Everybody Wants Some (6 page)

Templeman had apparently watched Van Halen from the shadows the previous night, taking a good look at the band before bringing Ostin down to view the merchandise. He had apparently been searching unsuccessfully for his own guitar hero for some time. “That’s why he signed [the band] Montrose,” said former Van Morrison guitarist Doug Messenger. “Ronnie Montrose could write good songs and play, but he didn’t have Eddie’s superstar quality.”

Van Halen played it cool, allegedly signing a letter of intent on a bar napkin and then letting Warner Bros. simmer for a full twenty-four hours before delivering their reply. Roth estimated the initial advance at $26,000, and said that Warner Bros. recommended the lawyer who looked over the deal for the band. Eddie later called the initial terms of the contract “a Motown deal”—a kind of indentured servitude unique to the entertainment industry. But at the time, they were thrilled, and they hired Berle as their manager.

Unknown to Van Halen, Warner Bros. had reservations about the band’s singer too. The label brass conferred with house producer Templeman about substitutes, someone more polished who could take their new rock act over the top. Alex Van Halen claimed the band didn’t learn about these boardroom discussions until the early 1980s, but one of the possible replacements for Roth in 1977 was recently liberated Montrose singer Sammy Hagar.

Hard rock was so far out of vogue in Hollywood that it hurt, as clubs mostly booked singer-songwriters and punk acts. Van Halen were not a formula hard rock band, however, and Warner Bros. hoped that the rest of the United States would embrace them. Contemporaries like Quiet Riot were stunned to see Van Halen signed. “We were more popular than they were,” singer Kevin Dubrow later told
Creem
. “They had a better rhythm section than we did. We had a great guitar player—they had a great guitar player. I thought for sure, after they got signed, we’d be next. But we weren’t. I was furious.” While hard rock waited to take off from the Sunset Strip, Van Halen enjoyed a five-year head start.

In late 1977, Van Halen played their last self-promoted party, for thirty-three hundred people who paid a cover charge of five dollars each. Van Halen were now sharply honed by hundreds of gigs and were in amazing form. Cover songs fit seamlessly between battle-tested originals and Eddie’s spectacular solo breaks. Roth’s randy crowd raps were far improved. In particular, the call-and-response part of the show by late 1977 between Eddie’s flickering fingers and Roth’s mile-a-minute mouth was spellbinding. “We did work really hard,” Eddie says. “It’s not like we were born with guitars and drumsticks in our hands.”

The local kids were proud—after all, they had won the turf wars, producing the baddest band in the region. Though the Pasadena party scene continued into the 1980s, it was the end of an era. Police and parents’ groups frightened by one too many ABC
After School Special
cautionary tales kept kids on the run, and the quality of bands slipped back down to more ordinary high school levels.

Funny that nobody in Van Halen had been born in California, because the band played the part perfectly, selling a bigger, better, and more liberated version of sun and fun. They were outsiders who had bridged the gap, and the great unwashed hordes would soon respond by the millions. After years in the trenches, now Van Halen could die happy. “My fondest memory of working with Van Halen is it was a group that was aimed in a single direction,” David Lee Roth later recalled. “We played a lot of different kinds of music in the bars for a number of years, and that was a great education. We didn’t do it for money. We did it because we really loved the music.”

For all their regional success, in 1977, Van Halen were still just a promising club act. They were gaudy, sweaty hard rockers in an era of sleek disco and fashionable punk rock. Refining the edges on these square pegs was now the job of producer Ted Templeman, who had wrangled rockers Montrose, cooked mellow hits for the Doobie Brothers, and harnessed the frenetic Captain Beefheart.

Templeman sought the live excitement, beginning by bringing Van Halen to the studio to record demos of two to three dozen winners from their stage repertoire. Plenty of tough jams like “Young and Wild” and “We Die Young” from those sessions never made the grade, but “Runnin’ with the Devil,” “Atomic Punk,” and “On Fire” were perfect. Other early live favorites needed major tweaks and were set aside for the time being. “House of Pain” and “Voodoo Queen” would surface again in coming years. The giddy energy and humor on the demo recordings were evident—at the end of “Little Dreamer,” Roth mocked Alex’s trippy cymbal splashes, cooing, “Are you experienced?” in his best Hendrix baritone.

