Night Beat Part 8

I have my own view of the subject, which is simply that when you're trying to act out dreams of desperateness in a place where those dreams aren't intrinsic, then you just have to act a little harder and a little tougher. After all, it's a great kick, a great fancy of revolt, to feign hopelessness in a place just drowning with hope. When the pa.s.sion and the moment faded, the punks could always kick back and settle into the subliminal, lulling rhythm of the city-and many of them did. That cadence of insensibility has been what's always kept time here: it even, in its own way, gave the punks their momentum, and eventually it outlasted them. Undoubtedly, that made some of the scene's detractors fairly happy. But for the rest of us, those few voices of outrage that startled this vast, unconcerned cityscape are something we miss terrifically.

ALONG THE WAY, the L.A. punk scene produced a handful of bands that were seen by some as great hopes-including X and the Go-Go's (I know it's hard to believe, but the Go-Go's really were a punk band once upon a time, until A & M Records signed them and fixed that problem for good). Of those two groups, clearly X was the more considerable (though vastly less popular) force. Indeed, X made definitional, high-reaching, great punk records (especially Wild Gift and Under the Big Black Sun) and also played definitional, high-reaching, great live shows. In concert, guitarist Billy Zoom, drummer Don Bonebrake, ba.s.sist John Doe, and vocalist Exene Cervenka took songs like "s.e.x and Dying in High Society," "Johnny Hit and Run Pauline," "The Once Over Twice," and "Your Phone's Off the Hook, but You're Not" and pushed them to their limit, as if they wanted to punish the structures of the songs in order to strengthen their meanings. At the same time, the group never abandoned its sense of essential unity. X was, after all, a band about community-for that matter, a band that a.s.serted the ideal of family as a loving but practical-minded alternative to personal dissolution and fas.h.i.+onable nihilism-and for all the tension and frantic propulsion in their music, the individual elements of the sound hung together like firm, interconnected patterns.

But by 1985, X's sense of family-and perhaps a bit of their spirit-began to fray. John Doe and Exene Cervenka not only sang the best team vocals in punk's history, they had also been a real team-husband and wife. But then that marriage suffered a breakup, and though the pair's creative partners.h.i.+p remained intact, the romantic disunion took its emotional toll.

In most ways that count, the alb.u.m that came from that rupture, Ain't Love Grand, was an alb.u.m about how fiery love comes to rugged and embittered ends, and how, after the ruin, it can sometimes forge new bonds of esteem and comrades.h.i.+p. Of course, before one can arrive at any such understanding, one has to cut through the remembrances of romantic h.e.l.l: all the charges and admissions of infidelity ("My Goodness" and "Little Honey"), all the mourning of a lost, ideal union ("All or Nothing" and "Watch the Sun Go Down"). At one point, in "Supercharged," Exene delivers a taunting account of the feverish and relentless s.e.x she enjoys with a new lover, and John Doe sings along with her, like a grim witness to his own exclusion. One can't help but wonder, what must Doe have been thinking at such a moment?

Perhaps he was simply thinking that this is what one must do to get past the bad truths. After all, the band survived this rupture, and somehow emerged with one of its bravest works yet. It's as if, in the place of children, Doe and Cervenka sp.a.w.ned a certain artistry that demanded a continued fellows.h.i.+p; they worked and sang together not merely for the sake of their music, but because of the knowledge that they could make music this grand and fulfilling and revealing no place else but in this band, with each other. The two no longer shared the same home or same love, but they certainly shared the same harmonies-an affinity they could find only in each other-and that's worth whatever the cost of their continued alliance. Of course, this time it meant something far different for the two to sing together, and not surprisingly, they pulled off their most memorable performances in a trio of songs ("All or Nothing," "Watch the Sun Go Down," and "I'll Stand Up for You") where they stepped away from recriminations and faced the challenge of their abiding friends.h.i.+p and partners.h.i.+p. "When my friends put you down, I'll stand up for you," Doe sings to Exene in the alb.u.m's most heartening and generous moment. "I'll stand up for you, and you'll stand up for me."

In their music and their forbearance, Doe and Cervenka a.s.serted that some traditions should withstand the necessary negation that comes along with modern times and new values. X never made this claim more meaningfully than in Ain't Love Grand.

