Night Beat (33 page)

But the best dreams die hard, so the tale moves on. In 1985, Dream Syndicate regrouped, with a new guitarist and producer, Paul Cutler. Their next album,
Out of the Grey,
was a bracing work of redemption. In particular, it seemed to be a record about what it means to lose one’s way and to summon the will to find a new direction and start again. In such songs as “Dying Embers” and “Now I Ride Alone,” Steve Wynn conjured bitter, dark remembrances of blown chances and bad choices, and while he clearly cared a great deal about the people who get swallowed up in such dissolution, he refused to surrender to the romance of it all. “Spit out the poison and get on with it,” he sang at one point, even though he was singing about somebody whom he knew could never let go of his own decline or his own broken past. Maybe Dream Syndicate lost their crack at the big time, but they still had music to make, and Wynn sounded as if he intended to make it as honestly and compassionately as he knew how. Dream Syndicate broke up and regrouped more than once and Wynn went on to make two fine solo albums,
Kerosene Man
and
Dazzling Display.
But
Out of the Grey
was the best music Dream Syndicate ever made.

I wrote about Dream Syndicate often in my days at the
Herald Examiner.
One smog-bound, gray-brown winter day, I was driving to work, listening to KROQ—L.A.’s new wave station that played mainly cloying music. Then the D.J. said a few words that perked my interest. “We’ve been reading a lot about this L.A. band the Dream Syndicate,” he said. “I haven’t heard anything by them yet, but we believe in giving new bands a chance at KROQ, so here goes.”

With that, “Halloween,” from
The Days of Wine and Roses,
began blaring from my car speakers—its frictional, slow-moving-but-exciting sound unlike anything I’d yet heard on that station. It reminded me of the sense of daring that causes one to fall in love with rock & roll in the first place, that sense of inquiring emotion that can pin you like a bolt of recognition. There it all was: flashes of the Velvet Underground, Television, and white noise Rolling Stones, in the collision of guitars and the hard, uncompromising beat and . . . and . . . all of a sudden, it was
gone.
After only thirty seconds of rapturous cacophony, it disappeared with soundless abruptness.

The D.J. fumbled his way back on the air, his voice shaky with anger. “That’s all I need to hear,” he said. “I like to give new local bands a chance, but this is ridiculous. You won’t be hearing more of that band on this station.”

And indeed, I never did.

I told this story to Wynn one day during an interview, while we were seated at a hamburger stand on Santa Monica Boulevard. He looked wonderstruck, then just shook his head, laughing.

“God, that’s wonderful,” he said. “To think we could disturb somebody who’s supposed to be as aware of ’new music’ as these people are supposed to be . . . ” He let the thought trail off into a bemused smile.

“At least we won’t be overexposed,” he said after a while, laughing once again.

BY THE LATE 1980s, L.A.’s punk scene no longer meant as much. As it developed, though, punk was something that was now all over the world—in fact, maybe it had always been in the air, in the history, in one form of voice or another, from Robert Johnson and Presley, to Jerry Lee Lewis and Sinatra. But without what punk accomplished in the late 1970s and in the early 1980s, American artists like R.E.M., L7, Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, or even (God help us) Alanis Morrisette, and U.K. acts like ABC, Human League, Oasis, Blur, Pulp, U2, Sinéad O’Connor, and the Prodigy, might never have happened or meant as much.

But as the 1990s began, the place where you could hear punk at its brightest and most exhilarating was in Seattle, Washington, especially in the music of a trio called Nirvana. But we will come to that story later.

van halen: the endless party

Our ancestry is firmly rooted in the animal world, and to its subtle antique ways our hearts are pledged. Children of all animal kind, we inherited many a social nicety as well as the predator’s way. . . .

ROBERT ARDREY
FROM
AFRICAN GENESIS

It’s like we always say: There’s a little Van Halen in everybody—all we’re trying to do is bring it out.

ALEX VAN HALEN

D
avid Lee Roth makes quite a picture as he stands in front of his dressing-room mirror backstage at Detroit’s Cobo Arena. Arching his hips lewdly and tugging at the waistband of his ruby-red spandex tights until the elastic crotch zone bulges like a gaudy Christmas stocking crammed with apples and bananas, Van Halen’s lead singer preens and postures like a bestial champion of autoeroticism. Actually, this steamy display is a thoughtful gesture for the ladies who will crowd around the stage tonight—the idea being that when they look up and behold David, they also behold his Goliath.

