Everybody Wants Some (28 page)

With Vegas and the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino on the verge of transition, Roth came to town two steps too soon. While Frank Sinatra still lived, there was no room for Dave to wiggle into Vegas, carrying the baggage of Henny Youngman and half the tummlers of the Catskills. “I went down to the Hard Rock Café, man, and it was all updated. They had gambling chips with rock stars on them—Jimi Hendrix on the $25 chip, Eric Clapton on the $50 chip, and I’m on the bagel chip!”

Following the failed sideways move to the Las Vegas Strip, Roth’s musical career reached flameout stage. Yet as he frequently advised Van Halen fans, echoing Eddie’s stance against cover songs, “It’s far better to fall flat on your face for your own effort than to die bending over backwards for someone else.” Soon after leaving Vegas, he received a call from Warner Bros. to let him know Van Halen were putting together a greatest-hits album using some songs from his days with the group.

The Chinese year of the rat, 1996, started okay for Van Halen. Four days into January, they learned that “The Seventh Seal” had been nominated for a Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance. Then at the January 1996 NAMM convention, Eddie unveiled his new signature Peavey Wolfgang guitar—again an archtop like a Gibson Les Paul, morphed into the shape of a Fender Telecaster. Guitar players had seen Eddie’s new Peavey when he appeared on David Letterman in late 1995. At the same NAMM event, Sammy Hagar and Washburn introduced the three electric-acoustic hybrid guitars in his Red Rocker line, plus a solid-body electric called the Cabo Wabo.

Eddie had ended his collaboration with Ernie Ball Music Man, citing production problems with the limited 1,000-per-year line. He had joked that the guitars were good enough that he could go into any store, take an EVH off the wall, and play it onstage that night—but finding the guitar in local stores was impossible. Waiting periods on orders for the small edition had climbed steadily, now reaching over a year for a guitar. So Eddie turned to his amp manufacturer, Peavey, the reliable Meridian, Mississippi, based workhorse with the capacity to mass-produce the model with a few adjustments. He patented and added a “D-Tuna” switch for quickly flopping the tuning to drop-D, relaxing the E string a whole tone while the other five strings remained locked tight in the nut. At $1,700, the Peavey would become more common than the pricier Music Man.

While planning to lay low after the strenuous
Balance
album and tour, the band bought time by working on a movie soundtrack for the tornado picture
Twister
. With
Balance
producer Bruce Fairbairn in tow, they began work on two new songs—the pensive and melodic “Humans Being,” and an epic ballad called “Between Us Two.” Though the fee they collected was high for a movie soundtrack, Van Halen could certainly afford to pass on the project if they had known the ultimate effect on the band. “Ray Danniels was always looking for ways to make his cut,” Sammy told
The Road
. “The guys wanted to do it for some stupid reason.”

The
Twister
project became its own kind of disaster, a whirling vortex of misplaced priorities and scheduling struggles that tossed the band members through the air and left them miles away from where they began. “We weren’t supposed to work the first half of ’96,” the irritated newlywed Hagar told
Guitar World
. “Eddie was supposed to get his hip surgery done, Al was supposed to get the vertebrae in his neck fixed so that he wouldn’t have to wear that neck brace all the time and look like a paraplegic, and I was having a baby with my wife.”

Instead, days turned into weeks. No longer drunk and amiable, the newly sober Eddie Van Halen turned into a finicky creative partner. Hagar’s requests to record vocals in Hawaii were nixed by the Van Halen brothers, and he found himself continually leaving his pregnant wife in Hawaii to work with the brothers at 5150 in California. “I finally ended up packing my bags and moving back to my home in San Francisco to have the baby, directly against the plans my wife and I had,” he said.

With priorities scattered to the wind, Van Halen’s story at this point became like the fable of the seven blind men and the elephant, where everyone saw a different, conflicting side. “Sam seemed more focused on his outside projects than he was Van Halen,” Ray Danniels told
Pollstar
. “And you know what? Ed Leffler probably wouldn’t have allowed that, either.”

With Hagar and Eddie, the relationship had always been easy. They meshed as songwriters and bandmates. The trouble was that when things began to sour, they didn’t have a vocabulary for keeping the pieces together. They could no longer look each other in the eye. The two men screaming the lyrics at each other in the “Humans Being” music video proved all too telling, as a decade of camaraderie came to a close.