As for the Go-Go's-I have to admit, I had a hard time liking them. The band's first alb.u.m, Beauty and the Beat (1981), was an eager though savvy attempt to meet commercial expectations of new wave diffusion, and their second (Vacation, 1982) was merely the obvious follow-up attempt at cranking out more surface-fun fare. But the third record, 1984's Talk Show, proved to be something more than their vindication-something closer to a self-directed work of vengeance, as if the group had something to make up for by upsetting their former pop refinement. In any event, some twist of thinking-or perhaps just the internal friction within the band during that season-occurred to make Talk Show a surprisingly hard-edged revelation. In fact, the record was so good it had the effect of splitting the group up-though not forever. When the band returned in 1994 with Return to the Valley of the Go-Go's, they sounded like they were playing just for the mere fun of it. Yet "mere fun" can also be its own deep truth-especially in Los Angeles. As Greil Marcus noted in Mystery Train, L.A. is a city where Nathanael West's and Raymond Chandler's dark version of urban realism are no more reflective of deep truths than Brian Wilson's fun-in-the-sun view of the city's ethical climate. Pop, as a medium of fun, and fun as a purpose of pop, is still an inevitable and necessary tradition in the L.A. scene.

LOS ANGELES in the 1980s also produced two other bands I'd like to comment on briefly. One is the Minutemen, a three-man outfit made up of guitarist D. Boon, ba.s.sist Mike Watt, and drummer Mike Hurley, who were part of the scene nearly since its inception. In the early 1980s, they released what were two of the most impelling of all American hardcore alb.u.ms (and perhaps the most inventive punk-style recordings since the Clash's debut LP): The Punch Line and What Makes a Man Start Fires. They were politically and musically involving works, full of quick, hard thinking, and quicker, harder tempo changes.

The Minutemen were at once both the thinking listener's and thinking musician's hardcore band-which is to say they wrote and performed art-informed music from a singular and committed political point-of-view, and they played from a funk-derived punk perspective. Big, hard, fleet shards of ba.s.s guitar cut across the contending structure set up by the impetuous guitar lines and eruptive drum patterns, and in that vibrant webwork, surprising references-everything from Chuck Berry to Sly Stone, from Miles Davis to James "Blood" Ulmer-exposed themselves and took on new ident.i.ties, and, in the process, new histories. Seeing them live, they made me feel I had finally seen Moby d.i.c.k onstage, and had finally understood why Ahab lost. Some things are too big to get over or around, and too irresistible to ignore.

On December 22, 1985, D. Boon was killed in an automobile accident, and the Minutemen necessarily came to an end. The loss was immense. In his quest with the Minutemen, Boon clearly worked more as a comrade in action-an equal-than as a lead figure. In fact, sometimes on record it was hard to sort out his particular songwriting style from that of Watts and Hurley, which may be a tribute to the sense of unity and functional democracy that the trio achieved-much like that achieved by groups as disparate as the Band and the Ornette Coleman Quartet. Onstage, though, Boon often seemed the more central and commanding figure in the Minutemen, and not merely because of his obvious physical bulk, nor because his vocals tended to sound a bit better humored and ironic than Watts'. Actually, what made him such a dominating performer was that he seemed to have some kind of imperative physical involvement with the music. I can recall shows in which he seemed to be wringing his guitar, pulling and twisting wondrous, complex cl.u.s.ters of notes from it, then reshaping them into new patterns to fit the vaulting rhythms being served up by Watts and Hurley.

D. Boon and the Minutemen left eleven alb.u.ms and EPs and one epic-length ca.s.sette, comprising some of the most probing, resourceful, and continually surprising American music of the 1980s. Watt and Hurley went on to form fIREHOSE with guitarist and vocalist eD fROMOHIO, and in 1995, Mike Watt released a widely respected alb.u.m, Ball-Hog or Tugboat?, featuring contributions by Eddie Vedder, Henry Rollins, Evan Dando, and members of Nirvana, Screaming Trees, Sonic Youth, Meat Puppets, and Soul Asylum.

PERHAPS MY FAVORITE 1980s L.A. punk group was the one that, at moments, also disappointed me the most: Dream Syndicate. In the early 1980s, I was working evenings in an L.A. record store, Westwood's Rhino, alongside a young, friendly guy named Steve Wynn. I learned that Wynn had formed a band, Dream Syndicate, and he invited me to catch their maiden appearance at a Valley spot, the Country Club. From their first moments onstage, I was in love. They had that ideal mix of reference sounds-part Bob Dylan, part Velvet Underground, part Neil Young, part John Fogerty-but they also had something all their own: a willingness to take their music anywhere it might go at any given moment, even if that moment resulted in chaos or decomposition. They also had spirit and humor. The audience that night-who'd gathered to see some no-account new-wave headliner or another-hated Dream Syndicate on the spot. They booed the band, pelted them with beer cups, spit on them, and demanded they GET OFF THE STAGE. Finally, Wynn said, "I've got some good news for you: This is our last song of the night," and for the first time in Dream Syndicate's set, the audience erupted in a cheer. "The bad news," he added, "is that it goes on for a really long time," and the audience groaned as one. And the song did go on for a long time-about twenty-five minutes. By the time it was over, there were only maybe five people left seated in the hall, myself among them.

