The Tapes Archive

Chapter 3: Van Halen’s History

It’s a long way to the top in rock and roll. Once a band gets there, it’s never easy to stay, and rarely does a group’s visit last very long. There are thousands of bands in the U.S. alone whose greatest goal and fantasy is to reach that top slot, become head honcho, and rule over all those struggling aggregates in positions two through 12,000. In 1984, Van Halen, just four guys from California, made it to the peak—can’t get no higher. But it wasn’t easy, and it took time, dedication, and lots of partying. They spent ten years together as a band, working (playing) their way up from one of those slots in the bottom few thousand.

It started, more or less, back in 1967 when a couple of junior high school-aged brothers moved to California from the land of their birth, Holland, and the immigration officials never gave it a second thought. Thus, the seeds of wildness and crazy musicality that were to spawn Van Halen were allowed through customs untaxed.

Elder brother Alex (by two years) played drums, while younger Eddie recently had picked up the guitar and discovered a natural ability as he poured over Cream records and figured out Eric Clapton measure by measure. While attending Pasadena High, the Van Halen brothers began playing in bands, always together, the beat and the melody. During the early ’70s, the pair teamed with a now-unknown bass player to form Mammoth, a trio that turned out to be the last stop before the formation of Van Halen. Young Eddie sang and played lead in that early incarnation of Mammoth, but he hated the singing responsibilities and, it seemed, was always looking for a chance to unload that task.

Meanwhile, at nearby Muir High, also in Pasadena, a transplanted Hoosier from Indiana was occasionally attending classes. A self-professed cut-up, David Lee Roth also had his eyes on a rock career, skipping classes to play his guitar and honing the instrument that is his body. He soon found himself in a local rock outfit called the Redball Jets and would often rent his PA system to the brothers Van Halen and Mammoth. It wasn’t long, then, before the Mammoth guitarist, who hated to sing, asked the Jet singer with the PA system to join up.

Things weren’t all hunky-dory for Mammoth, now a quartet. The band played any and every gig it could, the members forsaking the collegiate life after high school for the backyard weiner roast and long car rides through the sprawl of Los Angeles. Troubles soon began brewing with the group’s bass player, but as fate would have it, the band shared a bill with a rock conglom called Snake, whose bass player, a transplanted Chicagoan named Michael Anthony, impressed everyone. Eddie asked Anthony to jam, and after a grueling musical test of odd rhythms and cover tunes administered by the Van Halen brothers, a new bassist had been found. So the lineup was complete. It was 1974.

For the next three years, the band perfected their skills, rehearsing in the proverbial basement and learning an awesome songbook of 300 covers, everything from the hard rock of such bands as Led Zeppelin, Cream and The Kinks, to the super-bad funk of James Brown and the Ohio Players (from whom Roth claims to have gotten his characteristic shrieks). Along the line, conflicts arose with another band, monikered Mammoth, and the supersonic, sleek surname of the siblings Van Halen was chosen as a replacement over such forgettable handles as Rat Salade and Daddy Longlegs.

Working constantly, Van Halen soon developed a reputation as the party band around Pasadena, playing every type of California frolic imaginable—beach parties, street dances, wet t-shirt affairs, beer bashes. Though underage, they managed to play many a bar date by staying on stage between sets, okay according to California statutes. Soon, they progressed to clubs like Gazzarri’s Crazy Horse West in Hollywood, the Rock Corporation in the San Fernando Valley, and the Starwood Club in Hollywood. They promoted themselves endlessly, printing up flyers and stuffing them into high school lockers, renting halls, and putting on shows for a minimal charge. They got shots as the opening act for such artists as Santana, UFO, Nils Lofgren and Sparks. By 1976, they attracted over 3,000 rabble-rousers to the Pasadena Civic Auditorium for one of their self-promoted concerts. 

This constant hard work and an unrelenting drive to succeed eventually resulted in the band signing on for a four-month stay at the Starwood. Increasingly, the band had worked originals into their show, balancing their wild-ass covers and expanding their songbook to encyclopedic proportions. It was 1977 now, and disco was in full swing, but Van Halen still held forth with their long hair and loud, blistering rock. At the Starwood Club, the kids were going loony over the band, and that reaction was enough for Kiss bassist Gene Simmons, in attendance one starlit evening.

