by Noel Monk
Similarly, their personal manager had been suggested by Mo Ostin, an astute judge of talent and commercial potential, and one slick motherfucker. I have no doubt Mo wanted a manager that would be favorable to his company.
That person was Marshall Berle.
Marshall had a long history in Hollywood, fueled by deep family ties in show business. Before moving into the personal management game, he’d spent more than a decade as a talent agent at William Morris, where his clients included the Beach Boys, Little Richard, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Marvin Gaye, among others. I never did find out exactly how he came to know about Van Halen, but I do know that he was at the Starwood on the same night that Mo Ostin and Ted Templeman came to see the band play. He introduced the boys to Mo and Ted, and shortly thereafter became their personal manager (at Mo’s urging).
Even at this first lunch, it wasn’t clear to me exactly what Marshall’s relationship was to the band—mostly because he wasn’t there. I found it strange that he hadn’t attended the initial meeting in Burbank. In my opinion, a personal manager should always be present when a band is meeting with record company executives, and should be heavily involved when they’re planning a tour—especially when it comes to a brand new contract. I tried to ignore my initial reaction; maybe he was out of town, or maybe he had already gone over the talking points with Carl. I had no idea, and at the time I didn’t really care. Later, as I got to know Marshall and saw his behavior up close and personal, the fact that he had missed the initial meeting made perfect sense to me and was a sign of things to come.
After lunch, we all went back to the offices and took the band on a quick meet-and-greet, introducing them to a few other key players. Then we went our separate ways. Within forty-eight hours I was on the road with another band whose tour would last the next few weeks. I wouldn’t see any members of Van Halen until nearly two months later, at the end of February, when I caught up with them in Chicago, ready to kick off the tour. Then, for better or for worse, Van Halen became my world.
WHILE I WAS AWAY, the buzz surrounding Van Halen became louder and more substantive. They had dropped one of the best debut albums in the history of rock ’n’ roll, becoming a household name practically overnight. There wasn’t a car radio in any part of the country that wasn’t routinely blasting their cover of “You Really Got Me,” a fresh-faced, upbeat version of the classic Kinks song, and Van Halen was promising to live up to the hype Carl had predicted. The man had been right. Everyone loved David’s energy, and Edward’s electric, out-of-the-box guitar work. They were a hit.
All this came as a huge relief. Sure, Carl and I had both done well with the Sex Pistols, but after almost four months on the charts, and perhaps attributable to their very specific audience, Never Mind the Bollocks still hadn’t reached gold status. Even so, the Pistols had become the center of much media attention, which cemented the album’s place in history as a cult hit, so we had counted it as a win (or, at least, I had, and I had the “I Survived the Sex Pistols Tour” T-shirt given to me by Ted Cohen to prove it), but with success comes pressure. Van Halen was crucial to advancing our careers and credibility, and the stakes were higher than ever. Naturally, they were much higher for Carl. He was a vice president, after all, and it was his ass on the line much more so than mine, but I sympathized, and had my own role to play.
See, this is where I came in. It was my job to steer Van Halen through the rough, rigorous, and grueling process that separates the great bands from the wannabes and one-hit wonders. It was up to me to help Van Halen transition from a club mentality—with limited resources and production—to the Big Show. At the end of this tour they would either be a band that would be right at home in front of several thousand fans, or their careers would be over.
I knew how to guide them along this journey; with Carl’s backing—and with his emotional support and the financial muscle of Warner Bros.—I could make it happen.
But not without a great record.
Until then, I had been worried that I’d been saddled with the impossible task of transforming chicken shit into chicken salad. I’d been down that road before, albeit with less at stake, and it all rests on the album. Artists’ careers hinged on whether those twelve-inch sheets of black vinyl had any substance to them or not. Without a good one, you were dead in the water. If the music sucked, people wouldn’t buy the records, and if they didn’t buy the records, they sure as hell weren’t going to shell out even more of their hard-earned cash to see the band live. This was synergy at work. The single caught their attention, then the album grew the audience, and then the audience supported the tour. I knew the reality of the world in which I worked: no matter how much money you threw at a project, or how talented and hardworking your production and promotional staffs might have been, it all came down to the record. It’s not something you could fake.
Van Halen didn’t need to. They were the complete package.
There’s an old saying in the music business: We want the girls in the audience to want to be with the boys in the band, and we want the guys in the audience to wish they were in the band.
Van Halen nailed it. They nailed the girls in the audience, too—but that’s beside the point.
Released on February 10, 1978, the album sold briskly from the onset, although it wasn’t an overnight sensation. Rather, it peaked at a high of number 19 on the US charts roughly one month after it was released. Van Halen made good on the promise of the previously released EP, and time has served only to burnish its reputation. Simply put, the album holds up. A few years back Rolling Stone placed Van Halen at number 27 on its list of the 100 greatest debut albums in rock ’n’ roll history:
The strutting frontman as spandex-clad love machine, the finger-flying guitar hero, the kegstand rhythm section: Van Halen was the ultimate party band and their debut feels like the Eighties arriving two years ahead of schedule. Tunes like the fist pumping “Runnin’ with the Devil,” the muscular “Atomic Punk,” a thunderous cover of “You Really Got Me” and “Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love” put the show-biz swagger back in hard rock, and Eddie Van Halen’s jaw-dropping technique raised the bar for six-string pyrotechnics, particularly on “Eruption,” the solo that launched a thousand dudes messing around at Guitar Center.