Dream Syndicate's first full-length alb.u.m, Days of Wine and Roses, was one of the best works of 1983-boisterous and reckless, and full of a weird and stirring beauty. That was when Dream Syndicate caught the ear of A & M Records (you remember them from the Go-Go's, right?), and suddenly something went terribly wrong. Some said it was outside pressures, some said it was internal problems, but whatever the cause, Dream Syndicate seemed to freeze up right before our eyes and ears. The group's A & M debut, Medicine Show (1984)-which had taken months to make and had cost a fortune-ended up sounding more drenched in att.i.tude than meaning, and was utterly without the spark of spontaneity that had made their earlier music so riveting. Worse, the group's live shows, which had once seemed so chancy, degenerated into pat, heartless performances. What had begun as an inspired vision had turned simply into another guileful career, and it was hardly surprising when, a few months later, we learned that the group's leaders, Wynn and guitarist Karl Precoda, had parted ways.

But the best dreams die hard, so the tale moves on. In 1985, Dream Syndicate regrouped, with a new guitarist and producer, Paul Cutler. Their next alb.u.m, Out of the Grey, was a bracing work of redemption. In particular, it seemed to be a record about what it means to lose one's way and to summon the will to find a new direction and start again. In such songs as "Dying Embers" and "Now I Ride Alone," Steve Wynn conjured bitter, dark remembrances of blown chances and bad choices, and while he clearly cared a great deal about the people who get swallowed up in such dissolution, he refused to surrender to the romance of it all. "Spit out the poison and get on with it," he sang at one point, even though he was singing about somebody whom he knew could never let go of his own decline or his own broken past. Maybe Dream Syndicate lost their crack at the big time, but they still had music to make, and Wynn sounded as if he intended to make it as honestly and compa.s.sionately as he knew how. Dream Syndicate broke up and regrouped more than once and Wynn went on to make two fine solo alb.u.ms, Kerosene Man and Dazzling Display. But Out of the Grey was the best music Dream Syndicate ever made.

I wrote about Dream Syndicate often in my days at the Herald Examiner. One smog-bound, gray-brown winter day, I was driving to work, listening to KROQ-L.A.'s new wave station that played mainly cloying music. Then the D.J. said a few words that perked my interest. "We've been reading a lot about this L.A. band the Dream Syndicate," he said. "I haven't heard anything by them yet, but we believe in giving new bands a chance at KROQ, so here goes."

With that, "Halloween," from The Days of Wine and Roses, began blaring from my car speakers-its frictional, slow-moving-but-exciting sound unlike anything I'd yet heard on that station. It reminded me of the sense of daring that causes one to fall in love with rock & roll in the first place, that sense of inquiring emotion that can pin you like a bolt of recognition. There it all was: flashes of the Velvet Underground, Television, and white noise Rolling Stones, in the collision of guitars and the hard, uncompromising beat and . . . and . . . all of a sudden, it was gone. After only thirty seconds of rapturous cacophony, it disappeared with soundless abruptness.

The D.J. fumbled his way back on the air, his voice shaky with anger. "That's all I need to hear," he said. "I like to give new local bands a chance, but this is ridiculous. You won't be hearing more of that band on this station."

And indeed, I never did.

I told this story to Wynn one day during an interview, while we were seated at a hamburger stand on Santa Monica Boulevard. He looked wonderstruck, then just shook his head, laughing.

"G.o.d, that's wonderful," he said. "To think we could disturb somebody who's supposed to be as aware of 'new music' as these people are supposed to be . . . " He let the thought trail off into a bemused smile.

"At least we won't be overexposed," he said after a while, laughing once again.

BY THE LATE 1980s, L.A.'s punk scene no longer meant as much. As it developed, though, punk was something that was now all over the world-in fact, maybe it had always been in the air, in the history, in one form of voice or another, from Robert Johnson and Presley, to Jerry Lee Lewis and Sinatra. But without what punk accomplished in the late 1970s and in the early 1980s, American artists like R.E.M., L7, Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, or even (G.o.d help us) Alanis Morrisette, and U.K. acts like ABC, Human League, Oasis, Blur, Pulp, U2, Sinead O'Connor, and the Prodigy, might never have happened or meant as much.