With Simmon’s financial and production backing, Van Halen was studio-bound, putting together a demo tape of 13 songs. And while the recording project didn’t result in any interest from major record labels, word was out that Van Halen was working with Gene Simmons. Their reputation was growing. The demo sessions also provided the band with their first exposure to the ways of the studio, a valuable lesson for the future.

Continuing their stint at the Starwood, Van Halen drew the attention of Marshall Berle, who would eventually become the band’s first manager. More important at the time, though, Berle informed the band that some important executives from Warner Brothers Records were coming to hear their Starwood show. And so the legend of the Van Halen signing was born.

It was a dark and stormy night (it really was) in May of 1977, and, as the tale goes, hardly anybody had braved the weather to come to the club. But friend Marshall Berle arrived, bringing Warners President Mo Ostin and producer/VP Ted Templeman, and Van Halen unleashed one of their more scorching sets for the bartenders, empty seats, and execs in attendance. That was all Mo and Ted needed to hear, and one week later, the dotted line contained the scrawls of Messrs. Van Halen, Roth, Anthony, and Van Halen. And if that wasn’t enough, Templeman was so impressed that he assumed production chores for all future Van Halen albums, a task he reserved for only the top Warner Brothers, artists. It was a true-to-life Hollywood discovery, captured on vinyl this time rather than celluloid.

So, after four years of endless struggling just to get on the dotted line, the real work began. The foursome immediately went into the studio with Templeman at the control knobs and, according to various reports, laid down 40 tunes in one day. After three weeks of essentially live recording, jumping around, and drinking beer (only three of Eddie’s solos were overdubbed), the 11-song Van Halen emerged. Released in February of 1978, the album sold over one and a half million copies in that year alone. Listener’s ears were teased with the release of the band’s cover of Ray Davies‘ You Really Got Me, a thundering rock speedball that rose to #36 on the Billboard singles chart. The album quickly followed and camped on the album chart for 91 weeks straight, getting as high as #19, quite an accomplishment for an unknown hard rock band in a decidedly un-hard rock time. Most amazingly, Van Halen remains on Billboard’s Top 200 album chart today, one of the most enduring albums in rock’s last decade.

1978 was a weird year in rock, deceptively mellow when the band first hit the Top 100. The Top 10 included the soundtrack from Saturday Night Fever at number one, Billy Joel, George Benson, Barry Manilow, Earth Wind & Fire, Jackson Browne and Styx. The only other heavy bands around were Aerosmith (a youthful favorite of Van Halen’s), Kiss, Ted Nugent, and Journey, older, established groups ripe for a challenge from the brash youngsters from the West. Looking back now, hindsight shows the band’s fortuitous timing and the simple reality of the fresh power in their music.

Following Van Halen’s release, the band took on its first major tour, opening for Montrose and Journey on the “Van Halen World Vacation.” (Having worked so hard to reach the touring level, the band considered the road to be a vacation.) They played before 62,000 rabid hometown fans in Anaheim, then headed off again, fronting Black Sabbath and crossing the Atlantic to convert fans (but not critics) in jolly old England. As they repeatedly blew Sabbath off the stage with their combustible warm-up, it became clear that Van Halen’s days as an opening act were numbered.

Off the road and back into the studio, at the now standard frantic pace, the band cranked out Van Halen II in just six days, possibly a land-speed record and a practice that had many critics scoffing. The public didn’t mind, though, as the March 1979 release of the album was followed by its rapid climb to number six on the album charts. The lyrical Dance the Night Away went to #15 as a single, the most popular Van Halen song until 1982.

The album’s wild exuberance and electric live feel preceded the launching of the band’s second world tour and first nationwide trek as a headliner, a ten-month foray that began in early April. Accompanying the four frolicsome fellas were a 22-ton, 10,000-watt sound system and 10 tons and 444,000 watts of lights. The following year proved to be the one in which Van Halen really established themselves as a band of note and as a notorious band. It began with the recording of the third album, Women and Children First, the band’s first all original album. This time, recording took two-and-a-half weeks. Included with the album was a poster of David Lee Roth in chains created by noted flesh and fashion photographer Helmut Newton. Though the poster didn’t attract quite the attention Roth had hoped, it did make for constant comment from the verbose vocalist.

