Everybody Wants Some Read online

  Though his fingers were dazzling, Eddie could never read sheet music as well as he should have. Alex was an excellent sight reader, but Eddie’s performances were painstakingly crammed into his brain note by note, phrase by phrase, in advance. The judges at piano contests praised his unusual interpretations, but as far as he could tell he was playing it straight. “The only reason they ever wrote music down is because they didn’t have tape machines,” Eddie later complained. “Do you think Beethoven or Bach would ever have written things down if they had twenty-four-track tape machines?”

  Since the Van Halen home was too small to host band practice, the brothers keyed into jamming with local kids whose houses had garages. They formed a band called Revolver, and progressed from the Ventures to heavier covers by Cream and Mountain—power trios centered around guitar and drums. “I approached the drums not as an instrument, per se,” Alex remembered, “but more as an attitude—viciously attacking something” with the biggest, heaviest drumsticks available.

  At thirteen, Alex began subbing for the drummer in his dad’s wedding band, keeping time to jazz and salsa tunes driven by clarinet and accordion. Eddie frequently joined on bass, playing the oompah music lines. “One of Al and my first gigs together was with my dad at the La Merada Country Club,” Eddie recalled. “We’d be the little freak sideshow while the band took a break. I would play piano or guitar and Al would play drums.”

  The first night on the floor, the boys passed a hat around to the dancing couples and collected twenty-two dollars. Their father gave each of them five dollars, and said: “Welcome to the music business, boys.”

  David Lee Roth was born on October 10, 1953, in Bloomington, Indiana, where his achievement-oriented father, Nathan, went to medical school. After the senior Roth graduated, he moved his family several times, first to a small ranch in Newcastle, Indiana, where Dr. Roth became the caretaker of a menagerie of horses and swans. Next the parents took David and his two sisters, Allison and Lisa, to the East Coast, settling on East Alton Court in Brookline, Massachusetts, outside Boston.

  David was an energetic kid, but he was plagued by allergies and fought with health problems that forced him to wear leg braces from almost the time he could walk until age four. Then he was shipped off to therapy for the better part of a decade. At nine years old, he began three intensive years of clinical treatment for hyperactivity. He had a few healthy outlets—Roth’s parents called his dinner-hour routines “Monkey Hour,” when he acted out cartoons and sang revved-up vaudeville songs for dinner guests.

  Though his mother, Sibyl, taught high school music and language classes, Roth claimed his parents were nowhere near as tuneful as the Van Halen family. “I had no musical influences to speak of,” he told MTV. “My idols were always Genghis Khan, or Muhammad Ali, or Alexander the Great, or the guy who invented McDonald’s hamburgers.”

  By his telling, he wasn’t suffering from lack of concentration. Everyone else was simply having trouble playing their part in his continuous mental picture show, a fast, animated flipbook of Mad magazine and Playboy. Dave was obsessed with Bugs Bunny, Tarzan, and blackface song-and-dance man Al Jolson, whose songs he played on old brittle clay 78s. Later, he loved Elvis Presley—but not the music, just the movies.

  While Roth’s head was swimming in pop culture, his roots were knotted tightly around the Old World—his grandparents were Ukrainian Jews who traded the mountains and steppes of Eastern Europe for the sweltering cornfields of the Midwest. In fact, all four of his grandparents spoke Russian. “My great-granddaddy died dancing,” he later joked with a TV interviewer, “at the end of a rope.”

  When Roth was seven, his movie-buff dad took him to see Some Like It Hot, the classic Billy Wilder film where Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon dress in drag to get close to Marilyn Monroe. “Life turned into an ongoing quest to be in that movie, just somewhere in that movie,” Roth told Rolling Stone. On the way home that night, while his eyes were still boggled, his dad detailed the plot to Robin Hood—the movie Mrs. Roth thought he was taking their son to see.

  The rambunctious David found a kindred spirit in his uncle Manny Roth, a bohemian hepcat whose small Café Wha? on MacDougal Street was a nexus of New York’s Greenwich Village beatnik scene in the early 1960s. Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen, Bill Cosby, and Richard Pryor all tempered their antiestablishment acts there before a highly engaged cosmopolitan audience. “New York certainly reflects the dinner table I grew up with,” Roth later told an interviewer. “Obviously it encouraged me.”

