Runnin' with the Devil

by Noel Monk

  But nothing quite prepared me for the seven-year ride that was Van Halen. And when I refer to “Van Halen,” I refer to the original incarnation of the band, which disintegrated in 1985 with the departure of David Lee Roth. (I left around the same time, which, as you’ll see, was not exactly a coincidence.) Nothing against Sammy Hagar—fine singer and by all accounts a genial enough guy—but the real Van Halen died with the departure of David. I say that as both a compliment and a condemnation, for David’s exit brought about the wreckage of a band that was at the height of its powers and popularity and could have dominated the music scene for another decade had common sense and reason prevailed.

  Maybe that’s part of what made Van Halen so great: almost from the outset this was a band that appeared, at least from the inside, to have a limited shelf life. Too much talent and too much ego, too many disparate personalities, too much drugs and alcohol. They had to be great right from the beginning, because there was no way it could last.

  Not that I knew any of this in late January 1978, when I got a call from Carl Scott, a senior vice president in charge of artist development and touring at Warner Bros. At the time, I was living in New York, but had made a second home out of the Hyatt House on Sunset Boulevard. The Hyatt House was nicknamed the Riot House because of its popularity with the bands that would come through LA—they’d stay there while playing the Whisky a Go Go, or one of the other nearby clubs. Like I said, rock ’n’ roll was my life, on or off the road. I was thirty-one years old and fit right in at a hotel frequently overrun with drunk and drugged-out rockers and their entourages. It felt like home. Well, fewer cockroaches, but you can’t have everything.

  While technically an independent contractor, paid by the gig, I was, for all intents and purposes, an employee of Warner, and Carl Scott was my mentor. Gifted at business and generous of spirit, Carl taught me a lot about the music industry and helped ensure that I had a steady stream of work. Although primarily a sound engineer and stage manager in my younger days, I had just come off a short, but nonetheless memorable, stint as head tour manager for the Sex Pistols, the infamous punk band fronted by snarling vocalist John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) and doomed bassist–slash–heroin addict Sid Vicious. The Pistols, assembled in 1975 as a gimmick by London artist, boutique owner, and all-around textbook narcissist Malcolm McLaren, was founded to stick it to English classism while simultaneously providing his store with millions in free advertising. After a handful of lineup changes and the release of the seminal punk album Never Mind the Bollocks, they briefly became, if not the hottest band in the world, by far the most controversial.

  And the most polarizing.

  The Sex Pistols were poster boys for a nascent punk movement that owed as much to New York’s Ramones as it did to any of the other UK bands that had come before them. They were volatile and vitriolic, fueled not by a need to change the musical landscape but by a lethal combination of anger, alcohol, drugs, and youth. They hit hard and fast, destroying everything in their paths, only to burn out before they’d barely gotten started. Although sometimes dismissed by detractors because of their apparent nihilism and onstage antics—antics that included Vicious mutilating himself with broken beer bottles and Lydon hitting the snarling, spitting, and cursing trifecta, doing his best to agitate the audience through a mouthful of gray teeth—there was much more to the band than initially met the eye.

  In reality, the Pistols were a sensational band whose lone album remains one of the most influential and critically acclaimed records of all time. They were a ferocious live act that terrified older and more staid members of the music industry, not to mention the parents of the adolescents who bought Never Mind the Bollocks and who attended shows deemed not just raucous and unwieldy but downright dangerous. Ragged and unpolished, they made up for a lack of musical sophistication with an insane amount of energy and a live show that always threatened to devolve into utter anarchy. That they often appeared drunk or stoned onstage and in interviews, and frequently cursed out reporters and innocent bystanders alike was a bonus—and only added to their appeal and marketability.

  Not that there weren’t obstacles. When the Sex Pistols came to the States in January 1978, for their first and only tour, executives at Warner Bros. were both excited and terrified. This was an Important (capital I) band, one with enormous commercial and artistic potential. They were also a band with so many issues and challenges that they could implode at any moment. Concerts in the UK had frequently been marked by violence and onstage vulgarity; postponements and cancellations had become commonplace as promoters and local authorities simply didn’t want to deal with the hassle of a Sex Pistols show.