Yeah, that all sounds about right. Van Halen was a fantastic debut that instantly displayed everything fans came to know and love about the band. More than two dozen songs were brought into the studio and considered for inclusion on the album, with the final list pared to a tight and muscular eleven: nine original compositions and two covers. The album was not an overnight sensation, but man, did this thing have legs. In part because of the band’s stellar live shows and a youthful commitment to endless touring, Van Halen became one of those albums that simply would not go away, spending an incredible 169 weeks (more than three years!) on the charts. It reached gold status on May 24, 1978, and platinum status the following October. The album surpassed 10 million copies sold in 1996, and continues to be a staple of classic rock radio stations today.
That, my friends, is what is known as a legacy.
Despite all this, as I prepared to join the band in Chicago for the first date on their tour, I still hadn’t heard a single Van Halen song, a feat which, in hindsight, I can only attribute to dumb luck. Van Halen had announced themselves with a thunderous roar, and by the time I headed out to Chicago to meet up with them, they were sending shock waves through the industry. They were more than ready for their first show as the opening act for Ronnie Montrose and (would-be) rock legend Journey, kicking off what would prove to be—what would have always been, regardless of what came next—one hell of a memorable tour.
WHEN THE BAND got off the plane in Chicago on February 28, 1978, they were dressed exactly as they had been the last time I saw them. By that I mean they were wearing the exact same clothes, which in retrospect is kind of sweet and refreshing. David was a rich kid, so he could afford a rich kid’s wardrobe, but I had met him tw
ice now and both times he was dressed like any other Southern California kid who wanted to look like he was in a band: jeans and T-shirt and boots. The other guys had barely two nickels to rub together and weren’t about to waste what little they did have on clothes. At the risk of sounding sentimental, all four of them had stars in their eyes and smiles on their faces. In that moment, I found them enormously appealing. They were poised for stardom, but I don’t think they realized it (if David did, it was only in the abstract). Their album had been out less than three weeks and they had not yet played a live show in support of it; they had no idea of what lay ahead. Then again, neither did I.
The first day was given over to travel and acclimation, which was a welcome respite for me. Two days of rehearsals at SIR Studio and Instrumental Rentals would follow before the band played its first live show on March 3, at the Aragon Ballroom, a 5,000-seat venue on West Lawrence Avenue, roughly five miles from downtown Chicago. I caught bits and pieces of the first rehearsal, but much of my day was devoted to logistical issues. The band was accompanied on this trip by roughly seven or eight handpicked crew members, including a drum technician named Gregg Emerson, who was Alex’s buddy from high school, and Rudy Leiren, a guitar tech whose primary qualification was that he was a very close friend of Edward’s. (I had brought along my old friend, Gary Geller, aka Red Roadie, to fill the dual roles of stage manager and bass tech for Michael Anthony.) This was the first time I had met the road crew, and they seemed like decent enough guys, every bit as starstruck and goofy as the band members themselves. I hoped that they would be good at their jobs, because I knew that, given their friendships with Eddie and Alex, there was no way I could ever fire them. To their credit, Rudy and Greg took their work seriously . . . but hey, what good is nepotism if you can’t take care of your friends?
Until Van Halen joined them, Journey and Montrose had played Davenport, Iowa, and Racine, Wisconsin, respectively. As you can imagine, the crowd at the Aragon Ballroom was twice the size, easily. No offense, but Davenport and Racine were the minors; Chicago was the majors, and Van Halen hadn’t just come to play; they had come to win.
This was a great opportunity, and we were here to take full advantage of it. We were a supporting act, filling the third spot on a triple bill, and we’d be getting our feet wet playing to venues that seated from twenty-five hundred to as many as eight thousand screaming, drunken fans. On paper, it was the perfect way to kick off Van Halen’s first major label tour. For a band just starting to gain traction, this was a pretty sweet spot to be in. We’d been added to the bill because Journey—which, after years of being unable to break through, had just hired a new vocalist, Steve Perry, revamped its sound, and released a game-changing album, Infinity—still wasn’t big enough to sell tickets on its own. Ronnie Montrose, formally the front man of Montrose, a band that had been fairly popular prior to the departure of lead singer, Sammy Hagar, two years earlier, was beginning to fade from public perception.
Van Halen brought a lot of energy to the lineup, and as soon as we were announced, tickets started selling. We were new, fresh-faced, and exciting, but Journey was the best known of the three bands at that point, with the brightest résumé, and so they were accorded headliner status. That was fine with us. It gave the boys the opportunity to play in front of bigger crowds than they had ever experienced and to polish their live show without the burden of expectation that comes with headlining a tour. If they were good enough, they would blow the headliners off the stage anyway.
