by Noel Monk
When Van Halen was signed to its first tour, however, the band was in no position to demand much of anything, so the dressing room was rather austere. I’d usually augment the rider by asking the promoter for some beer and soda. Then, on my own, I’d buy some Jack Daniel’s (mostly for Michael), some vodka, maybe a little scotch, and we’d set up a little bar backstage. David usually had some weed on him, maybe coke if it was a special occasion, like a Tuesday, and as soon as the show ended we’d throw ourselves a little party. The promotional guys loved visiting our dressing room; it was a fun and lively place, especially after a few months on the road, when the band experienced a massive uptick in the quantity and quality of the young women who craved backstage access.
Edward, David, and Al were getting laid all the time. Every night, sometimes multiple times per night. Michael not so much, but not for lack of opportunity; he simply rebuffed most advances. It was rather perplexing to the other guys in the band, but it was just one of the many reasons I liked and admired Michael. He had his priorities straight, and he knew where his loyalties lay, with his high school sweetheart, Sue Hendry, unlike the other boys, whose priorities were to lay as many different women as humanly possible—which is quite a lot, if it’s a Tuesday and the, uh, extracurricular activities are being fueled by copious amounts of blow. Alex accumulated the most partners. Both his appetite and stamina seemed boundless, and he made no effort to harness any of his compulsions.
Many nights the party was in full bloom before Montrose even began playing, which left Journey in the unfortunate position of trying to warm up and prepare in the middle of a Van Halen bacchanal. One night a member of the Warner Bros. promotional staff passed out in the dressing room shower. I’m not sure how or when he got home—hell, he might still be in there. Another time I walked into the dressing room while Montrose was still onstage. The room was eerily quiet, an immediate indication that something was seriously amiss. The whole band was there, along with some of the guys from Journey and other various hangers-on. Ordinarily, the place would have been rockin’. This time, in stark contrast, it felt almost funereal.
I thought briefly about backing out of the room and claiming plausible deniability, before I finally asked, “What’s going on, guys?”
I was met with complete silence, and my heart sank. I looked around the room. My gaze came to rest on a large and well-lit full-length mirror, the type artists would normally use to check themselves out before going onstage. For some reason, there was a broad green streak running diagonally down the length of it, as if someone had splashed paint on it. In the middle of this swath was a large, man-shaped gap—as if someone had been standing in front of said mirror when the shit went down. I moved in to get a better look. Around me, no one said a word. I reached out to touch the evidence, and on closer examination, the “paint” revealed its true nature: it was guacamole, thick and viscous and already starting to turn brown.
Oh, shit.
I turned to face the band. David and Edward were slumped in their chairs, trying not to make eye contact with me. I didn’t blame them.
“All right, boys,” I said, mustering up all of my courage, and preparing for the very real possibility of our being kicked off the tour. “Out with it. What the hell happened?” If that makes me sound like a parent dealing with children, well, that’s pretty much the way I felt. After a few moments of tense silence, Edward spoke up.
“David started it,” he said, pointing an accusatory finger. “He threw a bowl of peanuts at me.”
There was a pause, and I noticed David trying to stifle a laugh. Are you fucking kidding me? I thought.
“Fuck you, Dave,” Edward said and looked back at me. “See, I had to retaliate. He deserved it.”
This was excellent logic—for a six-year-old. (And, I suppose, for a rock star.) “What did you do, Edward?” I asked.
By now they were all laughing. The tension began to clear from the room—no doubt being absorbed straight into my shoulders and chest instead. “I threw a bowl of guacamole at David’s head,” Edward explained, shrugging and smiling that goofy grin of his. “But I hit Steve instead.”
Oh, boy.