  Who could blame them?

  The US tour lasted less than two weeks and was concentrated, improbably enough, in the Deep South—not exactly a hotbed of punk counterculture. I had been assigned the task of guiding these so-called miscreants through an environment that vacillated wildly between drunk adulation and outright hostility. The beauty of the Sex Pistols is that they really didn’t give a shit either way. They fought and fucked their way across the country, trashing hotels and instigating brawls with fans and foes alike. Sid was by then a full-blown heroin addict with a tenuous grip on sanity; thus, you had episodes of him simulating oral sex onstage in Baton Rouge, or spitting blood at a woman while suffering through withdrawal during a show in Dallas. Lydon was disgusted by Sid’s behavior and disenchanted with not just the tour but, as it turned out, the entire band. It was a nightmare that, in part because of the band’s subsequent dissolution, remains one of the more infamous and important chapters in rock ’n’ roll history.

  I lived through it, and later wrote a book about it. Like all great survival stories, time has only enhanced the appeal of this one. You see, the tour wasn’t a disaster. That it happened at all was a minor miracle. No, forget minor; it was a fucking major miracle, and by the time it ended I had earned considerable cachet with the brass at Warner. The tour, short and crazy as it was, helped make the Sex Pistols a notorious and successful band in the United States, and represented a major breakthrough for me and Carl Scott.

  Think about it: I was the tour manager, which meant I was responsible for just about everything entailed in getting the band from city to city and venue to venue. I was the one who would get on the phone every morning and call the guys, rousing them from a drunken slumber by shouting, “Rise and shine! Pack your bags, we leave in an hour!” This didn’t always make me the most popular member of the entourage, but it was a necessary role and I embraced it in a professional manner—even on the days when I was tempted to just hose them down and be done with it.

  I didn’t line up the dates, it should be noted. That was McLaren’s idea—book the foul-mouthed British punks into a bunch of redneck saloons and watch the sparks fly. Sounds like fun, eh? I was in charge of all logistics on the tour, which basically entailed babysitting Sid and the boys 24/7. In addition to waking them up in the morning, I made sure they were fed, watered, bathed, put into taxis, and taken to the venue—everything was on my back, and when the Sex Pistols invaded America, it was a heavy load indeed. For this effort I was paid the princely sum of five hundred dollars a week. No health insurance, no pension. Nothing. If I wasn’t low man on the totem pole, I was standing on his flimsy shoulders.

  But I pulled it off, or at least didn’t screw it up too badly, which was enough to raise my stock at Warner Bros. So, a few days after the Sex Pistols tour ended, I was called to the Warner offices in Burbank for a meeting with Carl Scott, ostensibly to thank me for the work I did on the Sex Pistols tour, and to pay me for services rendered.

  “Come on down, and bring your bookkeeping with you,” Carl said. “Time to settle up.”

  One of the first people I saw when I walked into the building was Ted Cohen, head of special projects; he worked out of both Boston and Burbank. The Sex Pistols tour was obviously a “special project,” so Ted and I had talked a lot both before and during the tour. But this was th
e first time I had seen him since the tour ended.

  “Here you go, Noel,” he said, throwing me a T-shirt. “Try it on.”

  The shirt was black, in true rock ’n’ roll fashion. On the front were the words I survived the Sex Pistols tour.

  I smiled at Ted.

  “Thanks, man.”

  I went into Carl’s office and we talked for a while about the tour. I handed over all my accounting info so that Carl could issue a check, and figured I’d be on my way shortly. Before I could leave, though, Carl took the conversation in a totally different direction.

  “We’ve got a new band,” he said. “And I think they’re going to be the biggest act we’ve signed in a very long time.”

  “What’s the name?” I asked.

  “Van Halen. They’re going to be huge.”

