DISGRACELAND - Van Halen (Part 1): Bootleggers, U.S. Marshals, and Protecting Innovation at Any Cost

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

On the backs of one of rock ‘n roll’s greatest innovators and one of its greatest ringmasters, Van Halen made some of the greatest music of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Guitarist Eddie Van Halen chased the perfect sound while lead singer David Lee Roth chased the next party. They were also ruthless when it came to protecting the unique thing they had created. Nothing was allowed to stand in their way. Not bullies, bootleggers, cynical guitar manufacturers, record producers – even the members of Van Halen themselves. This episode was originally published on March 26, 2024. To see the full list of contributors, see the show notes at ⁠www.disgracelandpod.com⁠. To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to a monthly exclusive episode, weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at ⁠disgracelandpod.com/membership⁠. Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - ⁠GET THE NEWSLETTER⁠ Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: ⁠Instagram⁠ ⁠YouTube⁠ ⁠X⁠ (formerly Twitter)  ⁠Facebook Fan Group⁠ ⁠TikTok To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. Disgrace Land is a production of Double Elvis. The stories about Van Halen are insane. They hunted down bootleggers with the help of U.S. Marshals. They barely escaped the wrath of an angry fan after cracking open his head with a beer bottle. Their singer was arrested after violating the fire code at a venue

where 11 people had been killed just months prior. Their guitarist had a drug dealer on call 24-7 fly around the world and score them dope. And on the backs of one of rock and roll's greatest innovators and its greatest ringmaster, Van Halen made great music. Unlike that clip I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Melotron called Neither Husk nor Cobb, M.K. I played you that clip because I can't afford the rights to a clip from Say, Say, Say by Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson. And why would I play you that specific slice of ooh, ooh, ooh, cheese, could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on January 9, 1984, and that was the day Van Halen released their sixth studio album.

An album that was intended to keep the band together, but instead wound up being the thing that finally tore them apart. On this episode, cracked heads, drug dealers on call, bootleggers, U.S. Marshals, U.S. Marshals, Ooo, O Cheese, and Van Halen. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgraceland. Eddie Van Halen was not like other guitar players. I'm not talking about a sheer musical talent, which was light years ahead of its game. his peers. I'm talking about the way he looked when he played guitar, the joy that radiated from his face. It was infectious. It was unique. It was a look that said, holy shit, can you believe that I'm doing this? Playing amused him. Just as it amused kids like me, those of us lucky enough

to come of age when Eddie Van Halen was making some of his greatest music, and lucky enough to watch Eddie play with the same effort it took the rest of us to eat our weaies in the morning. Eddie Van Halen, his two-hand tapping, his lightning speed, both sets of fingers attacking the neck simultaneously with complete ingenuity and exhilaration. He was chaos and creativity, a trickster and a comic. Bugs Bunny with a six-string. Eddie Van Halen didn't just play things that others had failed to play. He played things that others had failed to imagine.

And he did it all with a huge smile on his face. It's so refreshing. It was then and it is now. But it's not like Eddie Van Halen just woke up one morning, a guitar god. He worked for it. He fought for it. Just like he fought for everything. The son of a Dutch father and Indonesian mother,

Eddie was just seven years old when his family moved from Holland to America. He and his older brother Alex didn't catch rays or waves in Pasadena, California. Not at first anyway. Instead, they caught beatings. Local kids saw them as outcasts, weirdo freaks. who couldn't speak a lick of English. Bullies were everywhere. They ripped up at his homework and they made him eat sand.

So he retreated to his room. Not unlike another California musical genius at the very same time, searching for something in the sandbox in his living room. Brian Wilson. Just like Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys, Eddie Van Halen ran from what scared him and chased the sounds that he heard.

Sounds no one else could hear. And the chase thrilled him. He knew the sounds were out there, hot rotting through Southern California car culture, garage culture, a gold rush landscape of beaters and cherries, junk garrets and chop shops, a world where scraps can build something new. But the Van Halen's found building a new life harder than expected in the land of opportunity. All they found were the scraps. A respected musician back home in Holland,

Eddie Van Halen's father was no more than a janitor, in America. The family had little money. Innovation was all Eddie had. Necessity, being the mother of invention and all that, Eddie Van Hound literally built himself a guitar that didn't exist for cheap. He bought a factory, second-hand stratacaster body from a repair shop that specialized in aftermarket hardware, cost him 50 bucks. And then he spent another 80 bucks on the neck, and then a strat tail piece with a whammy bar and some jumbo Gibson frets and voila, a guitar of necessity. A Frankenstrap. But he didn't stop there.