Templeman soon installed Van Halen at Sunset Sound Recorders, where he had steered the Doobie Brothers to a slew of gold albums. There the band labored to record a white-hot debut loaded with unabashed charisma and a powerhouse of electricity. Usually Roth sang his lead vocals live in an isolation booth at the same time the band played the music in the main studio—an uncommon practice during an era when perfectionists like ELO and Boston were creating lush studio soundscapes one meticulous tape splice at a time.

The band jumped around and put on a show for themselves in the studio. The brothers bickered often over whether Alex was keeping steady time, and he countered by accusing Eddie of playing out of tune. In fact, Eddie was tuned down a quarter step to somewhere between D-sharp and E, a sweet spot low enough for Roth’s vocal range but high enough so Michael Anthony’s bass sounded tight.

Mike’s bass guitar was somewhat downplayed by Templeman, except for the “doomp doomp doomp doomp” at the start of “Runnin with the Devil,” a big-bottomed prelude that became iconic for Michael and the band. “When we recorded our first album, Ted Templeman was so into Eddie playing. Everything had to be oriented around the guitar,” Mike told
Bass Frontier
. “I had to be really basic. But from the first time I ever picked up a bass, everyone always said it’s not a glamorous instrument. You’re going to stand there like Bill Wyman in the back and just play. I don’t care. I love the way the bass felt, the way it makes your pants and everything else shake.”

There was almost no studio magic behind the band’s flashy technique. Eddie pleaded with Templeman not to force him to relive the headaches of the Gene Simmons demo sessions. Of ten songs, Eddie claimed he recorded overdubs on only two or three, including the solos to the cover of John Brim’s “Ice Cream Man” and “Jamie’s Cryin’ ”—a song that was written in the studio. “When ‘Jamie’s Cryin’’ was picked,” Alex told the
Album Network
, “everybody’s memory of it now is ‘Oh, what a great song.’ And yes, it was a good song, or else it wouldn’t have made it on the record. But we were more into ‘I’m The One,’ the hyper-kinetic stuff. We were heavy.”

Lacking time to hone the song on the Hollywood grindstone—the usual weekly club dates—Roth was unsure how to approach “Jamie’s Cryin.’ ” Not wanting to screw things up, he put down the Camel Filters and laid off drinking for a day beforehand, hoping to sweeten his raspy voice. After a couple takes, Templeman came down on him for sounding weak. When he heard Roth’s explanation, Templeman prescribed an immediate return to form—so the singer quickly applied the necessary medications, and soon his voice was suitably thrashed and ready to roar.

Slowed way down, a tape of three of Alex’s car horns became the special-effect intro to the record. Eddie recorded a cheap electric sitar to faintly fill out the sound of the guitar solo on “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love,” the band’s manifesto to being young, dumb, and full of cum. The song’s simplicity made a mockery of punk rock, using a complicated picking strategy to rip two chords wide open. At the same time, the feel-good vocal harmonies of “Feel Your Love Tonight” put a more racy sexual thrust into the good vibrations of the Beach Boys, the older generation’s consummate California crew.

The dynamics of
Van Halen
were fantastic, power rising from a hushed whisper to a full-on blaring wall of guitars, often within one song. On the soft side was “Ice Cream Man,” an old blues song of John Brim’s by way of Elmore James. Though out of place, the tune was a throwback to Dave’s days playing guitar in the high school parking lot. A dexterous picker in his own right, he played the acoustic first verse, and he played it live.

Eddie was awakening the higher brains of a generation with its feet stuck in the primeval mud of heavy rock. His archetypical guitar solo, “Eruption,” was done in two or three takes. Basically a showcase of his live soloing, “Eruption” was a slight variation on a composed solo piece for electric guitar. He would flash his chops throughout the live set, wiggling them between songs. Once committed to vinyl, “Eruption” became associated indelibly with Van Halen’s crunchy stop-start version of the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me.” Eddie thanked Templeman for even including “Eruption”—the producer heard him practicing it in the studio and demanded he cut a version for the album. A slight fade in the middle muted a squall of amp feedback—otherwise the unedited ninety-second stroke of genius appeared as performed.

