Larry Schwartz
WHEN EDDIE VAN Halen talks about LSD, he doesn’t mean a psychedelic drug. The heavy metal guitar veteran is alluding to a phenomenon he describes as Lead Singers’ Disease. It is a condition of the ego, he says, that commonly affects singers more intent on being rock stars than musicians.
“It appears that every 10 years people just weird out on us,” he says, of the departure of two high-profile vocalists, David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar, in as many decades.
It must gall him to be dependent on others to front a band that bears his surname and that of his brother, Alex, who plays drums.
“I just happen to not be blessed with a set of pipes,” says the hard rock guitarist some claim has been the most innovative since Hendrix. “So after about five songs, I’d scream and yell.”
So determined was he, Van Halen engaged a singing teacher just over a year ago. “And the woman goes, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with your throat … I don’t understand’. And then my mom called me and she overheard me talking and she’s going, ‘That’s it! Stop talking Dutch! It’s ruining
your throat.’ And I go, ‘S…, what am I going to do? I speak Dutch every day.’ “
Van Halen exaggerates the guttural consonants of his native language, then laughs out loud.
It is 35 years since his family migrated to Pasadena, California, from Nijmegen, near Amsterdam. He knew just four words in English at the time. “My mom bought the record and the book to learn English and the first four words were, “yes”, “no”, “motorcycle” and “accident”.
His parents had met in Indonesia. He’s looking forward to the band’s first tour of Australia partly because it’s “just about right next door”.
Van Halen, now in his early 40s, compares his childhood to the plight of the young David Helfgott. He and Alex, two years his senior, were trained from an early age to
be concert pianists, pressured to perform by their mother.
“I was seven or eight years old,” Van Halen remembers. “And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that movie Shine, but that’s how we grew up. Being basically forced to practise one classical piece of music for a year and do these contests. We were trained to be Vladimir Horowitz’s.”
Instead, he is hyped as a maestro of shock’n’roll. “Unlike virtually every rock guitarist before him,” the eminent US critic, J.D. Considine, has enthused, “he didn’t simply build upon the electric blues of Clapton, Beck, Page and Hendrix – he created a whole new language … As far as guitarists
were concerned, it was as though the wheel had been reinvented.”
The Van Halen brothers’ late father, a classically trained musician who played clarinet in jazz bands, was proud of their achievements. Their mother, 83, has been less impressed. “My mom is still, you know, ‘When’re you going to get a real job? Why don’t you dress like a millionaire?'”
Home is Studio City, California. “It’s the cheaper side of Beverly Hills,” Van Halen says. “I have a studio in my bathroom that I built. It’s just a freak thing. I sit on the toilet and play and record and basically write the whole record in there.” (A new album, Van Halen III, is due out next month.)
It’s a long way from the old home town revisited during a tour of Holland a few years back. “We played right outside of Nijmegen and on the way back to the hotel we tried to find the house. It’s a flat, like an apartment building. It was very emotional. Thirty-something odd years later, to be
standing in the same place and nothing has changed. It’s still clean. It’s still exactly the way it was.”
He remembers the voyage to America. “Nine days on the Atlantic, boy, the sink in everybody’s cabin was definitely clogged. I mean, that was a rough ride … my father actually played in the band on the boat. And so did Alex and I. We were like a little sideshow.”
The family had migrated under a government-assisted scheme to join relatives. The ship docked in New York and they took a four-day rail journey west to their new home. “We came here with 75 guilders and a piano … my father had to walk six miles every morning to wash dishes in a
hospital and he was a janitor. My mom cleaned people’s houses.”
His mother’s influence persisted in their first years in America. “I actually won three times in a row first prize out of I don’t know how many thousands of kids. And when I turned 12, I said, I’ve had it. I rebelled and I just started playing drums because I got into the Dave Clark Five. That’s
funny too. I never got into the Beatles until later.
“So I bought myself a drum set and somehow my mom and dad had convinced Alex to still do something respectable, which was guitar lessons. Well, Alex started playing my drums and he got better than me. So I said, OK, f… you. Take my drums. I’ll take your guitar.”