After a quick check to make sure the view looks as mouthwatering from the rear as from the front, Roth swaggers over to where I’m sitting and plops down in a folding chair. “Hey, man,” he says, tossing his woolly tresses back from his shoulders with a blasé flick of the head, “I want you to feel free to ask us anything you want, write about anything you see. Van Halen’s got nothin’ to hide. But,” he adds, leaning closer and slipping deeper into his patented street patois, “let me forewarn you: What you’ve walked into here is a self-created fantasyland, where everything happens four times as much and four times as quick, like an around-the-calendar New Year’s Eve.

“It’s like,
any
thing you desire you can find here—whatever your vice, whatever your sexual ideals. Whatever somebody else can’t do in his nine-to-five job,
I
can do in rock & roll.”

Tickled by his description of rock & roll privilege, Roth laughs lustily and bounds back to the mirror. “I guess what I’m saying, man, is that I’m
proud
of the way we live, not so much because of the records we sell or the money we make, but because of the party we’re going to have afterward to celebrate all that.”

ALL THINGS considered, Roth and the other members of Van Halen—bassist Michael Anthony, guitarist Eddie Van Halen, and his brother, drummer Alex Van Halen—have plenty to celebrate. Their most recent album,
Women and Children First,
vaulted into
Billboard
’s Top 10 only one week after its release. The band’s previous LPs,
Van Halen
and
Van Halen II,
have reportedly sold more than 7 million copies worldwide. In addition, the pair of sold-out shows in Detroit—part of the 1980 Invasion tour, the group’s most extensive and extravagant headline trek to date—denotes an even more crucial triumph of the marketplace: a fervid acceptance of Van Halen by America’s heavy-metal heartland. The group is now one of the undisputed kingpins of hard rock, ranking alongside such venerable Visigoths as Led Zeppelin, Ted Nugent, and Aerosmith.

Van Halen, though, differs from the current crop of metal bands (such as Rush, the Scorpions, UFO, and Triumph) that have been enjoying a formidable resurgence in popularity. Their ignoble posturing is a welcome reprieve from the empty-headed pomposity of blowhards like Rush, and their music is concise, tuneful, and impelling.

Van Halen, however, isn’t an example of resurgent heavy metal so much as the inevitable progeny of yesteryear’s metal epoch. Roth blusters and blares onstage like a brazen, self-endeared crossbreed of Black Oak Arkansas’ Jim Dandy Mangrum, Grand Funk Railroad’s Mark Farner, and Zeppelin’s Robert Plant. Eddie Van Halen, the group’s musical conscience, plays guitar like some pyrotechnical, virtuosic offspring of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page. Altogether, Van Halen comes off as intuitively smart and scrupulously artless—perhaps the most satirical symbols of metal mythology since Nugent, or at least Cheap Trick.

But, like many of their heavy-metal brethren, they can also come off as a band of vulgarians. At the outset of this tour, at the University of Southern Colorado in Pueblo, group and crew members trashed a dining room, dressing room, and restroom after the caterers refused to remove some brown M & M’s from a plate of candy. (Van Halen has a clause written into their performance contracts that prohibits the serving of brown M & M’s backstage. When asked why, Alex Van Halen replied, “Why not?”) The result of that little lark, according to one report, was $10,000 to $15,000 worth of damage and a ban on rock concerts in Pueblo for the forseeable future.

Instances like that one have prompted some critics to describe Roth as “vainglorious” and “brutish” and to view the band itself as a pack of lack-witted, carnal-minded musical barbarians—a common enough appraisal of heavy-metal groups. Sitting with Roth backstage, watching as he pulls on a pair of scarlet-plumed boots, I ask what he thinks of the critics’ aspersions.

“You want to know if we’re animals?” Roth says, gazing at his feathered footwear. “Let me put it this way: When I’m onstage, with the volume rippling my body like a glass of water, and thousands of people generating heat in my direction, there’s no pause for thought. My basement faculties take over completely.

“Sure—it’s animal. I mean, people might like to talk about art, but look where art
is:
It’s in the fucking gutter, starving. Van Halen likes to keep things simple; none of this vague, symbolic shit. All we’re doing is giving our daily lives melodies, beats, and titles—what we sing about is what we live.”

WHEN DAVID LEE ROTH declares that the life Van Halen leads is the same as the one the band sings about, what he’s saying is that it’s a life brimming with easygoing sex and unabashed affluence. Like many of their comrades of the metal persuasion, Van Halen ballyhoos the time-honored ideal of ceaseless, remorseless, inebriated partying. In fact, in their capable hands, the party ideal becomes a hard and fast commitment: that no matter where Van Halen alights, a boisterous, full-blown saturnalia is bound to follow.