The guitar's body, being a Stratocaster style, was pre-routed for three single-coil pickups, which I don't get deep into the weeds here on nerdy guitar ship, but just hear me out. Pickups are the things in the guitar that amplify the guitar. A Fender Stratocaster has space in the body of the guitar for three skinny pickups. That's just the way they're made.

If you want something different, you've got to get a different guitar. Eddie Van Halen did want something different, but he couldn't afford it. So he chiseled out a bigger cavity in the guitar's body to be able to fit in a single humbucker pickup, which is more common with Gibson guitars than with fender guitars, like the Stratocasters. And he preferred the humbucker pickup because it gave him a fatter sound.

And this, in turn, left his Frankenstrat with two gaping holes in the middle of its body because there were no pickups in there, and he just sort of covered that up with this gnarly piece of black vinyl. It was a monstrosity, but it didn't matter. The guitar wasn't the important thing. The sound, the tone, that was the thing. Eddie Van Halen chased that thing while his brother Alex,

already an incredible drummer in his own right, chased tail at high school parties. Alex had a sound, and every time Alex hit his snare, Eddie went full synesthesia and saw a color. Brown. Thus, the brown sound. A tone so elusive and so impactful, as I understand it, when you find it and play it out loud,

you immediately shit your pants. No, wait, I'm thinking of the brown note. Sorry, I know that's gross. But this is an episode on Van Halen, so get ready to be grossed out. My point is, Alex Van Halen would return home from those wild parties, find Eddie Van Halen,

right there where he left him, sitting on the corner of his bed, Frankenstraten hands, six empty cans of schlitz at his side, and thinking about the Zeppelin show at the form they'd just seen, Jimmy Page, hammering the strings with a single hand,

thinking, why couldn't you do that with both hands? A smile crept across Eddie Van Halen. his face as he began to let his own hands do what they did. And what they did amused the hell out of him. Eddie's innovations were on full display on his band Van Halen's 1978 self-titled debut, an album that introduced the world to not just Eddie and Alex, but to bassist Michael Anthony and the incredible and flamboyant lead singer David Lee Roth. It's an album that went platinum in a little over six months.

It featured their lethal cover of the kinks you really got me. And also killer original tunes like Ain't Talk About Love and Eddie's mind-blowing solo guitar track eruption. It is so fucking good this record, okay? This record, when you first hear it, if you're a young kid out there who has not heard this album before, just go, stop, stop, I'll take the hit on the podcast download. Just stop.

Go listen to the first Van Halen record. It will blow your fucking mind. I remember exactly where I was when I first heard it. I was sitting in the back of Rich Hogue's car. They were passing a bong into the back seat. I was 15 years old. I hit it. A eruption hit.

My mind was blown. As Eddie Van Halen says, So Brown. Okay? Back to the episode. Eddie was extremely proud of this record. And of his innovations and how his guitar and his playing were unlike anyone else's. He was also extremely protective of these things.

It had been a struggle to get to this point. The humiliation that he and his family had endured as immigrants trying to make it the countless hours of practicing and building and rebuilding, gouging, routing, painting, only to now watch all of his innovations, his ideas, his struggle.

They were all now incredibly being stolen from him. Other guitar manufacturers were now on the heels of Van Halen's hit new record making their own Frankenstrats, flooding the market with pale imitations, copycats, con artists, charlatans,

hawkers trying to make a quick buck with a knockoff just like the grifters slinging fake Gucci on the streets of L.A. Just like the bootleggers selling bogus Van Halen merchandise. The bootleggers were fearless, and they were everywhere, working the arenas and parking lots at every stop of Van Halen's tour. And these bootleggers, they were selling fake shirts for a fraction of the price. And by the early 80s, a few records deep into their career, Van Halen were grossing $250,000 in merch sales alone,

Every night. All cash. Big money. Again, quarter million dollars a night in cash. The bootleggers naturally wanted a taste of that action. But soon, they had other action headed their way. Not Eddie. Eddie was busy installing a dummy pickup in one of the holes in his Frankenstrat, a second pickup that wasn't actually wired to anything but through the guitar manufacturer was for a loop. Fuck them. And fuck the bootleggers too. They messed with the bull and they were going to get the horn. Van Halen's manager, a guy with a background in martial arts and a permit to carry a concealed weapon, which isn't to say that Noel Monk handled these clowns unlawfully. Their manager, Noel Monk, actually obtained a nationwide injunction against bootleggers,

which allowed for the assistance of U.S. Marshals in taking these bootleggers down. But knockoff t-shirts weren't high on the perp list, and the marshals weren't always there right when you needed them. And the urge to go after a bootlegger the moment you saw them was just too tempting to pass some. Some caught one glimpse of Noel Monk and took off running him. Others weren't so lucky. Their bullshit merch confiscated. The keys to their van tossed in the nearby lake.

