dollar bills from the rafters as a thank-you to fans. He called it “the Van Halen instant rebate.” Even the ever-helpful Van Halen management team had to nix that idea, fearful of the legal repercussions of unleashing a money riot in the lawsuit capital of the world.

One interesting upshot of Van Halen’s exploits in their ultra-prime was how the giant illusion of their lifestyle created a million dirty little white lies. Roth disallowing wives in Detroit and strategically tossing his room for the
Life
photo shoot, complete with panties hanging out of his cowboy boots, was part of the show. Van Halen had never lied about sex and drugs—in fact, they used their reputation to score more sex and drugs. But with three wives in tow and headaches galore, the party was more a spiritual creation on most nights than a sordid romp. As Roth often admitted, he didn’t finish his onstage bottle of Jack Daniel’s every single night.

Yet Dave was enjoying the bounty of being a man about town, and he promoted a big picture of Van Halen as endless sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Once unleashed, that imprint reproduced and multiplied everywhere and every day. Every time Van Halen’s music touched someone, there was a chance for a rumor. Girls claimed they were paid to hang out with Roth. Letters came addressed from expectant mothers. A woman charged jewelry to his accounts on Rodeo Drive, and mailed invitations to their nonexistent wedding to two thousand of his closest friends. The punks talked about Roth showing up at their club in limos, picking up girls, and splitting—rarely mentioning how often he stuck around and got onstage to sing with the band.

Never mind that Roth did not actually have paternity insurance with Lloyd’s of London—all anyone remembered was that he tried. As Van Halen’s costume designer, Nancy Grossi, told
Life
, “All the girls ask me if David stuffs his crotch. He doesn’t.” Yet 50 percent of them would swear they heard that he did.

Even twenty years later, Ratt cover model and future Whitesnake wife Tawny Kitaen told
Blender
, “I dated Van Halen’s manager, and we’d go to the Bahamas with David Lee Roth. If he had to travel with any narcotics, he’d shove it in my bag. We’d get in a car and drive David down Sunset Boulevard, looking for hookers, and then he’d bring ’em back to our house while I laid in my bedroom crying, ‘I can’t believe we have a hooker in the house!’”

Roth’s pucker-faced, hip-grinding mating dances also invited speculation beginning around this time about whether he was bisexual. For certain, he was in touch with his feminine side, along with the feminine sides of half the female population of California. And he definitely danced outside the lines of Reagan-era Rambo masculinity. After all, he had come on the tail end of swishy 1970s glam rock stars like David Bowie, Mick Jagger, and Steven Tyler, frontmen whose sex appeal came smeared from the end of a lipstick tube.

“If you walk into a room and the room freezes, this is not a normal peer-group situation,” Roth said. “When you achieve a certain level of success and popularity, people don’t really want you to be regular, don’t want you to be normal. I have to take care to circumnavigate being in that kind of situation.”

Though as a rock star, he was a natural cultural enemy of punks, Roth began acting as unofficial top-secret sugar daddy for the Zero Club, a Hollywood after-hours bar and meet market operating beneath the auspices of a semilegitimate art space. There, Roth befriended underground figures like Tomata DuPlenty of L.A. punk legends the Screamers, Henry Rollins of Black Flag, and Mike Watt of the celebrated San Pedro punks the Minutemen. Rollins would later be instrumental in publishing Roth’s autobiography, while the Minutemen’s cover of “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love” would become a punk rock legend.

The Zero Club’s resident bartender, Top Jimmy, was a white blues-man celebrated with his own song on
1984
. Roth reputedly caught Top Jimmy’s Monday night act with the Rhythm Pigs at the raucous Cathay de Grande club sixty-four weeks in a row. The singer of the biggest hard rock band in the country was bingeing on inspiration, putting away the cardboard Rolls-Royces to walk alongside with some of the most creative—and poorest—people on earth.

After many nights prowling with these self-styled characters, Roth was showing unusual signs of introspection. “I sacrificed my education, my financial security, and my social background for something only one in a billion people get to do. From the beginning, I bet it all. Now the big voice comes from the sky and says the entry fee will be my family life. They take that right off the bat, because I have to live on the road.”