Fed up with what they saw as familiar reticence by a singer whose heart was no longer in the band, Eddie finally told Hagar to be at 5150 by six o’clock to continue working on the song “Between Us Two.” By this point, the process had dragged on so long that Eddie had brought in outside lyricists to work the song to his liking.

“No, I did not show up the next day at the studio like he demanded,” Hagar told
Guitar World
. He was losing patience. “My wife had just gone through a difficult breach birth, and I was staying home to take care of her, period. That’s the sad state of affairs my relationship with Eddie had fallen into.”

The turmoil continued only briefly. After eighteen months of building hard feelings there was no avoiding the collapse. They gave up on “Between Us Two” and only finished “Humans Being” for the soundtrack. A second song, “Respect the Wind,” appeared under the names of Edward and Alex Van Halen—a complete outside work with Alex on piano and his younger brother accompanying.

On Father’s Day, in June 1996, hoping for help putting together a greatest hits album, Eddie called new dad Hagar for one last heart-to-heart talk. When sweet nothings came down to brass tacks, he changed his tune and accused Hagar of behaving like a solo artist, being a stubborn uncooperative partner, and always thinking of himself before the band. Eddie’s wife listened at his side. “Valerie was standing next to me and counted eleven times that I said, ‘Sam, all I ask is that you’re a team player.’ ”

While Eddie came clean with his resentments, Hagar claimed that Eddie also let slip an unbelievable threat: Van Halen were already working with David Lee Roth behind Sammy’s back, exploring the options in case Sam didn’t shape up.

Hagar said he stood with the phone in his hand, sputtering a few incredulous sounds. He and his wife looked at each other—she went pale. Then he recalled telling Eddie, “You, behind my back, are working with Roth? You fucking piece of shit!” He elaborated in a postfight interview with
Entertainment Weekly
: “Eddie, if what you do with Roth is better than what you and I have been doing, I’ll blow both of you!”

Two weeks later MTV News prematurely reported that Roth was the new singer of Van Halen. On June 26, manager Ray Danniels set the record straight: “Van Halen is in the studio working with original lead singer David Lee Roth. . . . It has also been announced that Sammy Hagar, Van Halen’s vocalist since 1986, is no longer with the group. The band is currently considering a replacement.”

In the opinion of Danniels, who had become Hagar’s nemesis, the situation changed the day Eddie got sober. “Eddie got capable of making judgment calls that he probably let go for many, many years. The boy became a man, and he took his band back. It’s as simple as that.”

Sammy issued his own press release the next day announcing his departure from Van Halen over differences of creative opinion. Even though their official missive led with the Roth bombshell, the others denied that they had met with Roth except to discuss the upcoming greatest-hits record. “Sammy was telling everyone that we were talking to David Lee Roth behind his back, which we weren’t,” Mike said. “He started to attack the band, basically lying. He wants everybody to have sympathy for him, thinking we kicked him out, and that’s not the case.”

“What we thought was kind of odd was that Sammy quit and then got mad,” Alex said. “I’m not a psychiatrist, but there’s something wrong with that.”

“They were in there with David Lee Roth, while I’m changing my new baby’s diapers,” Sammy vented to
Billboard
.

The band closed ranks against Sammy. Michael Anthony had grown close to Hagar during the past two tours, but throughout the split he remained loyal first to his band. In 1996, Mike didn’t join Hagar in Cabo San Lucas to celebrate his birthday. “Mikey and I have always been great friends,” Hagar said later. “I think the reason he didn’t try to side with me during the breakup is that Ed and Al were out to crucify me, and they had gotten Mike and basically threatened him—‘You side with Sam, and you’re out.’ So I think Mike was just smart enough to pull his head off the chopping block.”

Closely tied to the drama behind Hagar’s departure, Ray Danniels maintained his poor rapport with the singer. “I understand him being upset and angry,” Danniels explained to
Pollstar
. “This is a guy who somehow managed to blow being a member of the biggest American rock band, period, and he’s smarting. But unfortunately, he’s created the situation for himself.”