“Steve? As in . . . Steve Perry?” I braced myself for an answer I knew I wouldn’t like, and Edward nodded sheepishly. Someone giggled. Well, I thought, that’s the end of that. We’ve had a good run. Time to pull the soil over the freshly dug graves that Edward Fucking Van Halen had dug for us and call it a night. “Shit,” I said, rubbing at my mustache and trying not to lose my cool. Something funny happens to you in the middle of a disaster—sometimes you’re able to hold it together just long enough to try to fix the shit show.
“Where is he?” I asked.
David nodded toward the bathroom. “In there, I think.”
The next thing I knew, I had gone against every single instinct I had and walked into the bathroom, where I found Steve standing in front of the sink. From the top of his luxurious mane of silky black hair to the middle of his shimmering new sateen Journey jacket, he was completely covered in guacamole. “Hey, Steve.” I tried to keep my tone gentle, and the sheer terror out of my voice. “You okay?”
Steve slowly turned around so that I could get a full frontal view of the onslaught. “I was going to wear this onstage tonight,” he told me, tapping the chest of his jacket, his lower lip quivering. “Look at it now—it’s fucking ruined.” Words failed him, and for a moment I thought he was about to erupt—to start screaming, to demand that we pay for damages and leave the tour immediately, have our heads mounted on spikes and set outside the front doors of our next gig, but instead he simply began crying, a soft, sad little whimper, and I felt bad for him. Here he was, an emerging rock star fronting a ridiculously popular tour, and he had been reduced to tears by a pack of incorrigible, food-fighting kids. I can only imagine that Steve must have felt like he was back in middle school, crammed into a cafeteria with a bunch of heartless, mean children. If it had been me, I would have thrown that bowl of guacamole right back at Edward. Or punched him in the face. Maybe both. Alas, for better or for worse, not everyone is built this way. Steve had a titanic voice, but it came from a small and gentle man. He was an artist, not a fighter or a guacamole thrower.
“It’s okay, Steve,” I said. I won’t lie, I was a little relieved—but I did my best to conceal that fact. “We’ll get you cleaned up, and we’ll find another jacket.”
“There’s not enough time.”
“Sure there is.” I offered him a smile and armed myself with paper towels. For the next half hour, I stood in that bathroom and helped wipe guacamole from Steve Perry’s hair, face, and clothes, all the while talking to him, trying to cheer him up—and keep our asses from getting canned. Eventually, through much hard work and determination, we reached a point of respectability, if not outright cleanliness. He still smelled faintly of avocado and onion, sure, but you had to be awfully close to notice. It certainly could’ve been worse.
“How do I look?” he asked.
“You look great, Steve. Go get ’em.”
As we walked out of the bathroom, Edward was the first to speak. “You okay, Steve?” He sounded apologetic.
Steve, ever the trouper, nodded at him. “I’m fine. Don’t sweat it.”
They didn’t. No sooner had Steve exited the dressing room than the party resumed, albeit with a noticeable absence of guacamole. I breathed a sigh of relief.
Later that night, I was approached by Journey’s capable but understandably exasperated road manager, Pat “Bubba” Morrow. Bubba was in the unfortunate position of having to act as an intermediary between the bands; as tour manager of the headliner, he also took most of the heat when our boys acted out, which they did quite frequently. “Noel, this can’t continue,” he said. “Your guys have got to start behaving better or we’re going to ask you to leave the tour.”
I understood his dilemma; I also knew that, since Van Halen deserved as much credit as Journey for the tour’s success, he was in no
position to make threats. We were selling far too many tickets to be tossed off the tour, notwithstanding trashed hotel rooms, ketchup massacres, or any collateral damage from the occasional guacamole bomb. Did we get credit for not setting anything aflame? (No, no, we did not.)
I presume Bubba’s complaints eventually made their way to Warner Bros., because I next received a call from Jane Geraghty, the booking agent for the tour.
