The Politics of Van Halen (Part Two)
Or, How to be the Lead Singer of Van Halen for Five Glorious Seconds
I’ll go ahead and apologize up front for the fanboyism inherent throughout this segment. I don’t often fanboy, but this particular concert tale I’m about to share, by its base nature, invokes an unavoidable level of fandom.
After the 1998 debacle with Van Halen 3 crashed and burned, Van Halen went on hiatus once again, this time for near six years. It was commonly thought and later corroborated Ed didn’t take the dismal reception to his ‘98 passion project very well, resulting in a passive aggressive fan backlash that carried through the next three tours and the next seventeen years, one outing with Sammy and two more with Dave. Ed wasn’t thrilled about having to work with either lead singer again. This remained true virtually until the very end of his life. He felt pigeonholed. We artists know that’s not a great feeling.
Nonetheless, the fan base, the promoters, and the record labels weren’t having it. They’d had enough lead singer switch-ups. To be fair, I was among them, because I’m a true believer in the theory that Van Halen is only Van Halen because of the sum of its parts, not because of Eddie Van Halen all by his lonesome. Van Halen must be at least 4 of 5 specific guys, no less, no more. In hindsight, we diehards now know it was with great reluctance that Ed agreed to go out on tour again with Sammy Hagar in 2004, backed by a promotion of another greatest hits album bolstered by three brand new tracks, a common tactic of the time in the music industry.
I was excited Sammy was back in Van Halen. I was of the opinion that Ed played his best with Sammy, because as much as I love Dave, and I do, he isn’t consistent in being a great live singer. A great front man and showman, abso-fuckin’-lutely. However, it soon became clear even before they took the stage at their first show in Greensboro, North Carolina, that things were not copacetic in the Van Halen camp.
The three new tracks weren’t exactly top shelf Van Halen, for starters. They were largely forgettable addendums to a collection of hits we fans had owned for years. Online chatter was rampant with Sam and Ed rubbing elbows before the tour even launched. There were blistering rumors about Ed’s sobriety at the time, which if one believed the paparazzi photos and Ed’s general public appearance at the time, seemed to include a meth habit along with his usual alcoholic proclivities. He was raggedy, donning questionable fashion choices, often shirtless and sporting samurai bun hair, his teeth were toned in classic meth head cliche grey, and he was definitely emaciated.
Early attendees of the first leg of the tour reported uneven performances from Ed and a constantly uncomfortable air from Sammy about stage. No doubt Sam and Mike probably regretted signing contracts before realizing the extent of Ed’s off-wagon state of mind. But the tour went forward all the same. When Live Nation and Irving Azoff are involved, it’s hard to douse an entire tour…the jobs, the promoters, the venues, the huge web of money. In interviews long after the tour was over, Sammy claimed Eddie tried to bust out the window of a G5 jet at 4,000 feet with a wine bottle, and that was likely more true than not, given Ed’s preferred potions on that tour: Smoking Loon and Boone’s Strawberry Farm wines. As anyone in the cheap wine arena could tell you, they aren’t exactly top shelf vintages, but much like Bartles and Jaymes wine coolers in the 80s, they go down sweet and easy. Too easy.
The truth is, longtime Van Halen fans know it was next to impossible to catch Eddie Van Halen live while he wasn’t under the influence of something throughout Van Halen’s career. That was just part of the dealio. He was the definition of a high impact functioning alcoholic. The only exceptions were the Balance tour in 1995, a second leg of the 2007-2008 Dave-Wolfgang tour, and the next two tours from that last version of Van Halen in 2012 and 2015.
Perhaps as a hindsight reaction to the less than ideal tour in 1998 with Gary Cherone, also due to my increased adulting status in having more disposable income, I ponied up for not one but two VIP access ticket packages to the 2004 tour, the first in Vegas at Mandalay Bay, the second a week later at Staples Center in Los Angeles.
I attended the Vegas gig with the wagon hopper, who was indeed on wagon that summer, thankfully. We booked a couple nights at Mandalay and off we went into the desert to shoot craps, play blackjack, and catch one of the two legit versions of Van Halen for the first time in nine years. We acquired something called “Five Star All Access” ticket packages, which offered up randomized pit seating, a swag bag, and entry to a pre-show soundcheck.
Cue ominous, foreboding tone right about here.
The soundcheck was more or less a cattle call, with about fifty to sixty VIP package holders present. Venue staff lined us up and shuffled us into Mandalay’s arena, where Ed and Alex were warming up by themselves. Sam and Mike had missed their flight from the prior gig in Arizona the day before (the two tribes in the band were traveling separately, never a great sign), and were running too late for soundcheck. The VIP hosts offered apologies, but Eddie was anything but apologetic. He was sardonic, pissed off, already a sheet and a half in the wind. He and Alex begrudgingly trudged through instrumental versions of Jump, Runaround, and Top of the World. Between songs, Ed was supremely agitated, lamenting aloud about Sam and Mike’s lack of professionalism, then he asked us assembled VIPs how we felt about a singer-less Van Halen in the future, to which his brother, lurking behind the drum riser, smiled all too tight-lipped.
Woof. Awesome sauce.
