Van Halen

Exuberant California, Zen Rock'n'roll

John Scanlan

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781861899538
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Van Halenare known for classic songs like "Runnin' with the Devil, " "Panama, " and "Jump, " but also for the drama surrounding the exits of its former members. While many have attempted to discover the secrets of Van Halen through an analysis of their musical role models, John Scanlan looks at deeper aesthetic and philosophical influences in Van Halen, a groundbreaking account of this extraordinary band.

Following the band's pursuit of the art of artlessness, Scanlan describes how they characterize what historian Kevin Starr terms "Zen California"—a state of mind and way of being that above all celebrates the now, and in rock and roll terms refers to the unregulated expenditure of energy and youthful exuberance destined to extinguish itself. Scanlan sheds light on key events and influences—the decaying of Hollywood in the 1970s; Ted Templeman's work as a producer at Sunset Sound Studios; Top Jimmy, a blues rock singer who performed at the Zero Zero club; and the building of Eddie Van Halen's Hollywood Hills studio in 1983—that show how 1970s California was the only time and place that Van Halen could have emerged. Along the way, Scanlan also explores the relationship between David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen, the climate of Southern California and its relation to a sense of cultural exuberance, the echoes of Beat aesthetics in David Lee Roth's attitude to time, Eddie Van Halen's bebop sensibility, and the real roots of the so-called "Brown" sound. An illuminating look at a classic rock group and the cultural moment in which they came of age, Van Halen is a book for fans of the band and the history of rock and roll.

1 OUT UPON THE OCEAN

Reality – every kind of reality – may be perceived as a particular deployment or arrangement of things to be relied upon and worked to one’s advantage.

– François Jullien, The Propensity of Things

Asked in 1980 if he might consider himself to be trash culture’s greatest ever product, Van Halen’s David Lee Roth gave an unusual answer. Rather than being insulted by the suggestion that he might be no more than the latest passing fad, ripe for disposal, he was rather engaged with what it might mean to be trash. ‘I don’t know if I’m the ultimate product’, he replied. ‘What is “ultimate trash”? God, maybe I could ascend to that.’ He thought for a while, and realized that, of course, it had to be. ‘Yeah, yeah!’ he said. ‘Definitely.’¹

Trash is, if nothing else, a two-faced thing – once the stuff of desire, it becomes, by and by, relegated to a kind of nothingness. It speaks, perhaps, of the lures and traps of desire itself, which may promise happiness but, in fact, only reveals the truth of its transience. Trash is what it is because it slips out of our grasp. To aspire to such a condition – a thought that tickled the Zen-minded Roth – is, when all is said and done, to be at one with the impermanence of existence itself. Most of us battle against this; against giving ourselves up to the world, but for the Taoist such an aspiration makes perfect sense.

The temperamental counterpart of trash’s transience and negation of the desire to be is stupidity; a mute absence and denial of ‘self’ that points to the horror of a meaningless existential void. As Roth once said – and not without coincidence – ‘for many people, Van Halen represent the abyss’. Or, as Charles M. Young of Musician magazine once put it in 1984, the band Roth fronted presented a conundrum to anyone who might want to fix it with a label. Who were they? What were they? ‘Van Halen’ were, he suggested:

(a) The Four Stooges, (b) more murderous than Abdullah the Butcher [the wrestler], (c) what would happen if you put Al Jolson in the studio with Beethoven, (d) lucky it hasn’t run into a bridge abutment, (e) the best, (f) all of the above.²

When he first met Roth in 1984, Young figured that what he was facing was clearly a manifestation of the mythical figure of the trickster – he who collapses the boundaries of all thought and action that enable us to neatly organize the world.³ This was why the closer Young looked – he had predicted in a review of Van Halen for Rolling Stone magazine in 1978 that they would be a bloated FM rock band within a few years – the less easy it was to grasp what was there. As the American mythographer Joseph Campbell wrote, the trickster ‘always breaks in, just as the unconscious does, to trip up the rational situation. He’s both a fool and someone who’s beyond the system.’⁴ In myth, he is manifested in the form of innumerable slippery, elusive figures: Hermes, Reynard the Fox, Brer Rabbit and countless others. In popular culture he is Batman’s Joker, Robin Hood, the cartoon Wiley E. Coyote or Clint Eastwood in the guise of ‘The Man With No Name’, whose trickery Roth borrowed in Van Halen’s ‘Hang ’em High’. As he told Spin magazine in 1986:

The man who came from nowhere and goes home to no one. I always felt that. I always had a real good time with it … I’m living it. I’m breathing it.⁵