  Summer trips to New York impressed on young David Roth that, guidance counselors and behavior therapists be damned, there was a big wide world that craved and coveted extravagant personalities. Uncle Manny bought him a radio for his eighth birthday, hoping to feed the kid some inspiration. “I put it on, and there was Ray Charles singing ‘Crying Time,’ ” David said, “and I just knew I had to be on the radio.”

  The Roths left the East Coast for California in 1963, when Dave was ten, just in time to fall under the spell of the Beach Boys in their prime—America’s only real defense against the Beatles. From his new home in Altadena, young Dave shuffled off with his tousled hair and tennis shoes to fourth grade at the Altadena School. Meanwhile, Dr. Roth’s ophthalmology practice thrived—he became a successful eye doctor, and was also active in local theater productions. Throughout junior high, Roth remembered a poster hanging over his bed given to him by his father, picturing two chickens meeting a turkey above the caption “To thine own self be true.”

  After three years as a Tenderfoot Scout, Roth left behind his boyhood like the Van Halen brothers abandoning their tree house when he discovered his life’s future work. He once reported losing his virginity on a beach in Tahiti at age thirteen, under a full moon and over a girl who didn’t speak English. “She kept saying she liked me, she liked me. I know she meant she loved me—but ever since I’ve had a complex.” Tahiti came to be Roth’s catchall perfect setting for stories that may have only taken place in paradise. In his memoir, Crazy from the Heat, he reported another crucial moment in his early sex life—getting a blow job behind the bushes in the suburbs while looking through someone’s living room window and seeing Johnny Carson on the TV.

  As Dr. Roth’s career bloomed, the family moved to the affluent section of Pasadena. When integrated busing arrived, Dave became a societal guinea pig, sent to predominantly black schools from sixth grade onward. He boasted of his ingrained blackness later, but at the time being a fair-haired white hippie meant lots of fights. He put gobs of Brylcreem in his hair, he liked to do headstands, and school became an all-day talent show. Teachers didn’t know what was wrong with him.

  Despite his effusive personality, Dave was something of a loner, an overly intelligent rich kid with delusions of grandeur. He felt persecuted, and yet above it all. He had vulgar candy-sprinkled ideas of sexuality, a by-product of learning about the world through the twisted twin lenses of Mad and Playboy. Despite his father’s money, he was always a worker: at the end of his junior year at John Muir High School, Roth bought himself a stereo with the dollars he earned shoveling dung alongside Mexican gang members at a stable.

  A bench-clearing brawl during a gym-class football game led to a brief stint at boarding school. More rules only brought more resistance, so after one semester in uniform David rejoined the teen scene at public school, his wild streak intact. “I never went to class, but I went to school,” he said. “I used to sit under a tree in the parking lot playing guitar.” He attracted girls and cultivated a rep for his unusual old-time repertoire and generally gleeful demeanor. While fighting a constant cultural war at home with his attentive parents, he carefully pushed his public image to the brink—his short-lived trademark was a bleached skunklike strip down the center of his hair.

  A native midwesterner like Roth, Michael Anthony Sobolewski was born on June 20, 1954, at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Chicago. His family lived in a working-class section of what was then the breadbask
et of blue-collar America. Michael was the second of five children, and the oldest boy. His dad, Walter, played in polka combos, gigging often at the Aragon Ballroom with musical prankster Kay Kyser, the popular bandleader who wrote “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.” Walter encouraged Michael to play the trumpet too.

  The Sobolewski family heeded the same clarion call that lured the Van Halens and the Roths westward, first testing the waters during a short move in 1963. In 1966, they left Chicago for good, settling in Arcadia, California, a town five miles east of Pasadena, where Jan Van Halen worked as a hospital dishwasher. Walt Sobolewski continued playing at dances, performing standards for other midwestern transplants and old-timers.

