Everybody Wants Some (37 page)

In their post-Pantera thrash band Damageplan, Dimebag and Vinnie Paul had lobbied hard for a support slot on Van Halen’s 2004 reunion tour, stating they had already toured with reunited Judas Priest, Kiss, and Black Sabbath lineups—Van Halen would complete their four main heavy metal childhood heroes. The Abbott brothers had just visited backstage with Van Halen in Wichita, Kansas, on November 6.

Eddie appeared at Dimebag’s memorial service. He held his cell phone to the mic and played a voice mail Dimebag had left him days earlier. “Thank you so much, man for the most awesome, uplifting, euphoric, spiritual rock and roll extravaganza ever,” Dimebag had said.

Then came an awkward several minutes when a drunk Eddie repeatedly interrupted the farewell from Zakk Wylde, guitarist in Ozzy Osbourne’s band and one of Dimebag’s closest friends. “I don’t know what the hell happened to Ed,” Wylde told
Revolver
. “He hasn’t just gone off the deep end, he’s living in Atlantis! It was like he thought the whole thing was about him.” But in a lasting sign of deep respect, Eddie buried the black-and-yellow tape-striped guitar pictured on the back cover of
Van Halen II
with the slain guitarist.

Hopefully Eddie’s desire to play guitar wasn’t also buried. During 2005, he seemed to slip deeper into a funk. At least at his son’s junior high graduation in June 2005, he played a song with Wolfgang’s band Die Sheise—German for “the Shit.” “I’ve recorded so many songs with Wolfgang already,” Eddie said. “I’ve got hundreds of songs I haven’t released. I’m playing with Wolfgang every day.”

Then, after having beaten back his own disease a few years earlier, Eddie suffered the loss of his mother, Eugenia Van Halen, at age ninety in the summer of 2005. He was reaching an all-time low. In another sad chapter to the golden boy’s downfall, Valerie officially filed for divorce on Tuesday, December 6, 2005, citing irreconcilable differences.

While Sammy still occasionally spoke with the Van Halen brothers, Michael Anthony had not heard from them since the 2004 tour ended. “Mike’s a buddy,” said Alex. “He’s typical suburbia. He’s a very easygoing guy who’s got lots of friends from many walks of life. He’s got a lot of heart and is a stocky little guy.” But apparently Eddie did not share his brother’s enthusiasm.

One of Eddie’s closest friends since 1980 was Steve Lukather, a versatile session player with over five hundred albums to his credit ranging from Alice Cooper to Aretha Franklin. Lukather played bass and rhythm guitar on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” and more recently sang recorded background vocals on
F.U.C.K
.,
Balance
, and the new songs on
The Best of Both Worlds
. “He is fine,” Lukather said about Eddie. “He went through a really rough spot. Let’s face it—it is tough on a cat. There is still a lot of good music left in Ed. You just have to let him go through what he is going through. He is just a fucking man who is trying to raise his son and get his health and his mind right. Give the guy a fucking break.”

When the going got tough, the tough got weird. In June 2005, Paul Anka recorded a version of “Jump” with an eighteen-piece orchestra that accomplished what Roth had been trying to nail for years. With veteran lounge-lizard swagger, Anka confidently strolled down Roth’s velvet carpet, reclaiming the terrain with booming drums, piercing horn stabs, bubbly piano, and vocal ad-libs before the solo break. Anka sounded like Big Daddy come down from entertainment heaven to tell Roth to “roll with the punches.” Around the same time, a novelty band called Lounge Against the Machine took a decent swipe at “Hot for Teacher.”

Following an aborted attempt to develop a new adult-oriented show in Las Vegas, Roth unexpectedly resurfaced far from the velvet curtains. With little fanfare, he had become a fifty-year-old emergency medical technician, and in late 2004 started riding ambulances in poor neighborhoods in New York City. He went on over two hundred calls just to be certified as a paramedic so he could volunteer one weekend a month. “I was working in neighborhoods that were almost exclusively black and Spanish-speaking,” he told the
Los Angeles
 
Times
. “Only about twice out of 200 clients was I recognized. I was working in Brooklyn, down in Coney Island. . . . I’ve been in more project apartments than Jay-Z and Diddy combined.”