As the band set off on their nine-month ‘‘1980 INVASION” tour with more lights and power, Roth embarked on a series of mishaps. In March, the singer broke his hand in a fight with a disco fan in the parking lot of the Starwood Club. In April, he was arrested for encouraging a Cincinnati concert crowd to “light up.” (The charges were dropped.) In May, Roth tried to go that extra inch to impress the people of Italy and broke his nose on a lighting rig while executing one of his Spandex-testing leaps. (He ignored a doctor’s “two weeks of rest” prescription to return to Europe and the road.) And during a swing into the University of Colorado at Pueblo, David Lee got a little miffed that there were brown M&M’s in the band’s backstage spread (a no-no as specified by the band’s contract) and, along with his entourage, engaged in the temper tantrum heard round the rock world, doing over $10,000 damage. If nothing else, the brown M&M debacle established Van Halen’s reputation as uncontrollable party boys.

But 1980 wasn’t all broken bones and M&M’s. Eddie Van Halen continued to gain increased respect and admiration as a premier guitarist in rock. Following 1978’s acknowledgment as “Best New Talent,” the readers of GUITAR PLAYER magazine awarded Eddie the “Best Rock Guitar” award for the second year in a row, an honor he has claimed every year since.

Meantime, Women and Children First roosted at number six on Billboard’s album chart for five weeks.

Seemingly without a pause even to do laundry, Van Halen came off the road from their invasion and hit the studio, putting together Fair Warning in a lengthy five weeks. Acclaimed by many as the band’s most adventurous album and featuring some of Eddie’s best work yet, Warning jumped on and off Billboard’s chart in just 23 three weeks. Despite reaching number five, its relatively poor sales seemed to slow Van Halen’s steamrolling charge toward the top.

Despite the band not having had a Top 50 single on their last two albums, the sold-out worldwide tours continued. In 1981, the quartet set off on another ten-month cruise with a live production thought to be the largest ever taken on a transcontinental tour. But the big news of ’81 wasn’t the tour but the marriage. Guitar hero Eddie Van Halen met One Day at a Time TV star Valerie Bertinelli backstage after a concert, and following a six-month romance, they were married in Los Angeles. Soon after, a million kids of both sexes came down with cases of broken hearts.

In 1982, the band tried a new tactic. Coming off the road, they went into the studio for a day and cut a version of Roy Orbison‘s (Oh) Pretty Woman, releasing it as a single without an album. They then planned to take some time off but were pressured back into the studio after that single started to make it big. Warner Brothers, wanted an album to back Pretty Woman up, so in just 12 days and for less money than any of their previous albums, Diver Down was created. It contained five covers (a practice deemed sinful by many reviewers) and climbed to number three on the album chart. That, combined with Pretty Woman’s rise to #10 as a single, made Diver Down the most successful Van Halen LP, and it actually sold over a million copies before the band headed off on their 1982/83 tour.

The band’s Diver Down tour was its shortest (five months) but most grandiose. Firmly established as one of the top attractions in rock, Van Halen sold out all 80 of its U.S. concerts during an industry-wide slump in concert ticket sales. Once again, they assembled the largest concert production tour ever with 1.4 million watts of light, 70,000 watts of sound, 170 tons of equipment, and a road crew of 70 people. LIFE magazine did a spread on the band’s appearances in Detroit, and parents across America were finally exposed to the band their children had been partying with for years. In a curious retaliatory gesture, several folks canceled their LIFE subscriptions.

The Van Halen juggernaut continued gaining momentum again as Eddie collected more guitar awards, and October 22nd was declared “Van Halen Day” in Worcester, Massachusetts. Eddie also got into the swing of things by breaking his wrist in his hotel room. Then, in January of 1983, the band embarked on its first South American tour, running wild through Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. And to top off the Diver Down era, the quartet put together its first rock video to (Oh) Pretty Woman. Starring a pair of leg-fondling midgets (David’s bodyguards), a transvestite, and our four favorite rockers dressed as a cowboy (Eddie), samurai (Michael), Tarzan (Alex), and Napoleon (David), the video was banned from Australian and Japanese TV and from MTV stateside.