  Michael became a long jumper at Dana Junior High. He played trumpet in the marching band, and stayed active in sports, going out for baseball. After his older sister, Nancy, brought home psychedelic acid-rock bands like Electric Flag, Cream, and Blue Cheer, Michael’s attention wandered to the loud, animal side of music. He learned the walking bass line to Electric Flag’s “Groovin’ Is Easy” and admired the band’s bassist, Harvey Brooks. Straying from the conformity of the high school band, he idolized bassist Dickie Peterson of Blue Cheer—an iconoclastic hippie whose tough attitude was basically one giant middle finger to the world.

  At fifteen, with younger brother Steve on drums and friend Mike Hershey on guitar, Mike formed Poverty’s Children, later known as Balls. His bass was a cheap Japanese Teisco guitar belonging to Hershey—they removed the two highest strings to create a “bass” guitar. Though he played catcher on local baseball teams as a left-hander, he considered himself ambidextrous—in fact, he started playing bass as a lefty, and switched sides because a right-handed instrument was easier to find.

  Since Michael wasn’t sure how to tune a bass, he tuned the four strings to an open E chord for the first year. He soon acquired a Fender P-bass copy at a local flea market. Like Alex Van Halen, Michael also played with his father’s band, a polka combo, tooting a trumpet for pocket money up until college.

  By their midteens, Alex and Eddie were regularly performing live sets of covers by Black Sabbath and ZZ Top, while joining their dad for his regular gig at the North Continental Club in North Hollywood, acting as designated drivers when needed. They were several inches, many dollars, and quite a few decibels short of where they wanted to be, but they were resourceful and shameless enough to beg or borrow any equipment they needed for their gigs.

  In 1971, the Van Halen boys formed the Trojan Rubber Company, a power trio with neighbor Dennis Travis on bass. Already the boys were little-league outlaws. They smoked cigarettes like European street kids—their mom, Eugenia, even bought them packs to smoke. They had to call themselves the Space Brothers to get permission to play a Catholic high school—the priests and sisters found cosmic drug references more acceptable than a band named after condoms.

  By any billing, the Van Halen brothers became known for their spot-on impersonations of cool hard rock bands like Cream and Cactus. Eddie had been playing through a 100-watt Marshall guitar amp from the time he was fourteen. Competing in a local battle of the bands against kids eight to ten years older, Alex was already stealing shows with a bombastic set piece—Ginger Baker’s entire fifteen-minute-plus drum solo from “Toad.”

  While other kids were dating, experiencing heartbreak, getting into fights, and enduring the endless social humiliation of high school, Eddie sat most of those years out. Sequestered in his bedroom, he entered into a long-term relationship with his guitar. “Everybody goes through their teens getting fucked around by a chick or not fitting in with the jocks at school. I just basically locked my room for four years,” he said.

  His mind may have been with his guitar, but his skill as a guitarist made him popular. He experienced sex at an early age, and girls were always interested in this sweet, shy boy. In the eleventh grade, his steady girlfriend became pregnant. “It was very confusing,” he told writer David Rensin in TeenAge. “We didn’t even have enough money to go to a doctor to see if she was pregnant. And getting out of school to take care of it was a feat in itself. Luckily I had a friend in the school office who gave me blank admit slips.”

  The potentially life-changing event was over quickly, before gravity really kicked in for the young couple. “She wanted an abortion,” Eddie said. “We went to Planned Parenthood and talked it over. We were worried about her parents and my parents finding out, about getting busted for cutting school. Eventually her parents did find out, and their reaction surprised me. It was ‘why didn’t you come to us and let us help?’ I thought they’d call us scum.”

  Stashing the experience in the back of his mind, Eddie stayed focused on his guitar and his band with his brother. Though their schoolmates were already wild about them, at one show they completely changed the life of a kid from a nearby school, Dave Roth. He was a sponge for all forms of culture, high and low, mass and micro, and followed every dance craze from the Twist to the Freddie—yet he was somewhat sheltered. His parents forbade him to go to big rock concerts—until he was nineteen and snuck off to see Humble Pie. So when teenage Roth first saw Eddie Van Halen playing guitar, he saw the light.

  “Eddie was kind of a mentor,” Roth later told a TV interviewer. “I saw what he did with his fingers, and I knew that’s what I wanted to do with my feet, and with my voice.” Praise be and hallelujah.