When the EMT card was in his pocket, he went to Fort Sam Houston in Texas for training at the site where U.S. Army medics are schooled. Roth certainly wasn’t performing public service for the money—proceeds every time “Jump” was played in some sports arena kept his yacht washed and waxed. Diamond Dave was saving lives and pursuing the family business, following his father and two uncles the doctors, and his grandfather the surgeon—a line of work almost as prone to God complex as rock star.

After high school, Roth had worked as a hospital night orderly for two years, prepping and cleaning up after surgeries. “I was with the guy before they put him to sleep,” he told
Rolling Stone
in 1985, “and the last one he saw before he went out, and some of them never woke up again. It had a very striking effect on me. It’s very difficult to disassociate yourself from it once you’ve left. So I’m not as affected by pain and death and misery as I was before I worked there.”

Less altruistically, Roth was simultaneously threatening to revive his movie-star dreams on the basis of a slew of VH1 commentator appearances that rekindled his love of being on camera. He also played himself as a poker-playing acquaintance of the Jersey mafia in a 2004 episode of
The Sopranos
. Riffing on accountants and income tax, he delivered his line deadpan: “I used to be able to write off condoms.”

Then at the beginning of 2006, David Lee Roth showed up large on billboards and the sides of public buses across New York City. Filling the silence left by the departure to satellite radio of his longtime friend Howard Stern, he began a rollicking experiment in morning talk radio that listeners found either refreshingly urbane and unpredictable or just plain annoying. Stern had already predicted the hiring back in July 2005, hoaxing his listeners for the first hour of his show with an arrogant Roth imitator who bebopped and shoobedooed over Van Halen loops.

Once installed for real, Roth seemed truly appreciative of his new platform. His main experience focusing his boundless energy and free-flowing patter behind the mic was the short-lived Internet radio experiment five years earlier RothRadio.com. His new show seemed to have no producers, as it booked very few guests and left the singer to extem-poraneously improvise for hours each morning.

While lashing out against the insular culture of “celebutards,” he welcomed Latin listeners and soldiers tuning in via Internet, rocking the limits of both his format and his New York–based market. Though his loosely organized rants seemed ill-suited for high-powered morning drive-time radio, a more nuanced and interesting view of the world’s most eligible and aging himbo emerged. He lectured audiences on the concept of
balance
, how he would alternate orgiastic backstage excesses with humility exercises like scrubbing a motel room clean with a tooth-brush. He promoted deep album tracks by long-lost funk-rock bands like Mother’s Finest, and his love of his own life showed. 

His envy appeared, though, whenever he talked about modern rock. He tore apart popular bands like Green Day and Linkin Park, bashing their safe choices and lack of sophistication. Of course, he couldn’t help banging the pulpit on the subject of Van Halen. Roth had been ridiculed into silence during the 1990s, but now he could monopolize the conversation. When the radio show was inevitably canceled on April 21, 2006, he came out smiling. “At the end of the day, I sing for my dinner, and I kept my day job,” he told Fox News.

After a silent period of a few weeks, Roth’s mouth was back on the job. Capitalizing on the profile boost of four months of mostly negative press about his radio show, he immediately booked a summer tour, appeared on
Strummin’ with the Devil
, an album of Van Halen songs performed by a fast-picking bluegrass band, and sashayed into the talk-show circuit to parade his happy trails.

Playing with a country band, Roth found his Indiana roots and his relevance to the new conservative, rule-bound America. He swore by his cornfield beginnings as fiercely as he had once played his connection to footloose Uncle Manny and bohemian New York. He appeared onstage in a white fedora and a striped stock trader’s shirt, still kicking over his head in time to “Hot for Teacher.” The attention-stealing, egomaniac frontman was carrying on with the show long after the spotlight banged off—just another human lump with an oversized need to be loved.

The crowd still shouted for Van Halen. Shouted, shouted, shouted. Of course, the question hovered—whether Roth would rejoin his first love. “Paging Eddie Van Winkle,” he quipped on Fox News. “I think he’s the only one resistant now. I think it’s inevitable. That material is as familiar as ‘My Country’ Tis of Thee.’ How hard is it to sing ‘Dance the Night Away’? To avert that would be a sin.”

Even if they were fighting on different fronts, David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar had both survived the Van Halen wars. Sammy and the Waboritas were going strong into 2005, playing long nightly sets to crowds of thousands. Hagar’s straightforward act had expanded into a farcical reenactment of spring break in Cancun, complete with sandpit volleyball, bikini-clad waitresses dispensing tequila and temporary tattoos, and a donkey wearing a sombrero. Meanwhile, the Cabo Wabo brand remained literally center stage, painted on a giant hanging backdrop—and permanently tattooed on Sammy’s left bicep.