Some had a deal not just with Monk but with Pat Kelly. Former Chicago Cop, now head of Van Halen's merch team. Pat Kelly used cop intuition and cop intimidation to get the job done and get his man. Go after the little guy. Some foot soldier with an armful of knockoff teas, he's selling for eight bucks a pop. Pat Kelly put the fear of God in kids like that, or rather, even better, the fear of a retired police officer with zero fucks to give and even less to lose, a real tough guy, who now made ends meet by ringing the next little dickheads

for one of the biggest rock groups in the world. So what's it going to be, Pat would say? Speak up or eat shit fuckstick. Pretty soon that little punk is telling Pat Kelly what he wants to. to know who's running this sad excuse of the business and where the fuck is he? And that's when the local PD and the marshals get there and the whole thing is squashed, at least for tonight. Noel Monk and Pat Kelly's efforts helped to protect their employer Van Halen's brand and

their bottom line as well and thus allowing Eddie Van Halen to focus on the things he wanted to do. Play, innovate, and grin, ear to ear caught up in the chase, searching for the sound. By the time Van Halen had a security team big enough to run interference on merchandise bootleggers, they were sitting pretty in the catbird seat. Cawky, ubiquitous, hair teased tall, with sights set higher than a David Lee Roth split jump off Alex's drum riser. And to get that high, Diamond Dave knew you had to put on a show. The greatest show on Earth. Dave was Tarzan and Spandex.

P.T. Barnum reaching down. down between his legs to ease that seat back. This was his circus. These were his monkeys and make no mistake about it. The pistons on the tour bus were popping. The top of the big top was down and it was party time. April, 1980, Cincinnati. Five months after 11 fans were crushed to death during a concert by The Who, it happened at the Riverfront Coliseum, the same venue that Van Halen's circus was now pulling into for a stop on their world invasion tour. Or as the band referred to it internally, the party till you die tour.

Not exactly in the best taste given the circumstances. The riverfront Huo tragedy was still fresh. The press called it a stampede. People trampled underfoot, which was true, but the people who died, they died standing up, squeezed together so tightly that their lungs couldn't expand, strangled by the body standing next to them.

And now, tonight, security was on high alert. Enforcing the new safety measures put in place to ensure that no one would die at riverfront again, including the rule that banned open flames of any kind. A rule that David Lee Roth didn't know about or didn't care about. All he saw were people having a good time, which is what Van Halen delivered. A party. The crowd was wild. close to 200 arrested for drugs and booze,

another 100 tossed for violating that open flame rule, and Diamond Dave in handcuffs hauled off to a Cincinnati jail cell for playing the part of Pied Piper, not just a master of ceremonies, an insider of riots, charged with encouraging the audience to violate the fire code. In his defense, Dave said he was merely caught up in the moment, repeating a line from their song, light up the sky over and over.

But when the crowd heard Dave chant, light him up, they did as they were told, smoke them if you got him. The cops did get Dave, but only for a few hours. Released on a $5,000 bond, back to the band, back to the party. More emboldened than ever to carry out his mission. The people are going to walk out of a Van Halen show, they're going to feel like the building can fall on them, feel like a car hit him. Dave told the DJ later that summer. Again, not really in the best taste to talk about your band as something that can kill a man, Given the fact that the Who tragedy wasn't all that far in the rear view, but that was Dave's party.

Party that worked best when it was out of control when it had no boundaries. Unlike Dave, Eddie didn't drink to party. He didn't do Coke just to have a good time either. Cocaine kept him up all hours. Hours he spent practicing, getting a leg up on the competition. Alcohol, on the other hand, lowered Eddie's inhibitions, allowing him to attempt things on the guitar that he wouldn't have tried sober. Eddie Van Halen did drugs and alcohol for work.

And work is what the band needed to do. A few years earlier at the end of 1978, fresh off their first world tour, readying their second LP Van Halen 2 for release in the spring of 79. But what should have been a moment of celebration, instead was one of frustration and confusion. They were stuck with a massive bill.

Roughly $1.2 million owed to the, their record label, despite their great success. To Warner Brothers, it was just business. To Van Halen, especially to Eddie and Alex, still living at home with their parents, dead broke. It was motivation. Motivation to work harder. Sell more records.