But as the 1990s began, the place where you could hear punk at its brightest and most exhilarating was in Seattle, Was.h.i.+ngton, especially in the music of a trio called Nirvana. But we will come to that story later.

van halen: the endless party.

Our ancestry is firmly rooted in the animal world, and to its subtle antique ways our hearts are pledged. Children of all animal kind, we inherited many a social nicety as well as the predator's way. . . .

ROBERT ARDREY.

FROM AFRICAN GENESIS..

It's like we always say: There's a little Van Halen in everybody-all we're trying to do is bring it out.

ALEX VAN HALEN.

David Lee Roth makes quite a picture as he stands in front of his dressing-room mirror backstage at Detroit's Cobo Arena. Arching his hips lewdly and tugging at the waistband of his ruby-red spandex tights until the elastic crotch zone bulges like a gaudy Christmas stocking crammed with apples and bananas, Van Halen's lead singer preens and postures like a b.e.s.t.i.a.l champion of autoeroticism. Actually, this steamy display is a thoughtful gesture for the ladies who will crowd around the stage tonight-the idea being that when they look up and behold David, they also behold his Goliath.

After a quick check to make sure the view looks as mouthwatering from the rear as from the front, Roth swaggers over to where I'm sitting and plops down in a folding chair. "Hey, man," he says, tossing his woolly tresses back from his shoulders with a blase flick of the head, "I want you to feel free to ask us anything you want, write about anything you see. Van Halen's got nothin' to hide. But," he adds, leaning closer and slipping deeper into his patented street patois, "let me forewarn you: What you've walked into here is a self-created fantasyland, where everything happens four times as much and four times as quick, like an around-the-calendar New Year's Eve.

"It's like, anything you desire you can find here-whatever your vice, whatever your s.e.xual ideals. Whatever somebody else can't do in his nine-to-five job, I can do in rock & roll."

Tickled by his description of rock & roll privilege, Roth laughs l.u.s.tily and bounds back to the mirror. "I guess what I'm saying, man, is that I'm proud of the way we live, not so much because of the records we sell or the money we make, but because of the party we're going to have afterward to celebrate all that."

ALL THINGS considered, Roth and the other members of Van Halen-ba.s.sist Michael Anthony, guitarist Eddie Van Halen, and his brother, drummer Alex Van Halen-have plenty to celebrate. Their most recent alb.u.m, Women and Children First, vaulted into Billboard's Top 10 only one week after its release. The band's previous LPs, Van Halen and Van Halen II, have reportedly sold more than 7 million copies worldwide. In addition, the pair of sold-out shows in Detroit-part of the 1980 Invasion tour, the group's most extensive and extravagant headline trek to date-denotes an even more crucial triumph of the marketplace: a fervid acceptance of Van Halen by America's heavy-metal heartland. The group is now one of the undisputed kingpins of hard rock, ranking alongside such venerable Visigoths as Led Zeppelin, Ted Nugent, and Aerosmith.

Van Halen, though, differs from the current crop of metal bands (such as Rush, the Scorpions, UFO, and Triumph) that have been enjoying a formidable resurgence in popularity. Their ign.o.ble posturing is a welcome reprieve from the empty-headed pomposity of blowhards like Rush, and their music is concise, tuneful, and impelling.

Van Halen, however, isn't an example of resurgent heavy metal so much as the inevitable progeny of yesteryear's metal epoch. Roth bl.u.s.ters and blares onstage like a brazen, self-endeared crossbreed of Black Oak Arkansas' Jim Dandy Mangrum, Grand Funk Railroad's Mark Farner, and Zeppelin's Robert Plant. Eddie Van Halen, the group's musical conscience, plays guitar like some pyrotechnical, virtuosic offspring of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page. Altogether, Van Halen comes off as intuitively smart and scrupulously artless-perhaps the most satirical symbols of metal mythology since Nugent, or at least Cheap Trick.

But, like many of their heavy-metal brethren, they can also come off as a band of vulgarians. At the outset of this tour, at the University of Southern Colorado in Pueblo, group and crew members trashed a dining room, dressing room, and restroom after the caterers refused to remove some brown M & M's from a plate of candy. (Van Halen has a clause written into their performance contracts that prohibits the serving of brown M & M's backstage. When asked why, Alex Van Halen replied, "Why not?") The result of that little lark, according to one report, was $10,000 to $15,000 worth of damage and a ban on rock concerts in Pueblo for the forseeable future.