Van Halen is bemused, if flattered, by comparisons with Hendrix. “God, you know, I never learned a Hendrix song in my life. I mean I loved his playing. One of my favorite songs of all time was All Along The Watchtower. I don’t own any Hendrix records. I was totally into Clapton while he
was in Cream.”
As Mammoth, and later Van Halen, they played clubs for six or seven years before being signed by Warner Bros in 1977. He says he could never imitate other players. “I just turned into myself. When he had to play clubs we had to play the latest top 40 songs and it was always my fault that
we wouldn’t get the job because for the life of me I tried so hard to emulate the records and I just couldn’t. No matter what I did it sounded like me.”
There were no formal guitar lessons. “And I guess because I wasn’t taught by the book, I was free to do whatever I wanted and came up with a bunch of crazy stuff. I don’t know if it’s ever been done before …”
His influence is apparent in a host of guitar heroes. “At first when people started copying the things that I did, to them it was a trick or something. But to me it was part of my playing for so long that it’s second nature. It’s not just a flash thing. I hear these things in my head and the only way
I can do it is by using both hands on the fingerboard.”
He’s weary of a fascination with celebrities, the perception of a rockstar living a lavish lifestyle with a glamorous wife, actress Valerie Bertinelli. “It’s really not that way. I go to the bathroom the same as anyone else does. It just so happens that I made music all my life and that’s my livelihood.
That’s my life. And my wife, she’s an actress and she doesn’t like the business end of it much either. So she just picks and chooses every now and then a TV movie to do. We’re just grooving on raising our son, who will be seven in March.”
The youngster’s name is Wolfgang (“I didn’t have the nerve to call him Amadeus”) and “he is so musical it is ridiculous. He wrote his first little ditty on the piano about a month ago and I said, ‘See how simple it is, Wolfie. You got 12 notes. Do whatever you like with them. And if you like it,
it’s good.’
“He just listens to what I do every day. He’s got great rhythm and he’ll go, ‘Daddy can I play?’ I’ll do the chords and he’ll pick. He’s got great grooves. I had a miniature guitar made for him. I tuned it in a chord. So he can just bar chords.”
As well as guitar, Van Halen plays piano, cello and saxophone. He’s penned songs that are hard rock classics.
In its heyday in the 1980s, Van Halen was as well known for the flamboyant strut of lead singer Roth as for the songwriter-guitarist. For a while, Roth’s presence dominated. “Dave was like a peacock and if I’d have got up there in jeans and a T-shirt, it wouldn’t have quite fit,” Van Halen says.
“But after spraining my ankles on platforms a couple of times, I said, f… this s…”
He says they took Roth on board primarily because he owned a PA system and it was cheaper than continually hiring it from him. Their approach was different from the outset. “I don’t really know how to bulls… and I’d feel so bad. I’ll never forget the first radio interview that he and I did.
It was a top 40 rapid-fire kind of thing and the guy turns to Dave and goes, ‘So how’s it going, Dave?’ And Dave goes, ‘Heyupand apopandthesebutblorlur.’ And he turns to me and says, ‘I understand you and your brother are from Holland?’ And I say, ‘Yeah.’ Dead air.
“So Dave says, ‘Hey man, just make up something?’ And I was just lousy at it. I don’t know how to make up bulls…. I’m not an entertainer with my mouth. I don’t know, I express my emotions, I speak better through my music than I do with my mouth.”
Roth left the band to pursue a solo career in 1985. Hagar left the band just over a year ago. “He just stopped being a team player, you know,” Van Halen says of Hagar. “He basically wanted to be a solo artist and also have the prestige of being a singer with Van Halen.”
He’s confident that Hagar’s replacement, Gary Cherone, from the defunct Boston band, Extreme, won’t go the way of his predecessors. “When Gary joined, we just bonded. We just connected. He actually looks more like my brother than I do.” A long-time Van Halen fan, Cherone has been
living in the Van Halen guesthouse. “It’s like we’re brothers,” Eddie Van Halen says. “The circle is complete. I don’t see him ever copping … Lead Singers’ Disease.”
The Sunday Age
15th of February 1998
Larry Schwartz Writer