Play bigger venues. Debt was just another bully on the playground. To be the biggest band on Earth meant putting on the greatest show on Earth, Dave's Show. So everything got bigger. The Horace Winnies said Eddie coaxed from his Frankenstrat, Dave's unhinged screams, Michael Anthony's pitch-perfect backing vocals, 36 tons of lighting and sound equipment one year, and 175,000 tons the next, nearly five times more. A sound system that ran on 90,000 watts, which, if you're curious,

is enough power to supply the electrical demand of like 75 houses. It literally took a village to make the Van Halen machine go. and that machine went straight to their heads and to their balls yeah made their ball so big that yeah their tour rider did infamously include a demand for backstage bowls of M&Ms with the brown ones picked out. That's a true story.

And the bigger Van Halen got the more out of control the situation became. Soon it was more than fire codes that were being violated. And look, don't even get me started on shit like the homemade pornoes shot in hotel rooms by Van Halen's sleazeball manager. Pornoes that the same sleevesball manager later played for Warner Brothers' secretaries, women at Warner Brothers' offices. Again, their manager shot pornoes and then played the videotapes for secretaries at their record label,

which is behavior beyond the realm of the botched. It's fucking predatory. It's harassment. It's gross. I warn you, things are going to get gross. This is the gross part. Some of the wildest, most unhinged behavior by a rock band in the 1980s, and that's saying something. Behavior that once put David Lee Roth in a straight jacket. deemed 5150 by his own damn crew wrong before Eddie turned that section of the California Penal Code into the name of his home studio.

Because no one partied as hard as Van Halen. No one violated more rules. No one banged more groupies. No one hoovered up more lines. Van Halen were true to David Lee Roth's word, his credo. Van Halen were a house falling on top of you. A car crashing into you, rendering you dumbstruck, awestruck. awestruck, sometimes even physically struck.

1978, England. Van Halen's manager, Noel Monk, was panicking. No one told him managing a rock man meant he'd have to do this. Not hunting down merch bootleggers. That came later. That was easy compared to dealing with dudes like this. A dude who was both unlucky and pissed off. A potentially lethal combination.

His skull cracked open. A lump size of Van Halen's soon to be enormous ball. forming blood pouring down his face, a victim of David Lee Roth's good time, hit on the head with a full beer bottle that Dave had thrown into the audience at the end of the show. The worst of it was, the guy wasn't even a Van Halen fan. He was Teen Black Sabbath, the band that Van Halen had just opened for and frankly blown off the stage. Ozzy Osbourne, like Western civilization, was at this point in decline. Van Halen was in the ascendant, but now was no time to set your sights high. Now was time for horizontal motion.

Time to leave. The band did what Monk told them to do. Get the fuck out of the dressing room, go straight to the fucking bus, and don't ask any questions, and don't stop to talk to anyone. Monk was trying not to stare at the Sabbath fan's gaping wound.

Trying not to say the wrong thing. A thing that would get them all killed. Dude wanted an eye for an eye. David Lee Roth's blood for his own. But Monk figured that Cash would work just as well. If I gave you a thousand pounds, would that make all this go away? Money talked. Dude with the head wound, walked.

But not before signing a disclaimer that Monk hastily wrote up. A classic case of Cover Your Ass, which is what no Monk was there to do. Cover Van Halen's asses. Protect them from the things threatening to tear them apart. Which he did very well. We just couldn't protect them from each other. We'll be right back after this word, word, word. Michael Anthony just wanted to play.

He had the greatest job in the world, bass player for one of the biggest bands on the planet, also recognized by those in the know as the band's secret weapon, blessed with a voice that produced some of the most sublime backing vocals in hard rock. But don't tell that to David Lee Roth. Best not to out Dave, Dave, best to play it cool. And Michael Anthony was cooler than cool. Michael Anthony was Switzerland.

Even as Dave tried to push the band further into side show cheese, and Eddie fought back with more innovation. Now in 1983, obsessed with not one but two instruments, the guitar and synths, Dave thought Eddie's synthesizers were lame. Girls didn't want to fuck a dude behind a keyboard. And Eddie didn't really care what Dave thought. Eddie had a girl. His wife, Valerie Bertnelly, had made him an honest man.

two years prior. Honest, of course, being highly subjective in this situation, I know. But maybe Dave was jealous. Playing the grade school bully card that sent Eddie back to his room, back to the corner of his bed, where he pushed himself even further, aided as always by more vodka and more cocaine. He was evolving as a player, maturing.