“They’re going to throw you off the tour if you keep this up.” Her tone was serious, a bit like that of an elementary school principal. I felt bad that she had been put in this position. Frankly, I had very little control over the band’s actions—as long as they were getting from town to town and playing well, which they were, what was I going to say? And, under the circumstances, Warner Bros. had no more control over the situation than I did. They wanted to make money, and Van Halen was making them a lot of it, both in record sales and at the gate. After all, the band was being paid a relative pittance for their efforts: $750 per show, split four ways. Oh, and twenty-five dollars per diem to cover meals and other sundries. Think about that: each night when Van Halen went onstage, each band member earned approximately $187 to perform. Given the fact that we were selling between twenty-five hundred and eight thousand tickets per night and promoting a record that had already achieved gold status and would reach platinum before the end of the tour, it’s fair to say that Van Halen was a good investment for Warner Bros. (and that’s not even factoring in the band’s onerous initial contract). It would have been self-destructive, if not downright crazy, for the label to pull Van Halen from the tour.
Hell, we were the tour.
“Come on, Jane,” I said. “Let’s be honest. How are they going to throw us off the tour? You’d have half-empty arenas without us.”
There was a long pause, followed by a deep sigh of resignation. It was a hollow threat and Jane knew it.
“Well, you have a point there,” she said. “But can’t you please do something about their behavior?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know! Something . . . anything.”
“Okay . . . I’ll talk to them,” I said.
And I did. Not that it mattered. They were having too much fun to sweat the details or worry about the mess. That was my problem.
IN THE 1970S, if you wanted to listen to music in the privacy of your own home, choosing your own favorite artist and repeating a track as many times as you wanted, there were only a few options, and vinyl was by the far the best. People bought LPs by the boatload in those days—great, silky slabs of black vinyl. If you wanted to hear just a single song, you might buy the single, a small but shimmering vinyl disc. You’d put the record on your turntable, and bask in the sonic purity. You could hear everything on vinyl, every note of every instrument—from the loudest and strongest guitar riff to the subtlest background vocals. And if you wanted to hear a particular track over again, you had to do it manually, gently picking up the tone arm, moving it back a few grooves, and dropping it carefully in place.
To anyone born in the last twenty-five years, all of this must seem terribly quaint . . . not to mention ponderous and unwieldy, as well as a colossal waste of time. Digital content and streaming services have made old-school equipment and vinyl records as obsolete as wired telephones and tube TVs. To all but the nightclub DJ and the serious audiophile, the vinyl record is nothing more than a relic of a bygone era.
But what an era.
If you loved music in the predigital days, chances are you owned records, lots of them. They filled your bookshelves or empty milk crates; they provided a fortress, literal and metaphorical, from the outside world. And unless you were stupid enough to buy a “risk-free” membership in the Columbia Record and Tape Club, the only one way to expand your vinyl horizons was by visiting a record store. There was nothing quite like wandering up and down the aisles, looking at the posters on the walls, thumbing through the latest releases. You could kill a couple hours just wandering around Sam Goody’s or Tower Records, listening to music, soaking up the sights and smells, reading jacket notes. Record stores brought together a diverse community bound by a single trait: a love of music. Didn’t matter if you favored country, jazz, or R&B; rock, metal, or disco. Whatever your taste, they could be satisfied under a single roof. Retail outlets were the logical endgame for the record labels. A band was introduced to an audience on radio, made real through live performances, and then promoted on vinyl. The record store was, in a very real sense, the heart of the industry, and as such it demanded a certain quid pro quo from the artists whose careers it supported and promoted.
Thus was born the “in-store appearance,” wherein fans got an opportunity, however brief, to meet the artists. These were not unlike bookstore appearances by authors, except decidedly less articulate and usually much more profane. But probably a lot more fun. Van Halen did a few of these during that first tour, always in conjunction with a concert and sometimes in addition to a radio interview. The boys were utter novices at the marketing game in those days, and not yet so full of themselves that they bristled at the idea of promotional responsibilities. In fact, they kind of enjoyed these appearances.
