DISGRACELAND - Van Halen Pt. 2: Pulling a Gun on Fred Durst, Racing Ferraris and Lambos, and Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Most Faithful Servant

Episode Date: May 6, 2025

In 1985, David Lee Roth was out and Sammy Hagar was in. One of the biggest lead singer shakeups in music history led to some of the biggest sales of Van Halen's career. It also led to more drama, to Lamborghinis and Ferraris racing through the streets of Los Angeles, to military assault vehicles storming Beverly Hills, to crazed fans and loaded guns – and at the middle of it all, a modern-day warrior, a man with a code, trying to orchestrate his own survival. If there were a Mount Rushmore of guitarists, which four players should have their faces on it? Tell Jake at 617-906-6638, [e-mail], or on socials @disgracelandpod. Remember, you can only choose four! 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. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that.

David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gaten Moderato from Stranger Things, Tana Monsu, Camilla Marone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just like great shoes, great books take you places.

Through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget. I think any good romance, it gives me that. feeling of like butterflies. I'm Danielle Robe, and this is bookmarked by Reese's Book Club from Hello Sunshine and IHeart podcast, where we dive into the stories that shape us on the page and off. Each week I'm joined by authors, celebs, book talk stars, and more for conversations that will make you laugh, cry, and add way too many books to your TBR pile.

Listen to bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Cotton, the fabric of our lives. Movies can make you feel, make you dream. Sometimes they even make you appreciate architecture. Is there anybody who's been hotter in a doorway than Elizabeth Taylor? That's the kind of analysis you'll find every week on Dear Movies I Love You, the new podcast from the Exactly Right Network.

Every Tuesday, we break down the films we're crushing on, from blockbusters to deep cuts. Listen to Dear Movies I Love You on the I Heart Radio. app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis. This is a story about a modern-day warrior. A man with a code. A man out of time. A musician with a take-no-shit violent streak. A barretta to the head of limp biscuits Fred Durst.

A military assault vehicle tearing ass through the Tony streets of Beverly Hills. It's about an Alex, a Michael, a Sammy, even a Dave, and of course, it's about an Eddie. This is a story about Van Halen and one of the four guitarists who belongs on the Mount Rushmore of guitar playing. It's about a band who made great music. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show,

that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Melotron called Let Me Get Some of that Podcake, MK1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the right, to these dreams by heart. And why would I play you that specific slice of authentic sibling cheese, could I afford it?

Because that was the number one song in America on March 24, 1986. And that was the day the Van Halen released their seventh studio album, 5150, their first with new lead singer Sammy Hagar, an album that allowed the band to reach new commercial heights while unresolved problems continued to bubble unseen. beneath the surface. On this episode, Anthemic Sibling Cheese,

a military assault vehicle, a barretta, a code. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is the disgraceland. Eddie Van Halen jammed his combat boot down on the gas pedal. The assault vehicle he'd recently bought at auction roared to life,

tearing ass down the quiet streets of upscale Beverly Hills. There was no weapon in the machine gun mount, but that didn't make the vehicle any more street legal. This decommissioned slab of government steel was very much illegal, but Eddie didn't care, just like he didn't care about the gun he was holding. He was on a mission, and to carry out that mission, he required a certain level of comfort. Beverly Hills made him uncomfortable, and that's not because he wasn't welcome.

It was 2001, after all, and Eddie Van Halen, the guitar player of his generation, The one in the same who just decades earlier had reinvented the instrument and, in many ways, revitalized a genre, was very rich and very famous. It was the pretension that bugged him, though. The vulgar display of one's wealth, status, and power. Eddie didn't play that game. He wasn't a star. He was just a regular guy, a kid stuck in a grown man's body who liked to play a guitar.