Two words that David Lee Roth hated. Dave didn't want to make smart music. He wanted to keep it simple. But Eddie didn't do simple. So they met in the middle. One of the new songs they were working on, hot for teacher, allowed for Dave's corny schick,

but wrapped it in some of the most complex guitar and drumwork of Eddie and Alex's career. The creative tension made for great music, but it wasn't made to last. At least that's what Michael Anthony feared. Whatever was going on between Dave and Eddie was compromising this incredible band of Michael Anthony's incredible day job, a job he wanted to keep. So whatever it took to keep Van Halen running was fine by him,

even if sometimes that meant running with the devil. In 1981, it took money. The album Fair Warning was undoubtedly Van Halen's best record to date. Heavy, groovy, real unchained, mean street shit, but it wasn't selling. It was the only one of the band's first four albums that didn't immediately do better than its predecessor. And it looked like it would be their first to fall short of platinum sales, too.

That was a problem, both for the band's bottom line and for their egos. The solution? Money. $200,000, greasing the palms of music directors at radio stations coast to coast. Radio got paid, so fair warning got played. And by the year's end, it was a platinum seller just like every. other Van Halen record. The crime of Paola, paying a radio station to play your record, this was not a new concept. It had been around since the dawn of rock and roll. Money talked and anything else was just a waste of breath. Unless it was Quincy Jones doing the talking.

Q was money, baby. The legendary producer wanted Eddie to play a guitar solo on a new track by Michael Jackson. Remember, this was the early 80s. genre lines were drawn hard. A Van Halen fan wouldn't be caught dead moonwalking to a Michael Jackson tune, or so the thinking went at the time. And though the group did have an understanding that they would consult one another before doing anything outside of Van Halen, Dave was currently off doing his Tarzan thing in the Amazon rainforest or something, so Eddie wasn't about to track him down to ask for permission.

He didn't even ask Quincy to pay him. Michael Anthony, for one, didn't care that Eddie played on Michael Jackson's beat it. He wasn't about to hold a grudge. The only thing he wanted to hold was his bass. And maybe this new record Van Halen were about to release would hold the band together. It was poised to be their shining moment. The songs were anthemic. Jump. Panama.

I'll wait. A juggernaut of synth pop and hard rock that seemed to capture a moment in time. The 70s, hard rock finding its place in the emerging digital age of the 80s, the dawn of a new era. The album's title reflected this moment like a time capsule for posterity. They called it 1984. But unlike the eight-bar guitar solo he gave away for free, Eddie Van Halen was protective of what 1984 sounded like.

Just like he was protective of the guitars he built, the style he innovated, all the way down to the merch he sold. No one was going to compromise the sound. Not even Ted Templeman, Van Halen's producer since the beginning, since the beginning. Clearly now on Diamond Dave's side of the group's growing divide, Eddie and his longtime engineer, Don Landy, worried that Templeman would steal the master tapes from Eddie's studio 50150,

the one he built at his home in Studio City, not to burn them, but to mix the record the way he heard it, which is to say the way David Lee Roth heard it. A simple way. Eddie did what he'd done since he was a kid. He protected what was his. The phone rang.

inside 5150. It was Templeman, down at the front gate on the street. Eddie buzzed him up. Don, meanwhile, grabbed the master tapes and hopped in his car, the one parked next to Eddie's black Ferrari. He drove the driveway's loop around the back of the house, down to the back gate, hiding in plain sight. Templman rolled up, none the wiser.

Where are the tapes? Where's Dawn? Eddie played dumb. Gee, I don't know. Templeman left. confused, suspicious, irritated. Don returned to the studio with the tapes, and he and Eddie got back to working on their mix. The next day, the studio phone rang again.

Fucking Templeman. Don got to work, taking the tapes off the two-track and putting them in their boxes. And he jumped in his car and he drove around to the back gate as Eddie buzzed Templman up. And once again, Eddie and Templeman had the same conversation. Where are the tapes? Where's Dawn? Gee, I don't know.

And this went on for the same. two whole weeks this little game. Enough time for Eddie and Don to get 1984 where they wanted it, to get the mix they wanted. When the album finally dropped on January 9th of the new year, it was massive. As was the supporting tour,

which began immediately. It stretched on for nine months. 1984 was Van Halen's biggest year to date, and Van Halen's biggest record to date as well. But despite this, the album, 1984, only made it to number two on the album chart. Why?

