Everybody Wants Some (21 page)

One of Jan’s last wishes was that Alex and Eddie would stop drinking before they destroyed their bodies as he had done. In a seismic shift in priorities, Van Halen’s most unfettered party animal, billed by Sammy as “the greatest rock and roll drummer in the world—drunk or sober,” Alex Van Halen climbed on the wagon in April 1987. The brother who had stayed out all night in high school while Eddie stayed home and practiced guitar was now tackling sobriety. The band’s wild-life image mattered little compared to the members’ continued health and vitality. Van Halen would have to carry on with a drummer who no longer got drunk at sushi restaurants, climbed up on the table, stepped on a sake glass, and fell onto the searing hibachi grill. That Alex was a creature of history.

Though the elder Van Halen brother was well on his way to staying clean, Jan Van Halen’s request proved more difficult for Eddie. As Sammy was learning, the hell-bent “Bocephus mode” was really a permanent affliction. “At first Sammy thought Alex and I were drinking because we were so excited to have a singer, that we were celebrating,” Eddie told the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
. “Then he realized that that’s the way we were every day. I think he was a little scared.”

Expensive visits to rehab were not helping, either. After all, Jan Van Halen had taught Eddie to drink and smoke as a twelve-year-old boy. “I tried to quit it for him,” Eddie told
Rolling Stone
. “I tried to do it for my wife. I tried to do it for my brother. And it didn’t do any good for me. After I got out of Betty Ford, I immediately went on a drinking binge, and I got a fucking drunk-driving ticket on my motorcycle.”

In February 1987, Eddie revealed a new close-cropped haircut on
Saturday Night Live
. He appeared in a skit with his wife parodying their home life, and also finger-tapped and whammy-bar-dived his way through a bluesy rave-up alongside G. E. Smith and the SNL band. The stodgy backing players and Eddie’s preppy sport jacket and hair brought to mind Michael J. Fox miming to Eddie’s guitar tracks in the 1950s sock hop in
Back to the Future
—a conservative step back to the good old days of rock and roll.

Meanwhile, Sammy Hagar went head-to-head with Roth as a solo act, fulfilling his Geffen contract with a self-titled album in 1987, produced by and featuring bass guitar by Eddie Van Halen.
Sammy Hagar
peaked at number 14—and was soon retitled
I Never Said Goodbye
by the winning viewer of an MTV contest designed to juice interest in the album. The single “Give to Live” cracked the American Top 40, and “Eagles Fly” fluttered at the lowest altitude of the Top 100. Though it met with unimpressive reviews, the album went gold.

What had seemed like a concession to Geffen now looked like a smart move on Hagar’s part—the leverage of a separate identity outside Van Halen. “It’s hard to say exactly why I’d want to make another one because I get the chance to do anything I want with Van Halen,” Sammy said. “But there might be a time when I’ve got something that isn’t quite right for the band, and then if I get a few more songs together, I’ll have the makings of another solo album.”

While Sammy enjoyed his freedom, Van Halen took a break during which Eddie claimed to put down the guitar for nearly a year, focusing on piano and keyboard. He emerged in early 1987 just to play bass on “Winner Takes It All,” a toss-off song written by Giorgio Moroder and sung by Sammy for the soundtrack of
Over the Top
—a corny remake of
Rocky
, starring Sylvester Stallone as a golden-hearted truck driver striving to become the world’s greatest semiprofessional arm wrestler.

The movie was not a cinematic milestone, but newly minted A-list rock star Hagar was invited to arm-wrestle Stallone in the music video for the song. The ex-boxer had fought his way to the top of the music business. “I really didn’t know anything about these guys,” Hagar said of his decision to join Van Halen. “In my solo career I was doing fine. Things were going really well. I worked a long time to get where I was, and to just go back and start over again. I didn’t know. But after we played music together, there wasn’t any question. Artistically, it was the thing to do.”

Production for the next Van Halen album was hurried, as the band was late to snap back into the rhythm of working. Reassured by the success of
5150
, the band confidently proceeded without a producer, overseeing the recording themselves and crediting nobody on the album. Throughout most of the creation, the title intended for this album was
Bone
. Sammy spotted
OU812
stenciled on the side of a truck, and adopted the license-plate joke as a title—a kind of ultra-casual answer and taunt to David Lee Roth’s
Eat ’Em and Smile
.