The end of “Eruption” burst into a decimating boom that threw down the gauntlet to all other musicians calling themselves guitar players. The solo elevated electric guitar wankery from its slavish devotion to the blues. The middle finger-tapping section was almost like a flowing saxophone riff—maybe gigging with Jan Van Halen had rubbed off. Eddie’s sound was aggressive but natural. His guitar tone became known as the “brown sound,” a description Alex originally coined to describe his specifically tuned snare drum. Eddie wasn’t shooting for silvery robotic aggression—he wanted earthy noise. “I want my guitar to sound like Al’s snare,” Eddie said with shrug. “Warm, big and majestic.”

Not having heard “Eruption,” you could argue that music is more than just an athletic competition. You could talk about feeling, and how good music isn’t how many notes you play, but about which ones you really feel. You could look at Eddie Van Halen in his shag haircut and shiny pants and say that he was everything wrong with music. But Eddie wasn’t a nascent guitar god because his pick moved faster. He put more ideas together quicker but still poured more feeling into his playing, expressing a higher level of excitement and euphoria than anyone before him.

After twenty-one days in Sunset Sound, Van Halen rested. The band left the sessions with dozens of songs remaining from the preproduction demo, including “Peace of Mind” and “Babe Don’t Leave Me Alone.” Not many of them stayed on the shelf for long, as the band would tap the creative well of their club days several times over the course of Van Halen’s first six albums.

The photos for the album sleeve that introduced the band members to the big bad world beyond Southern California were shot at the Whisky a Go Go. The guitar on the album cover was one of Eddie’s $200 specials cobbled together from a pile of cheap guitars—what he called a Frankenstrat. The front pickup was just for show, to fill the hole—only the rear, bridge pickup was actually wired for sound, because after all his hot-rodding, Eddie couldn’t figure out how to solder the switch back in place. The guitar also had bike reflectors attached to the back to throw lights around onstage, like something from an episode of
The Little Rascals
.

For “Runnin’ with the Devil” and a couple other songs, the band filmed flashy music videos at the Whisky, hoping to capture the dazzle of their live show so the videotape could travel places they couldn’t. In the clip for “You Really Got Me,” Eddie wielded an Ibanez Destroyer he had crudely sawed some chunks out of to make a star shape, in the process ruining the guitar for actual music. For the band’s press bio, David convinced the others to shave two years off their age in order to seem younger. As if the old guard didn’t have enough cause for jealousy, Van Halen wanted to kill them completely.

Warner Bros. chose “You Really Got Me” to herald the coming of the new colossus. Bummed that their first single would be a cover instead of an original, Eddie recalled playing a tape of the finished album for drummer Barry Brandt from the rival Sunset Strip club act Angel, only to learn a week later that Angel were in the studio bashing out their own hard rock version of the Kinks’ song. Templeman and Warner Bros. scrambled to rush Van Halen’s single into stores first.

Standing atop the Hollywood rock club scene, Van Halen crowned 1977 with a New Year’s Eve date at the Whisky a Go Go, playing a best-of club days set, including “On Fire,” “Bottoms Up!,” “Summertime Blues,” a three-and-a-half-minute version of “Eruption,” and several unreleased songs like “No More Waiting” and “Bullethead.” Dave polled the audience about how 1977 had been for them, then drawled: “I judge the year on how good the Thai sticks were, and they were pretty good this year! Let’s hear it for Thailand! Let’s hear it for Colombia! Let’s hear it for Mexico! Let’s hear it for Edward!”

Wasting no time, in January 1978, Warner Bros. sent radio stations five songs from
Van Halen
pressed on a special red vinyl record. The standard cardboard sleeve pictured a pointy Van Halen logo that looked like a mountain range, while the flip-side label on the record featured Elmer Fudd climbing out of the famous Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies spirals used by Warner Bros. cartoons. “You Really Got Me” snuck up on a few rock radio stations and soon took hold nationally. Angel had been smart to try to snake the song—the precision-tooled cover took Van Halen into the Top 40 pop charts in United States and the United Kingdom, a sort of American invasion. Eddie was at home when he heard the song on the radio for the first time at 2 A.M. He ran into his parents’ bedroom and woke them up shouting, “Mom! Dad! We’re on the radio!”

The full album hit the new-release shelf in record stores nationwide on February 10, 1978, complete with a fetching new VH inverted tri-angle logo. Van Halen sold the California lifestyle and the world bought it. “We celebrate all the sex and violence of the television, all the rocking on the radio, the movies, the cars, and everything about being young or semi-young or young at heart. That’s Van Halen,” David Lee Roth told
Waxpaper
shortly afterward.