by Noel Monk
These sessions never escalated into serious confrontations (not on this tour, anyway); in fact, they rarely even resulted in any sort of serious dialogue about ways in which the product might be improved. Rather, they were an exercise in egoism by David, indulged by his bandmates and subordinates simply because it was the path of least resistance. Bully that he could be, David chose his targets carefully, seeming to direct most of his bile at those who were least capable of fighting back, or the least likely to fight back, anyway. Swipes at his bandmates were made in vague terms, except in the case of Michael, whose musicianship and backing vocals were sometimes called into question. Ridiculous, because, of course, Michael’s backing vocals did nothing but enhance David’s singing—especially when they played live. In the studio you can hide a singer’s weaknesses with multiple takes and sonic tricks (this was true even in the days before Auto-Tune). But onstage? Every singer is mostly naked, and the easiest way to cover up the aural blemishes is with a really capable background singer (or two). In Van Halen, that singer was Michael. Unfortunately, a gentle and laid-back demeanor also made him an easy target for David; there was no threat of Michael’s returning the volley. Instead, he would just sit there and quietly absorb the abuse.
Sometimes David would even go so far as to blame the drought in his sex life on mistakes made by others in the band or crew. A shitty performance, he reasoned, naturally turned off fans and diverted them from his dressing room. This was complete rubbish. Van Halen put on a series of stellar shows on this tour, night after unrelenting night, but if only a small percentage of the audience is female, then backstage groupie traffic is going to be light. That’s just the way it works. David was simply suffering the pangs of withdrawal—not enough sex, not enough drugs—and the effect was unflattering, to say the least.
It should be pointed out that he said very little regarding my performance. I do not believe it was because of any obvious difference between my abilities and those of the rest of the entourage (although it’s true that I did not often screw up), but simply because David was uncertain of how much clout I had with Warner Bros. As tour manager I existed in a foggy realm somewhere between band employee and front office executive. I served two masters and tried to please both equally. But it didn’t hurt that both sides were a bit confused about where my allegiance stood, or how much influence I had with either camp. Even better if it kept David off my back.
Nevertheless, he made many days a living hell for everyone. The worst of these followed a morning disclosure that Rudy the guitar tech–turned–announcer had gotten laid the previous night. Now, you have to understand that in matters of sex, roadies occasionally benefit from their proximity to rock stars. It’s not an everyday occurrence the way it is for the guys in the band, and it sure as hell wasn’t commonplace during that monthlong tour of the UK. But Rudy apparently had found a companion for the night and his divulging that news led to a spontaneous burst of applause on the bus. People stood and cheered and patted Rudy on the back for his good fortune. This, after all, was a time for magnanimity. Who could begrudge the guitar tech for getting laid? Surely not Edward, his best friend from high school and now his de facto boss. Eddie just smiled and nodded. So did Alex and Michael. We were all happy that somehow, in this most arid of conjugal climates, when even the biggest dick swingers on the bus were striking out, Rudy had broken the slump.
Well, almost everyone.
David said nothing, merely scowled and fidgeted angrily in his seat. Imagine the injustice of it all—the guitar tech getting laid while the lead singer—a veritable pheromone factory—goes home with Rosy Palmer. For most of us, this was cause for celebration (and Rudy downed many a beer later that night, without ever touching his wallet). For David, well . . . not so much, apparently.
What happened next was the result of a misguided attempt on my part to lighten the mood by playing a little joke on David. I might as well admit that I should have anticipated the consequences; even then, in the early days, before he felt the full bloom of stardom and power, David was not particularly good at self-deprecation. He took himself rather seriously, which meant you poked fun at him at your own peril.
That afternoon we had lunch at a typically nondescript little English road stop on the M1 heading out of the Midlands. We all sat together at a long, heavy wooden table and tried to stuff our faces with shitty English brunch fare: steak and eggs, greasy hash browns and chips, and hamburgers charred to a carcinogenic black, regardless of how you might have ordered them. Thanks largely to Rudy’s good fortune, the mood was considerably lighter than it had been in the previous few days. We ate and laughed and told stories and everyone seemed to be having a good time—everyone except David, who sat sullenly in his chair, poking at his food and generally behaving like the death of the party.
After a while David excused himself to use the bathroom, leaving behind a plate overflowing with a nest of chips and two large, virtually untouched hamburgers. For some reason that I still can’t quite explain—although annoyance was probably at the root of it—I was gripped by a sudden urge to take a huge bite out of one of the burgers. Even as I swallowed it, I knew that this was probably a mistake and would not be met with the benign response I had intended. A few of the guys at the table saw me take the bite out of David’s food, but no one said anything, and no one laughed. A couple of them looked at me like I was crazy, and then simply continued with their meal.
A couple minutes later David emerged from the bathroom and sauntered back to the table. He pulled out his chair, sat down, threw back his hair . . . and his face went ashen. There was a long pause before he spoke, during which he took a hard look around the table. Finally, he picked up the plate, gave it a half spin in his hand, and then slammed it back down, sending chips and hamburger juice in all directions.
A silence came over the entire restaurant as David stood up, looking like he was about to give an angry toast.