This was a Van Halen you could bring home to meet Mom and Dad. Instead of sneaking a joint and a bottle of Ripple wine behind the school gym,
OU812
was an album of prom themes—complete with pangs of lost innocence, lives at the crossroads, and dealing with heavy decisions. The hints of grit and darkness gave substance to the radio-friendly rock, without clouding up chances of airplay. The band also took a somber approach to graphic design, using a black-and-white portrait for the album cover, while the back jacket depicted a monkey contemplating a human skull—a riddle conceived by Alex Van Halen.

After the synthetic
5150
, the more natural production of
OU812 
was welcome. Synthesizers and digital drums still ruled the day, but they were allowed to breathe in the real world. Strangely, the guitar was largely subdued and the bass guitar was almost nowhere to be found—as if the band was trying to hide its animal impulses. “I probably didn’t even have to play on that album,” Mike later told
The Inside
. “Because of the production, you could barely hear any bass.”

Opening with a pulsing electronics, “Mine All Mine” was an ominous synth-rock track built up from sequenced keyboards. The lyrics put Hagar through ten hard days. “I beat myself up, hurt myself, punished myself, practically threw things through windows, trying to write the lyrics,” he told writer Martin Popoff. “I rewrote that song lyrically seven times, ripping papers up, drinking tequila all night one night to where I had the worst hangover in the world and I couldn’t even go into the studio. And I’m not like that. I don’t hurt myself very often. So Donn Landee and I locked ourselves in the studio and I sang the lyrics, and the whole time he had his head down on the console because he was trying to give me some space. When I finished, he jumped up with fuckin’ eyes bugging out of his head and said ‘that’s the coolest song you ever wrote.’”

The teen romance theme “When It’s Love” was the first song completed, written before Sammy even arrived at the studio to start work. The Van Halen brothers played him their tape when they picked him up at the airport, and by the time they arrived at 5150 the lyrics were done. Eddie unwrapped his full arsenal of Roland, Oberheim, and Yamaha synths on this one, even running MIDI cable into a Steinway grand piano. The schmaltzy single went to number 5, and sales of con-traceptive sponges among teenage girls very likely reached a new peak.

The first appearance of full guitars on
OU812
, “A.F.U. (Naturally Wired)” became the band’s opener on tour. Tidily bundling Sammy’s soaring yell, Eddie’s harmonics, and Alex’s chopped-up big rock drums, the track was mostly midtempo with fast parts and lots of open space—an excellent chance for technicians to adjust the lighting and sound.

The inspiration for “Cabo Wabo” came to Sammy near his vacation house in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, while he was watching a wobbling drunk attempting to walk through a chain-link fence. At the time, the song was best known for being the first time Eddie used a wah pedal. In a few years, it would be hard to imagine “Cabo Wabo” as anything but a promotional Halenmercial for Sammy’s forthcoming south-of-the-border party empire.

“Source of Infection,” a tipsy tribute to James Brown, rekindled the untethered spirit of early Van Halen. Sammy had suggested calling the album
Source of Infection
, but Alex found it offensive. The idea was shot down immediately.

Though the idea for “Sucker in a 3 Piece” dated to before Sammy’s time in the band, the song sounded a lot like the steady sex and potatoes rock that was the Red Rocker’s claim to fame.

Van Halen assumed the coast was clear to resume playing covers, gracing
OU812
with a juke joint version of Little Feat’s “A Apolitical Blues.” Donn Landee had engineered the original, so he copied the setup for the recording using just two mics in 5150. The band recorded live, and Eddie added piano parts later.

Eddie seemed for the first time to be writing dirty blues songs, something he had always avoided in the past. “Finish What Ya Started” was another country rock song in the Mellencamp vein with a roadhouse feel, benefiting from unusual fingerpicking and a peppy arrangement. Eddie hit on the riff late one night after all the music they needed for the album was already done. He shouted from his balcony in Malibu to Sammy’s house two doors down. Sammy rose from bed and found Eddie outside beckoning him, a guitar over his shoulder and cigarette in mouth.

“So he had a good song and I had the tequila,” Hagar told writer Martin Popoff. “And Eddie smokes, so he couldn’t come in. I don’t allow people to smoke in my house. We’re sitting outside on the porch, and I took my acoustic guitar and we wrote right on the spot ‘Finish What Ya Started.’ I didn’t have the lyrics quite done yet but I went back upstairs after we finished. About four in the morning and I’m laying there going in my head to myself ‘Come on baby, finish what you started.’ Because fuck, the guy got me all wound up, and I’m sitting here in bed with the song running through my head and I jumped up and wrote those lyrics.”