As Lewis Hyde notes in Trickster Makes This World, ‘all tricksters are “on the road”.’ They represent ‘the spirit of the doorway leading out, and of the crossroad at the edge of town’.⁶ Of all the members of Van Halen, it is perhaps not surprising that Roth was the one who never settled down or got married; the one who harboured a romantic ideal about being on the road – whether that meant being in a rock’n’roll band, or adventuring in the Himalayas (he conquered K2, the world’s second-highest peak, and only failed to surmount Everest due to bad weather) or getting lost in some remote jungle (as he did in Amazonia, in 1983). And like the trickster figure, whose chief aim was to sow the seeds of confusion, and to buck the rules of the system – to reveal their true workings – Roth, too, was really up to no good. He was deceitful and shameless, ‘amoral’, Young noted, ‘driven by appetites’ rather than reason or logic, and getting away with stuff in a way that no one else could – and doing it with a childlike glee.⁷ ‘If you’re getting a bad impression of me’, he would tell journalists, ‘spread it around.’

Van Halen’s rise to the top of the US charts coincided with the era during which various rock’n’roll baddies were the target of a holy alliance of conservative interests; self-appointed guardians of cultural standards who spent too much time spinning vinyl records backwards in search of ‘satanic’ messages. In Roth’s lyrical imagery, though, they would have found nothing more disturbing than allusions to Max Fleischer’s odd, spooky cartoon from the 1930s, Swing You Sinners! Nevertheless, when the so-called Washington Wives, led by Tipper Gore (wife of later vice-president, Al Gore) were campaigning against the perceived evils of popular music and for the values of what they termed the ‘moral majority’, Roth was quick to declare himself toastmaster general of the immoral majority, just as others who took all this seriously queued up to deny the accusations in front of Congressional hearings. When Roth declared to journalists that he wouldn’t ‘go down in history, but I [would] go down on your sister’, you were never quite sure if he really meant it, or if he was just – like the trickster – collapsing the boundaries of thought and action, saying exactly what should not be said in public. Perhaps he, and Van Halen, were channelling the Three Stooges, acting as irritants to respectability.

In fact, Roth’s behaviour provoked the kind of response that lived up to the central ambiguity of a trickster figure. That is to say, he divided opinion – even among self-declared Van Halen fans. In this, he led Van Halen with him to some extent, but more often stood out as the main offender against good taste. As rock’n’roll outfits go, this was a band of formidable musical ability – a band able to make their musical peers ‘sound like sluggish, unimaginative hacks’, as the Los Angeles Times noted in 1982. Yet, here they were – in the public imagination at least – ‘powered by love-him-or-loathe him vocalist David Lee Roth’ and his ‘narcissistic swagger’.⁸ As Henry Rollins (the frontman of Los Angeles punks Black Flag) recalled:

People I knew who didn’t usually voice their opinions, always had an opinion about that guy. Either they were into Dave or they wanted to punch that grin right off his face.⁹

Rollins was one of Roth’s fans, but nonetheless felt able to say that he ‘could see why a lot of people hated his guts’.¹⁰ How could Roth, on the one hand, be capable of executing those quasi-balletic, martial arts moves that saw him spend much of his time during live shows off the ground and sailing through the air, yet on the other, be a fall-down drunk; a man running off too much junk food and sugar, to say nothing of more illicit substances?

Roth’s ability to make even his own audience uncomfortable did not diminish with the passing of the years, with one witness to his ill-fated mid-1990s stint in Las Vegas suggesting that his ‘penchant for rambling fictional scenarios, extended blues jams and oblique Zen humor … tests the attention span’ of even his most loyal fans:

More than any other rock act or Vegas veteran, Roth reminds one of Sandra Bernhard in his ability to dispense comedy, discomfort, pensées and musical homages in one unwholesome package.¹¹

This was the kind of response that was common among critics, who seemed to be both repulsed by Roth yet drawn unaccountably to him, and thus to Van Halen. The following reaction – the opening salvo from an article in Rolling Stone in 1979 – was fairly typical of the need many writers felt, if they were going to say anything positive about the band, to first outline some of the problems they had with the mere idea and presence of them:

Van Halen is the latest rock act to fall out of a family tree of deadbeats whose ancestry includes slave drummers on Roman galleys, Ginger Baker’s Air Force and the street crews of the New York City Department of Sanitation.¹²

The article’s author, Timothy White, nonetheless ended by saying that, in the Van Halen II album (the subject of his article) this ‘blockbusting four-man outfit’ had created an ‘amazing’ artefact that might astound distant generations of rock archaeologists. For the most part, however, it was Roth’s lack of self-discipline and modesty that had critics reaching for their notebooks. There’ll always be people in the peanut gallery throwing stuff at you was the kind of thing he might utter in response, therein painting a picture of the critics as noisy upstarts in the ‘cheap seats’, not unlike the hard-to-please children of the TV show Howdy Doody (1950s), who delivered instantaneous judgements on the entertainment from their own little peanut gallery.