Instances like that one have prompted some critics to describe Roth as "vainglorious" and "brutish" and to view the band itself as a pack of lack-witted, carnal-minded musical barbarians-a common enough appraisal of heavy-metal groups. Sitting with Roth backstage, watching as he pulls on a pair of scarlet-plumed boots, I ask what he thinks of the critics' aspersions.

"You want to know if we're animals?" Roth says, gazing at his feathered footwear. "Let me put it this way: When I'm onstage, with the volume rippling my body like a gla.s.s of water, and thousands of people generating heat in my direction, there's no pause for thought. My bas.e.m.e.nt faculties take over completely.

"Sure-it's animal. I mean, people might like to talk about art, but look where art is: It's in the f.u.c.king gutter, starving. Van Halen likes to keep things simple; none of this vague, symbolic s.h.i.+t. All we're doing is giving our daily lives melodies, beats, and t.i.tles-what we sing about is what we live."

WHEN DAVID LEE ROTH declares that the life Van Halen leads is the same as the one the band sings about, what he's saying is that it's a life br.i.m.m.i.n.g with easygoing s.e.x and unabashed affluence. Like many of their comrades of the metal persuasion, Van Halen ballyhoos the time-honored ideal of ceaseless, remorseless, inebriated partying. In fact, in their capable hands, the party ideal becomes a hard and fast commitment: that no matter where Van Halen alights, a boisterous, full-blown saturnalia is bound to follow.

Tonight, the appointed place is the Cobo Arena, where nearly twelve thousand heavy-metal zealots-all with more than just a little latent Van Halen in them-have gathered to lend their voice to the party. And lend it they do. When Van Halen hits the stage, heralded by Eddie Van Halen's storming prelude to "Romeo's Delight," a thundering yowl of acclamation greets them from the floor. "Let me tell ya," says Roth from the lip of the stage, "when Detroit raises its voice, it's f.u.c.king scary."

Everything about this show-from the t.i.tanic, military-motif stage to the overhanging rainbow-spectrum light system (touted as the largest such setup ever taken on the road)-is designed to search out even the most narcotized kid in the furthest reaches of Cobo's three-tiered balcony and thump him in the chest, good and hard. The big thumper, of course, is the music, a sense-numbing blend of Alex' double-barreled drum bursts, Michael Anthony's hulking, palpable ba.s.s lines, and Eddie's fleet, blazing guitar.

Eddie, in particular, accounts for the bulk of the sound. He plays with unbridled strength, stacking up layers of leviathan chords, then cutting them down with volleys of staccato fireworks and glimmers of harmonic-phrased melodies. At certain moments, when Anthony's ba.s.s hammers out a steady rhythm-pulse, and Eddie's guitar and Alex' drums interknit into a cacophonous counterpoint, Van Halen's heady brand of heavy metal aspires to a near-orchestral scope (which is not to say near-cla.s.sical).

Musical prowess aside, Van Halen concerts are mostly showcases for Roth and his gregarious talents. Roth w.a.n.gles the crowd from overture to encore, cavorting throughout like a carnal gymnast and trotting out a bookful of born-to-raise-h.e.l.l bromides. "Swear to G.o.d, I smelled dope when I walked in here tonight," he says solicitously at one point, then has a dutiful roadie haul out something resembling a joint for him to puff on. Later, while swigging from a half-empty Jack Daniel's bottle, Roth proclaims, "Tonight, I'm going to teach you how to drink for yourself; but when I come back next year, I'm going to teach you how to drink for other people."

After the concert, the party spirit extends backstage. As ZZ Top's "I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide" pours out of Roth's portable stereo, two young women climb up on a banquet table and cheerfully strip down to their boots and panties, to the rowdy delight of the men and the silence of the other women. Eddie Van Halen is hanging out at the rear of the room, wearily watching it all with unconcern. Brother Alex, however, and Michael Anthony move up close.

Alex thoughtfully produces a flashlight, which he uses to illuminate the dancer's pelvic motions. In return, the women spread their legs and rub themselves delightedly. Catching my eye from across the room, Roth comes over and gives me a fraternal slap on the shoulder. "Lost denizens of the night," he says, smiling at the women writhing on the table. "Man, I relate to them heavily."

"YOU'RE ONLY as good as your worst night, and I feel like I went through h.e.l.l tonight."