Early in the tour we attracted only about thirty to forty fans, very low-key affairs. Our record was playing in the background, but so low that you could hardly hear it. As the guys scrawled their names on souvenir records and posed for pictures with what I can only regard now as fans who were well ahead of the learning curve, I decided to turn up the music. And I mean way up, until the walls of the store reverberated with the wails of Edward’s guitar. Fans began dancing in the aisles.
“Hey!” the manager shouted. “What are you doing?! It’s an old sound system; you’re going to blow it up.”
“Ah, who the hell cares?” I said. “We’re a rock ’n’ roll band and this is a rock ’n’ roll event.”
The manager turned down the music and stormed away. I waited a minute and turned it back up. For the next half hour we staged a battle for control of the in-store sound system. Just as we were getting ready to leave, I cranked it up as high it would go, and sure enough, the speakers blew. The manager was furious, but I scored major points with the boys, who thought the confrontation hilarious.
“Way to go,” they shouted. “Fuck it up!”
A few weeks later we did another appearance, this time with roughly seventy-five to a hundred people. Once again the music was very low, and again I cranked the volume. This time the store manager simply smiled and nodded. Definitely a guy better suited to the business.
A few more weeks passed, while we were kicking ass during live shows and accumulating record sales. In those days, there was a vital statistic in the music business known as a “ten day,” aptly named because it tracked how many units of a particular album had been sold in the previous ten-day period. With this, you could measure not just total sales but whether a record was trending up or down. Van Halen was trending up, better with each ten-day report. It was exactly the type of performance that made record company executives swoon, indicating that a band is capable of not just a momentary surge of popularity but something more profound: enduring popularity.
A similar trend could be seen in our record store appearances. So when I got word from a Warner Bros. publicity associate that our next appearance was expected to draw a crowd of a couple hundred fans, I decided that it was time to put forth a bit of extra effort.
“Guys, you can’t go in there like four schleps in a station wagon,” I said. “We have to do something different.”
“How about motorcycles?” David suggested. “That would be cool.”
He was right, it would be cool. I got in touch with a local motorcycle club and offered them five hundred dollars to let us use a few of their bikes, and to have them escort us to the store. They agreed, and we rolled up on a couple dozen Harley-Davidsons. As we approached the store, everyone revved their engines. If you’ve ever heard a Harley, with its distinctive braaaaaaaap! you k
now how loud that was. Let’s just say we made one hell of an entrance. As expected, a couple hundred fans were waiting in line, and more kept showing up. The band happily signed records and posed for pictures for a couple hours, until I finally pulled the plug, leaving about thirty unhappy customers to go home sad and empty-handed. I felt bad about it, but we had reached the point where in-store appearances were becoming unwieldy. It was impossible to satisfy everyone; better to leave them hungry. That was my philosophy. That’s why I always preferred playing a smaller, sold-out venue to a larger venue with a sea of empty seats, even if the latter would sell a few more tickets.
There was one more in-store appearance on that first leg of the tour, and we knew the crowd would be huge.
“What do we do for an encore?” I asked the boys.
“Well, we can’t do motorcycles again,” David said with a laugh. Then a mischievous look came over him. “I got it. Let’s get an armored car!”
So that’s what we did. We arrived at the store in an armored car—like a Brink’s truck—and parked by the curb. For a few minutes we just sat inside, as the crowd of fans at the door tried to figure out what was going on. Suddenly the back door of the truck was thrown open. “Security guards” (actually members of our crew) jumped out of the truck and brandished faux weapons, as the rest of us poured out the back. The crowd burst into applause as the boys walked into the store, smiling and waving, looking exactly like the young rock stars that they were.
And so it went, one town after another, one show after another, week after endless week, month after exhausting month. And it wasn’t as if we were traveling in elegance. The first few weeks our gigs were relatively close together, so we traveled by bus, which the boys enjoyed; it was basically a nonstop traveling party. It also was an anomaly.