  I’d like to say that my interest was instantly piqued, or that I felt a spark of destiny based merely on the name, or on Carl’s prediction. But I didn’t. As much as I admired and respected Carl, I also knew that it was fairly common for record company executives to get caught up in a certain amount of hype and optimism, and to believe that the next band would be the game changer.

  “Whatever you say, Carl. How can I help?”

  He leaned forward and put his elbows on his desk.

  “Noel, you don’t understand. No bullshit. This band is fucking brilliant. I’ve heard the tapes of the studio stuff. We’ve never had a band like this.” He paused, pointed his index finger at me. “You and I are going to oversee this project, and we’re going to break this band. And it’s going to change your life.”

  I could never have imagined how right he’d be. At the time, I knew absolutely nothing about Van Halen. I had no idea that a quartet of Southern California kids had been making the rounds near their hometown of Pasadena. All four of them were actually transplants, each of them born someplace else—which, if you think about it, is the quintessential essence of Los Angeles—but they perfectly embodied the West Coast surfer, stoner, and partying culture. Los Angeles might not have bred them, but they had been raised on its sunshine, schooled on its highways, and weaned on its smog-filled air; and in the end they’d adopted it as their own. It informed their sound and their attitudes, this baseline belief that there’s not much more to the world beyond bongs, babes, and parties, as represented by their lyrics.

  They loved California, and California loved them back. For years after my departure, I would run into people—on the street, in Ralph’s, at the gas station—who would swear up and down that they’d been to a Van Halen house party and seen them perform. Hundreds of them. Maybe it was just wishful thinking, or maybe the boys really did reach that many people, even in the early days.

  Van Halen started, as most bands do, in high school—or close to it. Alex and Edward, who was two years younger, had been raised in the family music business by their father Jan, a Dutch jazz musician, and their mother Eugenia, who was of mixed Indonesian-Dutch descent. The brothers had been born in Holland, but had moved to the States with their parents in the early ’60s. Jan was an interesting man—a jack of all trades who played the saxophone, the clarinet, the piano, and dabbled with shooting guns, something he and I later found common ground with—one who he took his music very seriously, and wanted his sons to aspire to the same thing. No doubt hoping to inspire greatness, he and Eugenia gave Edward the middle name of Lodewijk, the Dutch equivalent of Ludwig (named after the one and only Beethoven; good thing he lived up to it) and had both boys taking piano lessons around the same time they started school. They both eventually outgrew it. Alex picked up the guitar and Eddie bought a drum kit. It wasn’t long before Alex started sneaking in drum sessions while Eddie was out delivering newspapers, eventually mastering the drum solo to the Surfaris’ “Wipe Out.” He played it for his brother, and they made the switch; Eddie picked up the electric guitar and never looked back. Eddie’s guitar became an extension of himself—it was how he interacted with the world around him. The way he carried that thing around with him, it’s hard to imagine there was ever a time when he didn’t have it.

  When they were barely in their teens the two of them formed their first band, The Broken Combs. Well, one thing led to another, and the Combs ended up changing their name to The Trojan Rubber Co.—whether this was a nod to one of their favorite consumer products is beside the point. Back then Eddie handled the vocals in addition to the guitar, but his voice lacked range and smoothness. A couple years later they regrouped again, renaming themselves Genesis and putting their friend Mark Stone on bass. Unfortunately, the name was already in use, having been taken by a progressive rock band fronted by Peter Gabriel (and later Phil Collins), and so the Pasadena-based Genesis became a band called Mammoth. Mammoth quickly cultivated a reputation, building their résumé in true grass-roots fashion: by playing not just small clubs, but mostly private (and underage, of course) keg parties in suburban neighborhoods.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the railroad tracks, David was the lead singer of the Red Ball Jets. They weren’t much of a band, but they did have a first-rate sound system (bankrolled by David’s father, Nathan, an ophthalmologist). Sometimes the boys in Mammoth would rent the PA system from David, whom they’d met in a community college theater course, which eventually resulted in a partnership being formed. I think David joining the band was purely practical on the part of the Van Halen brothers: David had resources that could help them advance their careers at virtually no cost. Well, not exactly no cost. The quid pro quo was that David would join the band and Edward would cede to him the role of lead singer. This was fine with Edward, who knew he wasn’t much of a vocalist and who didn’t want the responsibility of fronting the act and chatting with the audience anyway. There was just one minor hitch to this solution: David was an untrained and limited vocalist. In short: he sucked. In fact, the first couple times he auditioned for the band, he was deemed unacceptable. But David is nothing if not persistent, and eventually the combination of his ambition, charisma, and obvious stage presence—combined with his financial support—won the boys over. While David never did become a great singer, over time he certainly became a better one, and he was clearly the right voice for Van Halen.