“I don’t know which one of you stupid fucking shitheads did this,” he said, pointing at the plate, still wobbling on the table, “but you can finish it.”
And with that he marched out of the restaurant.
After a few moments of awkward silence, we all resumed eating and telling stories, leaving David to cool off on his own. I realized pretty quickly that I had overstepped my bounds. A joke to one person is an act of aggression to another; I certainly hadn’t meant to upset David to quite this extent, though I did think he was behaving petulantly and deserved to have his ego tweaked. This was my dance with David throughout our time together: I appreciated and respected his talent and naked ambition but found his personality at best challenging, at worst sociopathic. Moreover, David had been getting on my nerves to a greater extent than usual, in part because we spent so much time together.
By the time we began touring the UK, David had taken to changing his wardrobe multiple times during the course of a show, and somehow it was among my many duties to man the “quick-change” booth just off the stage. The booth was really just a makeshift closet space, usually fashioned out of curtains or drapes, in which David could rush offstage between songs, or during a guitar solo, and change from black leather to brown leather, or from leather to spandex . . . or whatever. But since these changes were indeed “quick,” he needed some assistance. So I would literally wait by the edge of the stage, and when David came running off, I would join him in the quick-change booth and help peel off his sweat-soaked pants or shirt.
It was not a job that I cherished. And not simply because of the obvious grossness of the act, but because David was usually in such a frenzy that working with him in this environment was like trying to collar a pit bull in a phone booth. Bruises were inevitable.
“Let’s go! Hurry the fuck up! I’ll go out there naked, I swear to fucking Christ!”
“Easy, David . . . easy does it.”
The inherent narcissism of becoming a rock star would fuck with anyone’s head, but David was well down the path before he even joined Van
Halen. He had always been, as they say, a legend in his own mind, and when legitimate stardom and success came his way, he devoured it like a drug. Increasingly I would notice David posing at every opportunity, not just in the dressing room before going onstage but every time he passed a mirror or window. I’d catch him pausing and vamping, tossing his hair and sucking in his cheeks like a model. He was obsessed with his appearance.
Nevertheless, I felt bad about what I had done in the restaurant and the apparent distress it had caused him. What I disliked most about David was his tendency to bully and manipulate, and my little joke, while harmless, exhibited exactly some of those same traits. I considered it nothing more than giving David a tiny dose of his own medicine, but he obviously felt otherwise. So, to make amends, I ordered a new plate of food as we were nearing the end of our meal, asked the waitress to box it up, and delivered it to David on the bus. He was sitting cross-legged in a front window seat, indulging a mighty sulk. As I stopped in the aisle and tried to make eye contact, he did not move an inch, and steadfastly avoided my gaze.
“David, I’m sorry,” I said to the side of his head. “I did not mean to piss you off.” This was not entirely true—I did hope to elicit a reaction from David; I just didn’t think it would be quite so severe. He didn’t budge, gave no indication that he had even heard what I said, although clearly he had. I decided to press on.
“I have something for you,” I said, holding out the box, which by this time was beginning to show signs of strain, with a large grease blot spreading across the bottom like some sort of industrial spill. “You’re probably hungry, so . . . here. Please take this.”
Through inaction, he declined, so I sat down next to him and placed the sagging box between us. I’m not sure exactly how much time passed before the tension thawed—perhaps fifteen to twenty minutes, during which I occasionally tried to make small talk. Eventually, almost out of the blue, David turned to me and smiled.
“Ah, it’s okay, Noel. I was just fooling around.” He paused, reached down, and opened the box. As he withdrew a wilted burger and took a giant bite, he nodded assuredly. “Had you going there, didn’t I?”
There were myriad ways to respond to this line of bullshit, but by now I knew David well enough to understand both his ego and his insecurities. He didn’t want to be perceived as small or petty, even though he demonstrably was. He didn’t want people to think he was thin-skinned or weak, even though he routinely threw temper tantrums. David was complicated—at heart he was an entitled rich kid, which informed many of his relationships and behavior. He was accustomed to acting on every impulse, and as his stardom and wealth (and drug use) accrued, he naturally made less effort to keep his emotions in check. On this day, though, it was clear that he felt somewhat ashamed about having stormed out of the restaurant. I felt bad, too, but I wasn’t about to get into a heavy discussion about which one of us had been less mature.
“Yeah, you sure did, David,” I said, slapping him on the back. Then I grabbed one of his chips and stuffed it into my mouth.
David laughed. “Help yourself, Noel.”
BLACK SABBATH was a pioneering act in the heavy metal genre. They also were the real deal, with far less interest in melody and accessibility than Van Halen, and a legitimately dark and depressing outlook on life that was often reflected in their music; I liked the guys in the band, but their lust for drugs and alcohol far exceeded anything the boys in Van Halen had ever known. Sabbath, by this time, was a famous and wealthy band with the resources to keep themselves awash in chemicals, which they had been doing for years, much to the detriment of the group.