It's the wee hours before dawn, and Eddie Van Halen is sitting on my hotel-room floor. When he showed up about half an hour ago, he seemed dragged out and depressed because he felt his guitar playing earlier in the evening had been haphazard and prosaic. Now, after a couple of gla.s.ses of straight bourbon, he appears ruminative. "I suppose what bothers me," he says, "is that often the kids don't even notice when I'm bad. I come offstage and get compliments up the a.s.s. That's so frustrating."

Unlike Roth, twenty-three-year-old Eddie Van Halen seems strangely disquieted by ma.s.s adulation. "Just three years ago," he says, "I was fighting my way up front with the rest of the kids to see Aerosmith. Then a year later, we were playing with them. That boggled me to death. I mean, I knew I'd always play guitar, but I had no idea I'd be in the position I'm in now."

In a way, it might have been predicted. Born in Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, the sons of a jazz musician, Eddie and Alex Van Halen grew up studying counterpoint theory on piano and playing the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky. But after the family moved to Pasadena, California, in 1968, the two brothers grew enamored of American and British rock & roll.

While still teenagers, Eddie and Alex formed Mammoth, a heavy-metal-c.u.m-party band that frequented Pasadena's wet T-s.h.i.+rt circuit. Alex still bristles when he recalls the bantering he and Eddie used to receive from friends for playing "primitive" music: "They used to call us 'musical prost.i.tutes' because we were playing songs that had simple structures. But it's much harder to write a stable melody in a basic blues format than the stuff these progressive musicians come up with; they change chords and tempos more often than I change my underwear. Some people might call that technical proficiency, but I just call it jerking off."

Whatever lingering doubts the Van Halens may have had about their music's validity were dispelled for good after they hooked up with Roth, who was doing a blues troubadour act at Pasadena's Ice House. (One of the few things Roth does exercise restraint about is discussing his personal background, though he admits to growing up on a farm in Indiana and spending weekends at his Uncle Manny's Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village before moving to Pasadena in the early seventies.) "Dave was more entertainer than musician," says Eddie. "As a result, he had a better eye for the commercial thing. He was into short-format stuff because people's attention spans are only so long."

After Roth joined up, the Van Halens also enlisted rival Pasadena bandleader Michael Anthony to play ba.s.s, then elected to change Mammoth's name to Rat Salade. Roth persuaded the brothers that their surname might prove a more imposing t.i.tle. "I didn't like the idea at first," says Eddie, "but now I have to admit it sounds powerful-like a German nuclear bomb."

Van Halen traversed the city's basin for almost four years, handling their own management and booking their own dates. Finally, following a successful series of self-produced concerts at Pasadena's Civic Auditorium and an extravagant demo session produced by Kiss ba.s.sist Gene Simmons, record labels began to express an interest in the group. One night in 1977, Warner Bros. producer Ted Templeman hauled the label's president, Mo Ostin, over to see the group at a near-empty Hollywood club. In effect, Van Halen signed with Warner Bros. that night.

"The guys in the band still don't know this," says Templeman, who has produced all three of Van Halen's LPs, "but I went down to see them the night before I brought Mo Ostin along, and they just floored me. David Roth came across as the most convincing thing I'd seen in a rock & roll theater since Jim Morrison, but mainly it was Eddie who impressed me.

"Of all the people I work with, besides Michael McDonald, Eddie Van Halen is a true virtuoso. I think he's the best guitar player alive, and I've listened extensively to George Benson, Django Reinhardt, Tal Farlow, Charlie Christian, Jim Hall, and Jimi Hendrix. Eddie can play thirty-second-note melodic lines with a complexity that rivals Bach, and I haven't heard anybody who can phrase like him since Charlie Parker. Believe me, Eddie is a killer."

Eddie, though, winces at any mention of praise. "I don't know s.h.i.+t about scales or music theory," he says, "and I don't want to be seen as the fastest guitar in town, ready and willing to gun down the compet.i.tion. All I know is that rock & roll guitar, like blues guitar, should have melody, speed, and taste, but more important, it should have emotion. I just want my guitar playing to make people feel something: happy, sad, even h.o.r.n.y."

Eddie smiles slightly, then pours himself a final gla.s.s of bourbon. "Actually, I hate people telling me how good I am. All that really says to me is that I have a lot of friends these days who aren't really friends. I mean, if we stopped selling records tomorrow, bye-bye friends and bye-bye compliments.

"I guess that doesn't really bother me-it's just that it's the one thing I never expected."