The chemistry and camaraderie of the Van Hagar lineup were paying off. In the stripped-down black-and-white video for the song, Sammy whooped it up with the others on a big hollow-body electric guitar. “Finish What Ya Started” peaked at number 13 in
Billboard
, making a grand total of four Top 40 singles on the album.

Dedicated to the memory of Jan Van Halen,
OU812
was released May 24, 1988, and became the second album in a row to hit number 1. Within eight weeks, it went double platinum, proving that the success of the Hagar-era Van Halen was not a onetime fluke. Their material had changed radically, but they remained an important band. Though the moment could be fleeting, for the time being Van Halen was a family.

Roth kept up the pressure, as his second solo album went platinum just weeks after release. The cover of
Skyscraper
showed him all alone in his element, dangling from the side of a mountain. To promote the record and bring his climbing hobby to a more convenient locale, Roth arranged for the crew who built Disneyland’s Matterhorn to create a mini-mountain on the roof of Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard. He climbed around the rocks on top of the store while fans cheered from the parking lot and cars stuck in traffic swerved to avoid awestruck pedestrians.

While
Eat ’Em and Smile
had been a boisterous off-the-cuff outpouring of ideas, the construction of
Skyscraper
became much more labored. Steve Vai moved into a co-producer capacity when overdubs and effects grids became overwhelming. Billy Sheehan called the album “kind of contrived and well-thought out—too well-thought out.” Dissatisfied with the band’s music, he left to form Mr. Big with guitar shredder Paul Gilbert, and was replaced in Roth’s band by the drummer’s brother, Matt Bissonette.

Skyscraper
had its moments of made-for-TV perfection, like Roth’s rants on “The Bottom Line” laced with heavy guitar trills, and “Perfect Timing” with its Michael Anthony–like backing vocals. The record was still all Roth, but except for the wistful and reflective “Damn Good,” it lacked heart. “Stand Up” was nothing but a mindless aerobics exercise, a parody of eighties synth pop.

The standout on this album of would-be TV themes was “Just Like Paradise.” On this near-perfect rock confection, Roth wisely planted his boots and hung loose for the ride. The single climbed to number 6, helping
Skyscraper
raise up the album charts to the same position. For the “Just Like Paradise” video, a crew captured Roth climbing on vertical rock at Yosemite, while Vai contorted over a three-necked heart-shaped guitar on a soundstage. Inspired, the producers of a new TV teen drama called
Beverly Hills 90210
tried unsuccessfully to license “Paradise” as their theme song.

As expected, the
Skyscraper
tour was happily excessive. Continuing the mountaineering theme, Roth rappelled from the lighting rigging in his rock-climbing outfit. He also flew across the stage every night on a surfboard suspended from the rafters. “If you have money, you can buy a laser effect,” he explained. “When we do tricks, we don’t hire some designer for $100,000. It’s as simple as when I used to go see
Peter Pan
onstage when I was a kid, when we’d get home my sister would hang a board in the room, and I’d strap myself into it, and slam forward into the future.”

He was now traveling with enough uniforms in his wardrobe to outfit a small militia. “That goes back to when I was eleven years old in the Boy Scouts—that was the first uniform they forced me to wear.” He was also photographed in a frilly, colorful pair of skimpy pants sewn together from women’s underwear thrown onstage during his shows—Roth had been hoarding every scarf, bandanna, and dirty underthing thrown onstage since the early 1980s. In fact, he later revealed that he often kept in touch for many years with the women he met on tour. Through their marriages and divorces he kindled the flames—a gentlemanly side to the infamous cad.

If Hagar was reticent to sing old Roth material with Van Halen, Roth himself was only too happy to deliver the goods, laying claim to the most heated material from the back catalog, like “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love,” “On Fire,” and “Hot for Teacher.” He remained a one-man challenge not just to his former band, but also to the legions of also-rans then populating the airwaves. “If you can’t do it on stage with one white light bulb at the end of a fifteen-foot cord, and a T-shirt, a pair of jeans, a borrowed guitar, and a crummy amplifier—then you can’t do it at all. That’s where it’s all gotta come from. Everything else is icing.”