Then Ed’s young boy Wolfgang, he who would end up replacing Mike Anthony as the band’s bassist only three years later, came out and dumped a bucket full of Ed’s guitar picks on the VIP crowd. Online chatter from prior VIP package holders had regaled wondrous stories of band members milling about the crowd after soundcheck, taking photos and signing things. That did not happen at the Vegas event. Eventually, we were released to our seats, third row pit center. The show itself wasn’t great. Ed didn’t play well, and the vitriol between Sam and Ed was evident onstage.
Fast forward to a couple weeks later, where I took my girl of the time to her very first Van Halen show down at Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles. I’d changed up the elite ticket options offered on that tour and procured a pair of ‘Golden Ring’ tickets, as they were deemed, providing access to one of two general admission pits built right into the stage setup they’d crafted for the tour, one on Mike’s side and one on Ed’s side. The latter was the most in demand for obvious reasons. Much like the Vegas 5 star thing, it was not a cheap ticket, yet it was indeed Ed’s side where I managed to snag a pair of entries. I was excited for my girl to experience her first Van Halen show, her first arena show as well, but tempered my expectations of the gig because of the lackluster outing in Vegas a week beforehand.
To this day, I have no idea whether it was hometown chutzpah or if Ed chose to imbibe a little less for the evening, but what became clear, a godsend really, was for whatever reason Van Halen was on point that night, rendering a blistering set of mixed hits from both eras. The proximity to the band was nothing like I’d ever seen nor experienced since. The Golden Rings really were IN the raised stage, as you can see pictured below, constructed in the shape of the Van Halen rings logo common to the Van Hagar version of the band (by the way, I hate that term, sold to pop culture ranks courtesy of David Spade’s Joe Dirt). Better yet, there really weren’t that many folks in it, not compared to the oversold GA pits in these current days of arena rock. All three fellas who weren’t stuck behind the drum riser often were only inches from our outstretched hands, walking about the pits’ rims with smiles and plenty of high-fives and offerings of cocktails from Mike’s backstage bar. My girl, beauty that she was, attracted the note of the boys and high-fived all three of them during the set.
Yes, it was LOUD. Again, that was before I started wearing earplugs. I will maintain to my last day the three loudest gigs I ever attended were AC/DC in ‘91 at the Los Angeles Sports Arena (gone now, replaced by BMO Stadium), Van Halen in ‘04 at Staples Center (switched to Crypto.com Arena, currently reverting back to Staples Center per Lakers fan demand), and Scorpions in ‘07 at Gibson Amphitheater (gone as well, replaced by a Harry Potter theme park at Universal Studios). Those three gigs unquestionably rendered my max decibel watermarks. It’s not even a close contest. In fact, it was Scorpions at Gibson, where we landed front row right in front of Rudolph Schenker and all of his backline amp cabinets, that finally pushed me into old man’s earplug territory. I suffered significant hearing damage from that gig, which was, as any hardcore Scorpions fans can attest, fantastically awesome nonetheless.
At Staples that night, my preferred gunslinger ripped through his riffs like a demon, perhaps with the fervor and abandon of his many personal demons. There was Eddie fuckin’ Van Halen, playing his solo spot only a few feet from my starstruck eyes, literally dripping sweat down upon both me and my girl plastered against the pit’s wall, completely overwhelmed by stimuli assaulting all five senses. Imagine what it might be like to look back in the arena at twenty thousand screaming and envious fans through the legs of Eddie Van Halen or Sammy Hagar from BEHIND them.
It was like we were part of the band itself.
That unique feeling became more surreal when at one point, during the chorus of Ain’t Talking ‘Bout Love, a vaunted anthem from the Roth era, Sam stuck his mic down into my face and I got to sing a brief snippet of the song!
I like to tell people tongue-in-cheek that for five to seven glorious seconds, I was the lead singer for Van Halen.
More important, I sang a chorus live to an arena twenty thousand strong with Mike Anthony and Ed Van Halen.
EPIC.
After the band departed the stage, we decompressed in the pit, shell-shocked, and one of Ed’s techs handed me a yellow-striped guitar pick. Thus began my long odyssey of collecting guitar picks from performing artists if I was close enough to do so. It had been a lifelong desire of mine to actually catch a pick directly from Eddie during a performance. More on that in the next segment. Wolfgang dumping a bucket of picks on us in Vegas didn’t quite have the required panache.
My girl queried me on the way home, exhilarated as she was, and asked if all my concerts were in that vein. I laughed and told her most definitely not, that we’d just experienced a once-in-a-lifetime gig. When I told the wagon hopper about my second show wildly contrary to our earlier Vegas gig, he was, shall we say, disappointed.
That tour ended in the fall at Tucson, Arizona, with a most notorious swan song where Ed had a full blown meltdown and nearly came to blows with Sammy, resulting in a dubious end of their brief reunion. It became the last time Mike and Sam ever took the stage with Eddie and Alex.
As I’ve said, Eddie Van Halen was my only celeb hero. I’m all about the Southern Californian antihero. Oh, you’ve figured that out already? Perhaps because I grew up in an alcoholic environment and a good number of my closest friends and family wrestled with addictions of all kinds, Ed’s upsies and downsies didn’t rattle me too much.
Yep. Best show. Worst tour. What can I say. I got lucky.
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I wonder how you feel about “Me Wise Magic” and “You Can’t Get this Stuff No More.”
What a superb experience and detailed memory🥰