THE AFTERNOON of the second Cobo Arena show, Van Halen and a small entourage of security and promotion personnel pile into two limousines standing outside the Detroit Plaza Hotel. The band members are slated to make a round of radio interviews, but judging from their bedraggled faces, they would probably prefer using the time to make up for lost sleep.

Moods brighten measurably, though, when the band sees the bevy of fans-most of them female-waiting outside the first station. Roth and Alex fix in on a pair of silk-stockinged, milk-skinned twins and spirit them off to the radio booth. "Welcome to the top," chuckles Roth, snuggling between them, his large hands cuddling their backsides. "You've finally hit the big time." The twins float off to one of the booth's corners, where members of the entourage cajole them into displaying their bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The band, fully revivified now, settles down for the startled D.J.'s first question.

As it happens, he never gets to ask it. Van Halen quickly turns the proceedings into a chaotic, comic slingfest, tossing out more s.e.xual innuendoes, ethnic slurs, and harmonized burps in two minutes than the Marx Brothers probably managed in their entire careers. "I'd like to present Al with the "Most Incredible Performance Back at the Hotel Award' for last night," sn.i.g.g.e.rs Roth. "It was definitely a nine on the sphincter scale." The band chortles knowingly, and the D.J. blanches.

To celebrate his award, Alex grabs an open beer bottle, jams it in his mouth, tilts his head back so the bottle stands fully upended, and drains its contents in two awe-inspiring gulps. Then he ejects the bottle with a thrust of his tongue and repeats the ritual with a new bottle. The twins squeal admiringly.

"Hey, I got an idea," says Roth, moving over to a picture window. Catching sight of him, the fans in the parking lot below emit a volley of whoops and whistles. Roth turns back to the anxious D.J.: "Why don't you play 'Everybody Wants Some!!' from the new alb.u.m." As the sound of Alex's undulating jungle beat and Roth's Tarzan yodel booms out of the studio monitors, Roth pulls a chair over to the window and has one of the twins stand on it, her back to the kids in the parking lot.

When the song gets to its tawdry spoken pa.s.sage, Roth lip-syncs the words and handles the twin like a prop: "I like the way the line runs up the back of the stockings," he mouths, hoisting the woman's skirt above her hips and tracing the seam on her left leg, from ankle to a.s.s. Miming to the lyric, he tells the young woman to leave on her heels, turn a provocative pose, and show her legs from the side, up to her hip bone. The fans outside, including the females, greet every motion with clamorous, a.s.senting hoots.

At the display's end, the grimacing D.J. swallows hard and tries to think of something to ask. After a few minutes, he says, "Uh, that reminds me. It was unbelievable at your show last night. The response was so enormous, you couldn't even hear yourself think."

Roth grins back triumphantly, then notes, "Would it be worth listening in the first place?"

ALEX VAN HALEN props himself on the edge of a dressing-room table and offers me a lenient smile. "Why should rock & roll be meaningful?" he asks in reply to a question about the seemingly slight themes of Van Halen's songs. "I mean, is s.e.x . . . He pauses, and a wistful smile curls his lips. "I was going to say, is s.e.x meaningful, but I guess that's the whole point: If something feels good, then it's meaningful. And since our music is designed to make people feel good, it is meaningful."

Just then, the door swings wide and Roth struts in, pulling a tall, moon-eyed blond by the hand. "Go to another room," he directs us in a bearish voice. "Me and this lady got to talk."

Alex looks the woman up and down savoringly, then snickers. "Yeah, I bet you want to talk."

"There's an empty room across the hall," replies Roth, undaunted. "You guys can go over there." Then Roth spies my tape recorder and an inspired look crosses his face. "Okay, wait a minute. We'll give you an in-depth perspective of Van Halen." He turns back to the young woman. "What was your name again? Okay, look, darling, this guy is from a magazine and . . . "

The young woman sends a befuddled look in our direction and shakes her head. "You can't fool me. I know who that guy is. That's Alex."

Alex laughs like a firecracker, and Roth looks embarra.s.sed. "No, this guy here-he's from a magazine and is doing a story about us." Roth picks up the tape recorder and holds it up to the woman's face. "Just tell him what you think of us."

She looks even more confused. "You mean what I think of Alex?"

Alex erupts in laughter again, and Roth stares at the woman disgustedly. "No. Not Alex. Us. Tell the tape recorder what you think of us."

"You want me to talk into this thing and say what I think about the band?"

"C'mon, babe, don't waste the man's time."