This tour was ostensibly a tenth-anniversary celebration for Black Sabbath, but they were by now a band on the downslope of a long and steady decline. In late 1977 the band’s lead singer and most prominent personality, Ozzy Osbourne, had suddenly quit Black Sabbath as they were about to begin recording a new album. A couple months passed, Ozzy had a change of heart and rejoined the band, and together they recorded the album Never Say Die, which would be met with intense critical disfavor when it was released in September 1978. Our first monthlong UK tour with Sabbath occurred as they were putting the finishing touches on that album. A second leg, in the States, coincided roughly with the album’s release.
As I said, the two bands and their respective crews got along quite well, although by the end of the second tour we had become far more adept at drinking and drugging than we had been prior to our introduction to Black Sabbath. And when I say “we,” I am referring specifically to the four members of the band; I’d been around the business a long time and had been exposed to all manner of bad behavior; I knew when to say when and exercised that privilege more often than not. My job description, after all, was quite different than that of Edward or David. Someone had to be the grown-up, and that someone was me. Most of the time, anyway.
While Black Sabbath was the clear headliner on this tour, Van Halen stole the show. They were young and vital and filled with the sort of energy and ambition that had begun to drain from Sabbath. This would be the last tour Ozzy ever performed with Black Sabbath, and sometime afterward he recalled that it was while watching Van Halen that he realized his band’s time had come to an end. Or, at least, his time with the band had come to an end.
“They (Van Halen) blew us off the stage every night. It was so embarrassing,” Ozzy would later explain to the media. “They kicked our asses, but it convinced me of two things: my days with Black Sabbath were over, and Van Halen was going to be a very successful band.”
In reality, Ozzy was fired from Black Sabbath, but I suppose that’s really a matter of perspective. You say to-may-to, I say to-mah-to—that sort of thing. The point is, Van Halen stole the spotlight from Black Sabbath every night on the tour, winning over even the leather-clad Sabbath diehards in the UK. We beat them at their own game, on their turf, in front of their fans. Believe me when I say this: that sort of upstaging almost never happens.
Why this didn’t destroy the rapport between the two bands over the course of a two-leg tour that stretched out until the late fall is something of a mystery. Although declining in stature and beset by drug and alcohol problems, Black Sabbath remained a superstar act, and it must have grated on them to lose the nightly battle of the bands. Meanwhile, Van Halen was utterly fearless and tireless each time they took the stage, and it was fascinating to see the band’s confidence grow. They didn’t give a shit that they were playing in front of Black Sabbath diehards—who, trust me, were some of the toughest and most hard-core metal fans in the world. By the time Edward finished his guitar solo in “Eruption,” he had the crowd in the palm of his hand. And David? Well, David’s swagger grew with each passing show, which occasionally led to acts of outright stupidity.
There was the time when David veered from the band’s frequent end-of-show celebration, which involved spraying the audience with champagne. Instead of merely uncorking the bottles and dousing the first few rows, David, in his exuberance, decided to toss a pair of nearly full bottles high into the air. They soared above the crowd, end over end, before plummeting earthward like two-pound bricks. One landed on the concrete floor and shattered into pieces. The other bottle, unfortunately, cracked some poor bloke across the skull. There was a bit of a commotion in the crowd as the band exited the stage and went to the dressing room, unaware of what had happened. But I knew. I saw it, and I knew that we were in for a shit storm. These were not laid-back SoCal stoners. This was an audience of working-class Brits, many of them in their late twenties and early thirties, grown men who liked to drink and fuck and fight, and not necessarily in that order. They were generally docile folks into having a good time at the show, but if you pissed them off . . . well, they were not easily appeased.
“Get everyone the fuck out of here,” I said as I ran into the dressing room.
Still shimmering with the afterglow of another great show, the boys stared at me in disbelief, as if to say, What’s the problem?
�
��Just get on the bus,” I said. “Don’t ask any questions, and don’t stop to talk to anyone.”
Within minutes the band was outside and I was embroiled in an ugly negotiation with one very unhappy Black Sabbath fan. Dressed in black, with a leather jacket and close-cropped hair, he had a welt the size of a golf ball on his head and blood flowing down his cheek. By his side were a couple of his mates; they were all drunk and extremely agitated. I quickly went into damage control mode. It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last.
“Fuckin’ wanker threw a bottle at me,” the young man cried. “Coulda cracked my fuckin’ skull.”
I smiled. “Look, he didn’t really throw it at you. He threw the bottles into the air and one of them happened to land on your head. It was not intentional. It was stupid, I agree, but it was not intentional.” I paused, leaned in for a moment of conspiratorial conversation. “David is not the brightest bulb in the box, if you get my meaning.”
The kid did not respond. Nor did his buddies. Rather, they gave me a look of extreme displeasure. Knowing that they wouldn’t be so easily deterred, I fell back on an old reliable tactic: bribery.
“If I gave you a thousand pounds, would that make all of this go away?” I asked.
Again, the kid said nothing. He simply seethed in a manner that seemed to say, I’d rather just beat the fuck out of you right now. After a few moments, though, his body language softened.
“You got that kind of money lying around here?”
A fair question. The exchange rate in those days was nearly two to one, so my offer was roughly two grand American. Not exactly chump change.
I nodded. “Give me a minute. Just wait right here.”