One Day at a Time
went off the air after nine seasons in May 1984, leaving Valerie with a Golden Globe Award and time to raise a family. As her schedule relaxed into more made-for-TV movies like
I Was a Mail
Order Bride
, she noticed that Eddie’s didn’t—he still tinkered in the garage incessantly. “In the beginning when I met my wife, it was difficult,” Eddie told
Musician
. “She didn’t understand this thing that I had. It was huge, it was my life.”

“I know his mistresses,” Valerie said, “and they aren’t people. My only threats are the electric guitar and the piano.”

With the 5150 studio operating out of his house, Eddie could easily jump into projects during rare days at home. He recorded two songs, including an instrumental keyboard piece, for Valerie’s movie
The
Seduction of Gina
, a made-for-TV movie tackling gambling addiction. The director had pushed for more music from him, but Eddie felt uncomfortable surrendering tapes to a movie he hadn’t seen. So in the middle of preparing Van Halen’s new album, Eddie and Donn Landee took frequent trips to monitor how his music was used. Eddie felt like a novice, and he wanted to make sure everything was right.

With Landee’s help, Eddie also composed background music for the teen comedy
The Wild Life
, starring Christopher Penn, Eric Stoltz, and Lea Thompson. He had been on the short list two years earlier to con-tribute music to the hit film that launched the eighties teen comedy explosion,
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
, and
The Wild Life
was a loose sequel also written by Cameron Crowe. Poor communication between the movie producers and the Van Halen camp thwarted Eddie’s participation in
Fast Times
. Instead curly-haired California rocker Sammy Hagar penned the title track. But Van Halen were too great a part of the indelible fabric of high school culture to ignore completely. Crowe had gone undercover posing as a high school student to write the book that his movie was based on. For authenticity’s sake, he made sure Van Halen bookended the screenplay: fast-talking slimeball Damone is introduced as someone who scalps Van Halen tickets, and surf hero Jeff Spicoli ends the movie a hero. After saving Brooke Shields’s life on the beach, he spends the money hiring Van Halen to perform for his birthday.

In July 1984, Eddie made good on a previous promise and appeared live with the Jacksons’ “Victory” tour in Dallas to tap out his now-infamous solo for “Beat It.” Eddie hopped around, lost in the shuffle of choreographed dancers, electronic drums, and keyboard backing, until Michael Jackson shouted, “You got it, Eddie! Eddie!” and the guest ripped into a blazing twelve-second run. The great communion of techno-soul and high-tech rock arrived—finger-tapping guitar and Jackson’s slippery moonwalk were two great exciters colliding from separate sides of the sun.

During the
1984
tour, Eddie began playing with an odd hinged panel attached to the back of his guitar. Like a folding stool, the con-traption let him finger-tap with both hands on a flat horizontal surface, making his guitar more like a piano. With outside encouragement, he eventually patented the eccentric folding guitar tool, perhaps wary after all the innovations of his that had gone unpaid in the past ten years. But he remained skeptical that the idea would be marketable to anyone but himself.

Eddie’s superstar status had gone through the stratosphere. His appearance at the 1985 NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) convention caused a near riot. Meanwhile, fans were stealing his mail, and they eventually stole his entire mailbox. Eddie denied rumors he was working on a solo album, claiming that Van Halen offered him complete freedom and artistic satisfaction.

“I’m partially brainwashed by the whole aspect of the business,” Ed told
Guitar World
. “What if I did something totally off the wall that I personally enjoyed, and people thought something weird about me? It’s exposing a side of yourself that is very difficult to expect anyone to understand in the slightest way. I’d rather not expose myself or that type of music to any attack.”

Yet trouble bubbled to the surface, as the success of the
1984 
album and tour aggravated long-brewing ego problems. The band had become too big to fit on one stage. The nightly set was burdened with so many solo spots that Eddie later likened it to
The Tonight Show
—a disorienting whiz-bang of jokes, flashy guitar tricks, and crowd-pleasing antics. The musical freedom was advanced, bordering on over-indulgent. Eddie and Alex were jamming so long onstage that Michael Anthony often dropped out to let them explore.

Offstage, the personalities were starting to clash. “I’d stay up until six o’clock in the morning in the hotel room writing,” Eddie told
Rolling
Stone
. “Roth would bang on everybody’s door at eight, nine in the morning, to get us to go roller skating or jogging. I’m going ‘Fuck you, man, I just got to sleep,” and he would be saying ‘Well, man, you live wrong.’ ”