Because Michael Jackson's Thriller. That's why. The album and cultural juggernaut that just so happened to feature the smash hit beat it. A song that crossed genre lines. A song that featured an unmistakable Eddie Van Halen guitar solo. A solo he did not get paid for. Thriller was not only the biggest selling record of 1984, it was the biggest selling record of 1983.

Three, more people, both then and now, have heard Eddie Van Halen play on Beat It than on any of his own band's songs. The irony was not lost on Eddie and the rest of the group. To Dave, it wasn't just ironic. It was disloyal. Weakshin. As lame as the synthesizers on junk. Not that Dave wasn't being disloyal himself, dicking around on a not-so-secret solo project. Eddie, once again, didn't pay Dave much mind.

He was focused on protection. This time, protecting his vices, cocaine and alcohol. Two things that once allowed him to innovate. Habits now is out of control as David Lee Roth's never-ending party. And Eddie now had a personal dealer on the payroll and on call 24-7. Some top Jimmy who was flown around the world to procure the finest Peruvian Coke at any time of day or night. And that ain't cheap. To satisfy his habit, Eddie was forced to advance himself cash from the group's coffers.

Money came in and money went out. Whatever it took to keep the whole operation moving forward. Whatever it took to keep Eddie's search active and inspired. Whatever it took to feel protected. Van Halen's luxury tour bus rumbled through the Black Forest on route to Paris where a private plane waited to take them back to America. The tour supporting their album 1984 was at its end and the writing was on the wall. Van Halen was bigger than ever, but the creative tension between Eddie and Dave had reached a fever

pitch. As feverish as the fights that were now commonplace. Alex yelling at Dave and Dave yelling at Alex and Alex yelling at Eddie and Eddie icing out Dave all while Michael tried not to rock the boat. Right now, the boat was not rocking, and the tour bus was rolling at a steady clip, and no one was fighting. Right now, Dave was on his knees in the bus's tiny bathroom, puking his guts up. The booze, weed, and coke spilling out of his head and into the bowl of the toilet. A toilet that had already overflowed numerous times.

A cauldron of shit and piss. A rancid concoction of the most vile, smelling human waste that David Lee Roth was now adding to with pints of his own vomit. Even at their highest, Van Halen were at their lowest. Even at their best, they were at their worst. And even with a sound, unlike anyone else's, Eddie Van Halen was still on the chase, still making adjustments to his rig and adjustments to his tone.

First, trading in the Whammy Bar tailpiece on his Frankenstrat for a cutting-edge Floyd Rose locking model that would ensure he didn't fall out of tune. Then trading in the Frankenstrat entirely for a cut. and Bill Kramer. He was still a kid in many ways, gobsmacked by the sounds he managed to get when he played, obsessed with finding scraps and making something interesting out of them,

forever in that garage culture state of mind. And just like he'd gouged out the ash body of that original Frankenstrat, Eddie took the gouging away at his own band. David Lee Roth's fate was inevitable. Lead singers, like guitars, were replaceable. Michael Anthony tried to stay cool, but even Mr. Switzerland found himself under the microscope. Michael just wanted to play, and that was exactly the issue, at least to the rest of the band. Michael didn't write music or lyrics.

He didn't contribute to the creative process, according to them. Eddie, meanwhile, was obsessed with being creative. Evolve or die, innovate and protect. Bullies, bootleggers, guitar manufacturers, record producers, Sabbath fans with busted heads, every single one wanted a piece, and they got fuck all, just like Van Halen's bass player. Eddie talked to Noel Monk, Van Halen's manager, and Van Halen's manager, Noel Monk talked to the band's attorney, who put a document in front of Michael, one which Michael willingly signed, as it was the only way he was going to keep on playing. And when the ink dried, Michael

Anthony no longer collected songwriting royalties alongside his three bandmates. Roth, then packed up his shit, a sideshowed Jigola looking for the next place to set up his tent. Eddie, meanwhile, took his jet black Ferrari out into the warm California sun and opened it up. The car was as sleek as his signature guitar tone, fast like the instructions his brain sent to his fingers. He downshifted and rolled into a local garage. His guy, Claudia, genius mechanic, a guy who would later create a badass Italian race car with none. Not other than Georgio Moroder, but I digress. Claudio tinkered away on another Ferrari, a 512 model, modern, sophisticated, slick as hell.

Eddie perked up. Claudio, who owns this beauty? The question was Kismet. That car? That car belongs to Sammy Hagar, Claudio said. You want his number? I'm Jake Brennan. And this is Disgraceland.

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