  He’d been born in Bloomington, Indiana, to a Jewish family that eventually moved out to Massachusetts, and then to Los Angeles when he was in his teens. While David grew up in luxury—specifically, in the 14,000-square-foot estate (which would eventually come to be known as “Rothwood”) of his father, who had built his wealth in a traditional and conservative manner—he was no stranger to show business. One of his uncles, Manny Roth, had owned Café Wha, a club in New York’s Greenwich Village, and David had grown up seeing incredible luminaries such as Hendrix, Dylan, and Springsteen. Maybe it was because of this that he became obsessed with stardom. He told me on numerous occasions, and I quote, that he was “going to be famous!” He wasn’t just saying it—he was declaring it. “I was destined to be famous!”

  It didn’t embarrass him to admit it, either. Actually, I think he viewed it as a noble, if not particularly practical, ambition. I could just imagine him standing in front of a bathroom mirror as a pimply-faced teenager, holding a hairbrush as a faux microphone, and stating his affirmation for an imaginary audience.

  “I am going to be famous!”

  And he certainly was—no question about that. Maybe he was right, or maybe he turned his dreams into reality through sheer force of will. Either way, it was impressive.

  David’s obvious and valuable talents in some areas counterbalanced his over-the-top behavior in others—both on and off the stage. Edward was the most talented and artistically gifted member of the band, but David was the brightest and most broadly creative, with a vision that went well beyond simply playing music and getting laid. Yes, his intelligence was equaled and sometimes obviated by his bombastic, demanding, and occasionally cruel behavior. Diamond Dave was a hyperactive showman from the start and ultimately a diva of the first order, and his mig
hty tantrums frequently gave those around him the sense that disaster was imminent. But he did have a vision for Van Halen, and for himself, and he made that vision a reality. He had help, obviously, but there is no question that, among the four members of the band, David was the true leader.

  He was also a true opportunist.

  I always found it interesting that although David never changed his name, he rarely discussed or openly embraced his Jewish heritage. The reasoning, he explained to me on countless occasions, was this: rock stars are supposed to ooze sex appeal, and the Jewish stereotypes did not fit that image. Jews were seen as accountants and bookkeepers; financial managers and attorneys; they were doctors (like his father).

  Being a Jew myself, and proud, I was confused and irritated by David’s apparent shame and his tendency to paint with a broad brush. Jews aren’t sexy? Tell that to Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, Simon and Garfunkel, Lenny Kravitz, and any number of other Jewish recording artists. Jews can’t be rock ’n’ roll stars? Quick—someone better let Gene Simmons know before KISS puts out another rock anthem. Hell, it had been that sexy Jew in question that helped discover them! Kidding aside, it was a silly and narrow-minded point of view, but I understood that it came from a place of insecurity (yes, you can be insecure and simultaneously have a big ego—the entertainment industry is bloated with artists who fit that description), so I mostly just let it go.

  For Edward, the music always came first—stardom was simply a part of the deal. Not that he didn’t partake of the perks that came with being a rock star, but I always got the sense that Edward had a purity of purpose; he wanted to completely reinvent the way guitar-based rock ’n’ roll was played. He may not have been the smartest guy in the room, but musically, the man was a genius. Edward created sounds with his guitar like nothing anyone had ever heard before. He was an innovator, a shaker, and that was important to him. To say the least, he was dedicated to his craft.