The young woman gives a shaky look, then takes the recorder. "Okay, here I am and they're asking me about Van Halen," she says with a quivery Midwestern accent. "What I think of Van Halen is that I enjoy the show very much, and they rock & roll definitely all the way. It's hard core, makes you want to move, makes you want to groove, makes you do anything you want to do. And for another thing," she adds, smiling broadly at Alex and Roth, "every one of the guys in this band knows how to get down-that's for G.o.dd.a.m.n sure."

Roth pulls the recorder from her hand and gives it back to me with an uncertain smile. "I think maybe I just put my neck on the line."

Alex, still laughing hard, takes me by the elbow and steers me out of the room. "Can you believe," he says in a t.i.tillated whisper, "the mentality of some of these girls?"

WOMEN-SERVILE WOMEN, that is-are a matter of endless fascination to the members of Van Halen, as they are, indeed, to many male musicians. But during my stay with Van Halen, I've seen enough nude women and heard enough graphic, abasing morning-after anecdotes to fuel an article about p.o.r.n-rock-or a diatribe against s.e.xism. It doesn't seem, I tell Roth at one point, that Van Halen holds women in very high regard.

Roth looks surprised by the comment. "What are you talking about? I like women very much."

After pausing to hoot over his latest witticism, Roth continues: "I suppose you mean that rap earlier with the girl in the silk stockings? Well, she wore the stockings, I was merely complimenting her. That ain't s.e.xist. What you're talking about is s.e.xy feelings, and that's what Van Halen's striving to create. I mean, we don't have songs about forcing women to do anything. It takes two to tango, let us remember.

"As for me personally, I feel s.e.xy a whole lot of the time. That's one of the reasons I'm in this job: to exercise my s.e.xual fantasies. When I'm onstage, it's like doing it with twenty thousand of your closest friends. And that's a great relations.h.i.+p, because you never have to ask them, 'Did you come?' They'll let you know."

IN A SENSE, the intercourse that takes place between Van Halen and their audience may be more political than s.e.xual. Whether the musicians accept it or not, Van Halen is a ma.s.sive success because the band represents the real ideals of a ma.s.sive audience. Or, to put it another way, the members of Van Halen may live the life they sing about, but they also sing about a life their audience reveres, even aspires to.

That idea comes across with resounding force at the group's second Cobo Arena show, where the howl of the crowd often rivals the squall of the band, until the two meet and meld in one deafening, indivisible roar. But the biggest clamor occurs when Roth sings the opening verse from Van Halen's current single, "And the Cradle Will Rock"-a smart and funny song about how the early 1980s heavy metal generation, like so many rock & roll upstarts that have preceded and will follow them, bewilder and frighten their elders. But it's also a song about how those elders fail to understand their own children, and how the young people's unrest amounts to a good deal "more than just an aggravation."

The crowd sings along from start to finish, in the process appropriating the song and raising it to anthemlike status.

A little later, as Roth rests backstage, I share my theory of heavy-metal political intercourse with him. He doesn't seem all that impressed.

"I don't speak for kids," he replies, "and I don't represent people. I'm simply one of the people. But I'll tell you this much: When that crowd out there tonight went nuts, they weren't going nuts because David Lee Roth is so cool, or because Van Halen is so hot. They went nuts because they were enjoying themselves.

"That's what we mean when we say there's a little Van Halen in all of us and we're just trying to bring it out. It's like something bursts inside of you, something that makes you not care what people around you are thinking. It makes you feel invincible-like, if a car hit you, nothin' would happen. It should make you feel like the Charge of the Light Brigade, even if you're just going to the bathroom. When you do that on a ma.s.s level, it becomes hysterical, not political. It expands to a large group of people not caring about conventions, just getting into the thrill of being themselves. That experience is about the audience, not us. All we do is provide the soundtrack."

Roth decides it's time to join the party in the outer room, but first he has a final comment to share about the audience: "When people ask how far I think I've come in this racket, I always say twelve feet-from the audience to the stage. And when this is all over-because you know how it goes in this business-I'm going back into that audience, and back to the streets."

One could pa.s.s that off as just another bit of bravado on Roth's part, but the statement says something vital and valid about Van Halen's appeal. Like some other rock writers I know, I used to entertain the fantasy that the heroism of punk would eclipse, even negate, the mindlessness of heavy metal.

But heavy metal, quite plainly, has remained the music of choice for most of America's young rock partisans, and Van Halen is a salient case in point why: They provide their audience with a heady, spectacular respite from the daily, drudging rhythms of common futility. That, plus an invitation to the party.

In the end, maybe that's no different-no better, no worse-than an offer of shelter from the storm.

PART 4.