The problems between Sammy and the band were not high-flying tabloid fare. The partnership was dissolved over six months of squabbles about movie soundtracks, travel timetables, and whether to do a best-of collection. These were music insider problems, not something normal people could relate to. It was a strangely unfulfilling end to one of the nicest and most lucrative partnerships in rock. After all, Sammy had lasted almost as long as Roth and racked up four number 1 albums. He went out not with a bang but with a flurry of nagging details and resentments.

Van Halen’s next piece of business was releasing a greatest-hits album without sounding their death knell. Sammy had shunned the idea along with Alex, saying that a greatest-hits collection was for bands whose day was done—even though he had just gone down that road himself with
Unboxed
. Fans were not thrilled about the idea, fretting that the release of a best-of would delay production of a new Van Halen album. With Hagar gone, the argument was over. Van Halen were ready to catalog their greatest hits, juicing the fans by including new music made with Roth.

By late July, Van Halen were officially recording two new songs with the original lineup. Eddie had learned of Roth’s interest while playing golf with their mutual guitar tech Rudy Leiren, a valuable soft channel for communication during the lengthy cold war. Wasting no time on a respectful mourning period, and showing little interest in appeasing Sammy, Eddie brought Roth to the studio without warning—Alex and Mike were expecting Dave the helpful computer guy to drop by, not Dave Roth. Either afraid they would talk him out of it, aiming for maximum impact, or simply forgetful, Eddie got the original band back together, almost by accident.

From a slush pile of twenty unused songs, Dave chose “Me Wise Magic,” scratching out producer Bruce Fairbairn’s lyrics and bluntly dismissing the suggestion that Desmond Child be called to add some lines. He filled the vocal booth with potted palms to create a “Club Dave” in 5150. Eddie said that Roth humbly thanked him for digging through material to find a suitable second song, “Can’t Get This Stuff No More”—the first time Roth had ever thanked him for anything.

“Me Wise Magic” was a welcome return to Roth’s dark funk, though in the buildup to the chorus he shadowed Hagar by singing too high for his range. “Can’t Get This Stuff” evolved from a rejected song written during the
Balance
sessions called “The Backdoor Shuffle.” The song was sitting on the back burner when Roth came along and wrote new words and a vocal melody. Sammy claimed that Ray Danniels overnighted him a check for $35,000 and an apology when he cried foul, demanding credit on a song he helped write.

The typically easygoing Michael Anthony was the last member of the band to okay the reconciliation with Roth. Besides being closest to Sammy, Mike had often borne the brunt of the abuse. He hadn’t spoken to Dave in eleven years. “At first I told them I didn’t want to work with Dave and I wouldn’t wanna tour with him,” Mike told Van Halen’s Dutch fan club. “Then we had a meeting with him. It’s funny because he was very humble. He hasn’t got a record contract. He admitted that he has made big mistakes and that he did the wrong thing. He admitted that he has a very big ego. Hopefully he’s better now.”

Roth took several days to nail vocals for the two new songs, and fin-gerprints of studio wizardry were all over the tracks. Still, the songs rekindled the spirit of ’76 without abandoning the lush, flowing musicality of the later records. Eddie had installed a Fernandes Sustainer in his guitar, a special pickup to recirculate string vibrations so each note in his fast, agile noodling could hold indefinitely—or at least as long as Roth could chatter, which was pretty close to indefinitely.

MTV polled a few luminaries from the rock world, and found Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins and Kim Thayil of Soundgarden eager to see a Roth reunion. Chris Cornell of Soundgarden compared the event to Kiss touring again after fifteen years with full makeup. Even Hagar’s Cabo Wabo buddy Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains confessed to preferring the Roth lineup.

Needless to say, the record company was pushing hard for the reunion to go further. The opportunity certainly had lucrative potential. The original lineup of Kiss had regrouped earlier in 1996 and was in the throes of a 192-date tour that would ultimately take $43.6 million at the box office, according to
Pollstar
, making them the runaway top earner of the year. The problem was that Van Halen had enough money already—they were hoping for a more powerful cocktail of money, love, creative freedom, and respect.

In early August, Van Halen still would not rule out a reunion tour, though they were proceeding with extreme caution. “After we’ve finished mixing these songs,” said Mike, “we will be looking for a new singer.” The band seemed vehement about using a brief interlude with Dave as a chance to put the eternal reunion question behind them.