“Hagar’s success isn’t because he’s a great singer, a great guitarist, or a great songwriter,” said David Lauser, a friend of Sammy’s since high school. “He’s in touch with his heart, and people will pick up on that. I guess that’s what makes you a great artist.”

Advertising Age
reported that Cabo Wabo was on track to ship over 110,000 cases in 2004, putting the super-premium tequila well behind Patrón but still in the top five high-end brands. Perhaps anticipating the future of the concert business, Sammy announced he was making enough money from tequila sales and merchandise that he hoped to be able to tour for free. “It’s a year or two early from being able to do it for free, assuming the company keeps growing the way it is,” he said.

When he appeared on Craig Ferguson’s late-night talk show just days after Roth, he fidgeted through questions about Van Halen, pretending to walk off the set after being asked about another reunion. “I would love to if everything could be cool,” Sammy told Ferguson, “but it just ain’t happening anymore. It’s like a marriage that’s gone bad. I’m not going to go back and date my ex-girlfriend.” Badgered by Ferguson about whether Eddie might be crazy, Hagar reluctantly said, “Listen, I’m crazy, too, but I’m user-friendly.”

Since early 2002, Sammy and Michael Anthony had been working on a semi-supergroup called Planet US, writing music Hagar described as a blend of Led Zeppelin and Tool. Joining half of Van Halen would be Journey guitarist Neal Schon and Journey drummer Deen Castronovo. Former Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash initially agreed to play with the group but never made a rehearsal.

Van Halen’s 2004 tour had scotched the Planet US project, but Sammy and Mike still wanted to get a band going. They retooled their party band Los Tres Gusanos to include not just Waboritas drummer David Lauser but also Waboritas guitarist Vic Johnson. Billed as the Other Half, the quartet played an hour of Van Halen songs and resurrected Mike’s epic bass solo. “Van Halen is us four with the brothers,” Mike said, “but if nothing’s happening with the band, the fans want to hear it, and we want to go out and play it. I’m not going to sit around and do nothing.”

Angry that the pair would dare play without him, Eddie Van Halen offhandedly but cruelly slammed the Other Half on
The Howard Stern
Show
. “They’re both a little chubby, I think they’re both a little wider than they are tall. They’re out there selling hot sauce and tequila, playing all my music. That don’t bother me, just makes them a cover band.”

Surprisingly, Eddie appeared on Howard Stern’s show in 2006 to say he was “open to anything,” including touring with “Diamond” David Lee Roth—though he rapped him as “Cubic Zirconium.” Eddie called Roth a loose cannon, but said he could deal with loose cannons—and went on to act like one himself, insulting the hell out of Michael Anthony and Sammy Hagar, calling the former “Sauce Sobolewski” and the latter a “little red worm.”

Eddie claimed to be pissed off at Mike’s forays outside Van Halen, playing bass with Hagar and with Ohio guitar ace Neil Zaza. In any case, like Jan Van Halen gigging with his high school sons, Eddie turned to a sideman he could trust implicitly and biologically. “I’m pretty much open to anything, but what’s going to happen is there’s a new Van Halen member involved, and that’s my son,” Eddie said. “My son is in, and ‘Sauce’ Sobolewski can do whatever the hell he wants. The name Van Halen is going to go on way after I’m gone, because this kid is just a natural.”

In June 2006, Sammy projected that Eddie would need “an overhaul” before a Van Halen regrouping of any kind was possible. Although something of a gourmand, he also told a reporter he ate in greasy-spoon diners that didn’t demand that he change his clothes.

“If I was ever a genius at anything,” he told the
San Francisco
Chronicle
, “I found everything I like to do and where I want to live and I rolled it all together. I got a business. I can play music at my business. I love tequila and that whole lifestyle, the Mexican food. I’ve got a Mexican restaurant. I have the tequila that goes with it. I have the whole lifestyle rolled into one.”

After sponsoring a successful booze cruise to Mexico for his diehard admirers, Hagar was last spotted signing bottles of Cabo Wabo at a Costco—happy as he could be, a true human phenomenon. His gusto was rewarded in June 2007, when Italian liquor titan Campari paid $80 million for an 80 percent stake in the Cabo Wabo Tequila company.