Tonight, the appointed place is the Cobo Arena, where nearly twelve thousand heavy-metal zealots—all with more than just a little latent Van Halen in them—have gathered to lend their voice to the party. And lend it they do. When Van Halen hits the stage, heralded by Eddie Van Halen’s storming prelude to “Romeo’s Delight,” a thundering yowl of acclamation greets them from the floor. “Let me tell ya,” says Roth from the lip of the stage, “when Detroit raises its voice, it’s fucking
scary.”

Everything about this show—from the titanic, military-motif stage to the overhanging rainbow-spectrum light system (touted as the largest such setup ever taken on the road)—is designed to search out even the most narcotized kid in the furthest reaches of Cobo’s three-tiered balcony and thump him in the chest, good and hard. The big thumper, of course, is the music, a sense-numbing blend of Alex’ double-barreled drum bursts, Michael Anthony’s hulking, palpable bass lines, and Eddie’s fleet, blazing guitar.

Eddie, in particular, accounts for the bulk of the sound. He plays with unbridled strength, stacking up layers of leviathan chords, then cutting them down with volleys of staccato fireworks and glimmers of harmonic-phrased melodies. At certain moments, when Anthony’s bass hammers out a steady rhythm-pulse, and Eddie’s guitar and Alex’ drums interknit into a cacophonous counterpoint, Van Halen’s heady brand of heavy metal aspires to a near-orchestral scope (which is
not
to say near-classical).

Musical prowess aside, Van Halen concerts are mostly showcases for Roth and his gregarious talents. Roth wangles the crowd from overture to encore, cavorting throughout like a carnal gymnast and trotting out a bookful of born-to-raise-hell bromides. “Swear to God, I smelled
dope
when I walked in here tonight,” he says solicitously at one point, then has a dutiful roadie haul out something resembling a joint for him to puff on. Later, while swigging from a half-empty Jack Daniel’s bottle, Roth proclaims, “Tonight, I’m going to teach you how to drink for yourself; but when I come back next year, I’m going to teach you how to drink for
other
people.”

After the concert, the party spirit extends backstage. As ZZ Top’s “I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide” pours out of Roth’s portable stereo, two young women climb up on a banquet table and cheerfully strip down to their boots and panties, to the rowdy delight of the men and the silence of the other women. Eddie Van Halen is hanging out at the rear of the room, wearily watching it all with unconcern. Brother Alex, however, and Michael Anthony move up close.

Alex thoughtfully produces a flashlight, which he uses to illuminate the dancer’s pelvic motions. In return, the women spread their legs and rub themselves delightedly. Catching my eye from across the room, Roth comes over and gives me a fraternal slap on the shoulder. “Lost denizens of the night,” he says, smiling at the women writhing on the table. “Man, I relate to them heavily.”

“YOU’RE ONLY as good as your worst night, and I feel like I went through hell tonight.”

It’s the wee hours before dawn, and Eddie Van Halen is sitting on my hotel-room floor. When he showed up about half an hour ago, he seemed dragged out and depressed because he felt his guitar playing earlier in the evening had been haphazard and prosaic. Now, after a couple of glasses of straight bourbon, he appears ruminative. “I suppose what bothers me,” he says, “is that often the kids don’t even notice when I’m bad. I come offstage and get compliments up the ass. That’s
so
frustrating.”

Unlike Roth, twenty-three-year-old Eddie Van Halen seems strangely disquieted by mass adulation. “Just three years ago,” he says, “I was fighting my way up front with the rest of the kids to see Aerosmith. Then a year later, we were
playing
with them. That boggled me to death. I mean, I knew I’d always play guitar, but I had no idea I’d be in the position I’m in now.”

In a way, it might have been predicted. Born in Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, the sons of a jazz musician, Eddie and Alex Van Halen grew up studying counterpoint theory on piano and playing the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky. But after the family moved to Pasadena, California, in 1968, the two brothers grew enamored of American and British rock & roll.

While still teenagers, Eddie and Alex formed Mammoth, a heavy-metal-
cum
-party band that frequented Pasadena’s wet T-shirt circuit. Alex still bristles when he recalls the bantering he and Eddie used to receive from friends for playing “primitive” music: “They used to call us ’musical prostitutes’ because we were playing songs that had simple structures. But it’s much harder to write a stable melody in a basic blues format than the stuff these progressive musicians come up with; they change chords and tempos more often than I change my underwear. Some people might call that technical proficiency, but I just call it jerking off.”

Whatever lingering doubts the Van Halens may have had about their music’s validity were dispelled for good after they hooked up with Roth, who was doing a blues troubadour act at Pasadena’s Ice House. (One of the few things Roth
does
exercise restraint about is discussing his personal background, though he admits to growing up on a farm in Indiana and spending weekends at his Uncle Manny’s Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village before moving to Pasadena in the early seventies.)