A tour is very much a meritocracy. It can be challenging to play in front of an audience composed almost entirely of fans who have paid to see the headliner. (Later, we’d start calling the supporting bands “T-shirt acts,” because all they had to do was occupy the stage while the fans were outside purchasing merchandise.) But sometimes, if a band is good enough, it will win the crowd over. We were that band, there was no doubt about that, and we were more than confident that it wouldn’t be long before all eyes were on us.
Ah, but nothing is ever that simple on the road.
We arrived at the theater in the early afternoon and found a tiny dressing room waiting for us. The space was cramped and not well lit, but this was hardly unusual. How much room do you really need to change from street clothes into stage clothes? Hell, these guys had been changing in their cars or in high school locker rooms for years—when they bothered to change at all, that is. Part of the beauty—and fun—of taking a new band out on the road is that everyone tends to be very low-maintenance. While naturally somewhat nervous and anxious, the guys in Van Halen were mostly thrilled just to be out of Southern California. Aside from David, they were not exactly world travelers. And now, here they were, in Chicago. They couldn’t have been more excited, nor cared less about their dressing room accommodations.
Unfortunately, the dressing room was not the only place that was a bit too small for comfort. You see, the problem with booking three bands into one venue on a given night is that there isn’t always space for each band’s equipment. As the headliner, Journey took precedence. Montrose came next. There isn’t time to completely break down the stage and equipment after each act performs, so all three road crews work together during the day. The headliner’s equipment (amps, instruments, etc.) goes farthest in the back; the middle act places its equipment in the middle, and the opening act takes whatever space is left at the front of the stage. Then, as each band completes its set, a layer of equipment is peeled away or pushed to the side during a quick changeover.
By the time we began setting up our equipment—after Journey had assembled its back line of amps and drum kit, and Montrose had done the same in front of Journey—there was almost no space left. It had taken so long for the other two bands to load and set up their equipment that our crew was forced to load through the front aisle of the theater. Onstage, we were left with a space only twelve to fourteen feet wide in which David, Edward, and Michael could strut their stuff. For David (and, to a lesser extent, Edward) this was a serious impediment. David was accustomed to running around the stage and even into the audience. He used every inch of the performance space.
While the guys were still in the dressing room, I went out into the arena to see how things were going. The stage was impossibly crowded. There was equipment everywhere; tangled, knotted electrical cords formed nests on the hardwood and provided another potential obstacle. My first stop was the mixing board, where Tom Broderick, our soundman, was hard at work.
“How’s it going?” I asked him.
He responded with a thumbs-up and a confident smile.
Then I checked on Peter Angelus, our young and somewhat inexperienced (but talented) lighting man. Peter would go on to become a successful cinematographer and music video director, as well as talent manager, but at this time he was relatively new to the business. Before I even had a chance to say a word, I could tell something was wrong. Pete’s face was ashen, his expression grim. I jumped up on the light platform next to him.
“Hey, Pete. Is there a problem?”
He nodded.
“My headset isn’t working right. I have no communication with the spotlight operators.” He paused. “We’re fucked.”
Strictly speaking, he was right. Pete would normally spend the entire night on his headset, telling each of his spot operators when and where to direct their equipment. It was a complicated dance and required not just complete focus on the part of everyone involved but also a blueprint to guide the proceedings. Pete had seen multiple Van Halen performances and knew the band’s stage show intimately. But without properly functioning headsets, he was basically helpless—like an air traffic controller without radar.
Ah, but the show must go on, right? As a former soundman and stage manager, I had seen firsthand just about everything that could possibly go wrong in a live show. There was always a way around it.
“Let’s not panic, Peter,” I said. “I have an idea.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ll ca
ll the spots as you do the stage lighting.”
Peter looked at me like I was crazy.
“No offense, Noel, but you’ve never even seen the show.”
I laughed. This was an irrefutable point. It also didn’t matter. Drastic times call for drastic measures.
“Guess I’ll have to wing it,” I said.
I jumped off the platform and headed to the ladder that ascended to the four spotlight operators. They were all holding their useless headsets in their hands.
“Okay,” I said, “I’m going to direct spots from up here.”
They looked at me quizzically, then looked at each other. Then they shrugged.
I didn’t take this as a sign of complacency or disrespect. These guys were unflappable, which is exactly what we needed in a time of crisis. It also turned out that they were a knowledgeable bunch of spot operators, which made my Band-Aid approach to the evening much more successful than it might otherwise have been.
I looked at my watch and realized that Van Halen was scheduled to take the stage in less than half an hour, so I scrambled back down the ladder and made my way to the dressing room. The place was a mess—tight and cramped and musty—and the boys were clearly agitated and nervous. This was to be expected, given the stakes, but the anxiety was surely heightened by the overall feeling of claustrophobia and chaos that accompanied the show. And now I was obligated to add to the tension.
“Listen, guys, there’s a problem with Peter’s lighting headset. I’m going to have to call spots on the fly.”
At first, no one said anything. I think they were distracted. I didn’t mean to make them more nervous, but they had to know the situation, as we’d all be doing a bit of ad-libbing. Finally, David spoke up.