Cynthia Rose, writing about Van Halen’s Diver Down album of 1982 for the New Musical Express (NME), heaped praise on the musicality of the band, particularly brothers Eddie and Alex Van Halen, but observed that, while ‘the tunes more than pass muster … no quarter is given for anyone to get used to front man David Lee Roth’.¹³ With the benefit of hindsight, this reaction was merely a further development in Rose’s seeming inability to rid herself of the spectre of the so-called ‘Diamond Dave’ and Van Halen. In truth she seemed destined always to be the one who would try to answer the question that Charles Young of Musician would pose – what, or who, is Van Halen? In NME – not entirely known for its support for long-haired American rockers – she always ended up with the job of reviewing the band’s new albums; and, while she could never really hide the fact that there was some fascination there, that maybe she really liked them a great deal, it was an acceptance that was always equally cut through with disgust. She had been conned by these tricksters into liking this ‘thing’. In her review of Fair Warning (1981), for instance, Rose was – as on other occasions – impressed with what the band had served up, musically. ‘These guys do architect actual and varied songs’, she said, ‘from Fair Warning’s stinging “Sinners Swing!” and vivid “Mean Streets” to the hyperkinetic “Unchained” …’

this LP’s best numbers are constructed around Eddie’s whip-you-with-electric-eels showmanship and buoyed up by brother Alex’s Oblique Strategies drumming – which lashes the cymbals, varies the support system and attacks from behind instead of coming down on top of the rhythm in traditional thump and grind fashion.¹⁴

Yet, once again when it came to ‘love-him-or-loathe him’ singer Roth, she felt compelled to lay at his door not only the blame for ‘the sheer unbelievable obnoxiousness of the band’s sartorial gambits’ – she did have a point in that regard – but personal responsibility for ‘Van Halen’s successful vandalism of Western rock’s disarray’.¹⁵ Roth, however, slipping free of the grasp of the critic, was already one step ahead and turned those kinds of observations back at their source. ‘Sure, Van Halen is storm and thunder’, he told Don Waller in the Los Angeles Times:

Sturm und Drang, delivered at high velocity and close intervals. It’s preposterous in magnitude. It’s all bluster – a big fireball that eats itself up. You’ve gotta laugh at that sometimes. Look at the clothes I wear [Laughs real hard].¹⁶

It was almost as though he was saying – ‘anything bad you say about me and my band, I can outdo; you can’t even beat me when it comes to criticizing myself.’ But by 1984 you could have been forgiven for thinking she had always been a fan, as she congratulated Roth for reaching a level of ‘career construction that outstrips even that of Bob Dylan’.¹⁷ Who knows what that meant, but it was a kind of accommodation – a throwing up of the hands to say: ‘Okay! I give in. You win.’ Perhaps she saw that Roth, like Dylan, was a shape-shifter who fled any attempt to pin him down: a slippery fellow who had now earned the right to get away with it, or to get some recognition for remaining true to his tricksy ways. Indeed this might explain her appraisal of Van Halen’s MCMLXXXIV/1984 album, captured in a piece of writing which itself took the form of an elaborate ruse any trickster would have been proud of. Within a summary of the album’s supposed influences comes the following:

The literary sources behind this album are two minor classics of the late 1930s: Leemings’ Fun with String (Pub. Frederick A. Stokes) and Betcha Can’t Do It (‘how to put 12 persons in II beds and other intriguing stunts guaranteed to break the ice at any party’) by Alex van Rensselaer, publisher Appleton-Century. Don’t be deceived by the small ‘v’ in van Rensselaer. The two Van Halens are almost certainly distant blood relations of some sort, for much ideological pilfering from the obscure but original manual has taken place on numbers such as ‘Panama’, ‘Girl Gone Bad’, and ‘Top Jimmy’.¹⁸

This fiction caught the spirit of Roth and Van Halen as accurately as anyone had, and also inadvertently threw light on something else without perhaps being entirely aware of it – the absent artistic ‘I’ of Roth, which flew in the face of the fetishism of authenticity, which so defined rock music and the most thoughtless and unimaginative examples of its associated criticism.

Elsewhere, the ‘love-them-and-loathe-them’ reaction to Van Halen was equally in evidence. Barney Hoskyns could say in one breath that while ‘David Lee Roth is clearly a di...