  2. Rats in the Cellar

  By the time Alex Van Halen graduated from Pasadena High School in 1971, he and his brother were well-regarded fledgling musical professionals. Continuing to direct and manage his band with Eddie, Alex started music classes at Pasadena City College. He signed up for a composition class, where he arranged West Side Story for a fourteen-piece jazz orchestra, and was still subbing with his father’s wedding band when needed. “I was surprised by how well Alex played our kind of music—polkas and waltzes,” said Richard Kreis, a regular bassist in Jan Van Halen’s group. “He carried the rhythm of the band! And while we set up before the bar opened, he’d watch the door while I got the beer from the tap.”

  The brothers had outgrown their neighborhood bands—the Trojan Rubber Company closed shop after bassist Dennis Travis moved away. In 1972, Alex and Eddie formed a new group with bassist Mark Stone. They wanted to call themselves Rat Salad, the title of a Black Sabbath instrumental from the ultra-heavy, groundbreaking new Paranoid album. Instead, the Van Halen brothers chose the name Genesis—the optimistic beginning of a musical career of biblical scale.

  As Genesis began playing backyard parties in Pasadena, a friend jokingly drew up a poster announcing “Genesis at the Forum”—summoning a hilarious fantasy that the band would ever be big enough to play L.A. Forum. Then one sad afternoon Eddie came home from the record store and glumly informed Alex that their band already had an album out—he had discovered the latest record by the British progressive rock band Genesis on the new-release shelf.

  Afterward they became known as Mammoth, a wild and woolly beast that promised a heavy step. For a while, the Mammoth lineup included a keyboard player, which Eddie hated because the electric piano filled up the sound and tied down his guitar playing. Besides playing guitar, Eddie also sang lead vocals in Mammoth, though singing was not his strongest point.

  “Rock Steady” Eddie, as he became known at school, soon followed Alex to Pasadena City College, where he studied composition with Dr. Truman Fischer, also a former teacher of Frank Zappa’s. Fischer was a follower of the visionary composer Arnold Schoenberg’s stern belief in learning the rules so you could completely ignore them. From this professor, Eddie received his lifelong creative license: If it sounds good, it is.

  While setting up on stages in high school gyms and auditoriums, Mammoth met fellow heavy travelers like Snake, boogie rockers who played ZZ Top and Foghat covers. Snake also lent the Van Halen brothers equipment—which was to be expected. Alex remained perpetually a few pieces of gear short of the bigger, better show, and he was shameless about borrowing wh
at Mammoth needed to slog onward.

  Snake’s leader, vocalist and bassist Michael Sobolewski, had graduated from nearby Arcadia High in 1972. He crossed paths with Alex Van Halen at Pasadena City College, studying psychology until his father gave him permission to switch to music. Even on rudimentary originals, Mike’s powerful lungs, expanded by blowing trumpet and running track, were an obvious strong point.

  Another of Alex’s classmates at Pasadena City College, Dave Roth, frequently supplied Mammoth with a PA system, but at least he had the good sense to charge ten bucks a night for rental. At one point, Roth auditioned for Mammoth, but the band was unimpressed with his free-wheeling renditions of Cream and Grand Funk Railroad standards. At that ill-fated meeting, a nervous Eddie left the room so older brother Alex could break the bad news.

  Undiscouraged, Roth formed the Red Ball Jets, an R&B-influenced act that played old rock and roll covers like “Johnny B. Goode,” a band where a huge horn section wouldn’t have been out of place. They rehearsed in the basement of Dr. Roth’s office building in San Marino, and frequently faced off against Mammoth in local battles of the bands in public parks. “It was never about the music for him, it was about the show,” Eddie recalled. “He was like an emcee, a clown. He was great at what he did.”

  Biding his time with theater courses in junior college, Roth was a big personality for a small suburban city. His constant manic energy grated on the down-to-earth teenage rock scene. He wore ridiculous costumes, talked constantly, and strutted and preened like the sex god he obviously believed he was. Mike Sobolewski’s first reaction when meeting Roth was, “Jesus Christ, get this guy away from me!”