But if he went and did something dumb, like keep one of his guitars locked up in a your fancy mansion and then did something equally dumb, like not answer his phone calls to arrange a time for him to come pick up that guitar like a normal person. That kind of Beverly Hills bullshit lit a fire under Eddie Van Halen's regular ass. So Eddie Van Halen tore ass in his military assault vehicle through the 90210210 zip code with no shirt on. His tattered pants were being held up by a piece of rope while he drove and the boots on his feet, the ones that were managing the gas pedal on the break at the moment, those were wrapped up in duct tape, and his long hair was up in a bun as a samurai in feudal Japan centuries ago would have worn it. And just like those samurai

of old, Eddie Van Halen sought enlightenment, believed in salvation, and lived by a code. Enlightenment came through his music, salvation came from within, and his code was governed by three points, honor, discipline, and morality. This was how he lived. his life, or how he tried to at least. And God rewards those who seek him. Eddie Van Halen was a seeker, a searcher, just like that other iconic American John Wayne, a man who made westerns about anti-hero cowboys that often borrowed from Japanese samurai films, the same ones who wore their hair like Eddie was now wearing his. Samarize, cowboys, John Wayne, Eddie Van Halen, it was all connected.

And now at 46 years old, with the days of routinely putting up hits on the billboard charts seemingly behind him, Eddie Van Halen's purpose was more elusive than ever in a shifting landscape of grunge, new metal, and Britney Spears. Eddie sought more than just his signature tone. He was looking for yet another new singer for the band that bore his name, Van Halen, a band which had famously, or infamously, burned through three vocalists over the course of its story career. I'll get to all that in a minute.

And he was looking for meaning, too, after recently separating from his wife of two decades Valerie Bertinelli. And he was looking for a cure for the cancer that was growing in his tongue. But at this very moment, what Eddie Van Halen was really looking for was his guitar. And he knew just where it was. held captive inside the Beverly Hills home of one Fred Durst, that backwards red hat enthusiast and lead vocalist of Limp Biscuit, the band which just two years earlier had incited a riot at Woodstock 99 with their macho-fuck-o anthem breakstuff.

Today, however, it was Eddie who was doing the inciting. He drove his assault vehicle onto Fred's well-manicured front lawn, put it in park, or however you get those things to stop, and let it idle nice and loud. He jumped from the driver's seat. pulled the gun from his waistband, and made a beeline for the front door of the house. He knocked, Red Hat answered. Eddie wasted no time.

He put his gun to that stupid fucking lid sitting on top of Fred Durst's stupid fucking face and said, Hey, where's my shit, motherfucker? 24 hours earlier, the vibe was way different. Eddie was hanging out with Fred, a man he'd only just met. And he was hanging out with him inside of Fred's house, jamming with limp biscuit. minus guitarist West Borland, who had recently left the group. Now, if you know anything about Eddie Van Halen and about Limp Biscuit, you're probably thinking, what the fuck?

And yeah, even Fred Durst himself, when a mutual friend suggested he auditioned Eddie for Limp Biscuit's new lead guitarist said, and I quote, that would be hilarious. The greatest guitar player ever jams with the worst band ever. Again, that's a Fred Durs quote. But also, consider this. Eddie Van Halen hadn't actually bought a new record since Peter Gabriel's album So, which came out in 1986. That's 15 years before this scene that I'm describing to you took place.

So it's entirely plausible that Eddie Van Halen had no idea what he was getting into when he agreed to jam with limp biscuit. Maybe in this vulnerable moment of searching for something new, maybe Eddie was just open to an opportunity, any opportunity, just like he and Van Halen were once upon a time open to crazy operations. opportunities as well, like jamming with Joe Cocker or Ozzy Osbourne and even Darrell Hall to fill their lead singers empty shoes. No shit. Look it up. But the insane pipe dream of limp biscuit with Eddie Van Halen on lead guitar was not meant to be. Eddie knew it as soon as he walked inside. It was hit by a cloud of marijuana smoke.

Eddie didn't do weed. And when it came to Eddie's stimulant and depressant of choice, that'd be cocaine and alcohol. And they were tools to help him work, he thought, not something he used to unwind. and party with the guys. Eddie told Fred thanks, but no thanks. He bounced, fast, said he'd be back for his guitar and gear the next day. That next morning, he called Fred to schedule a time to go pick up his stuff, but Fred never answered. Fred never called him back.

Fred Durst gave Eddie Van Halen the brush off. And now Fred Durst was regretting that decision, that inaction, that lack of respect. Or so, Eddie Van Halen would like to think. The greatest guitar player ever was standing on the lawn of the front man of the worst band ever, still aiming his gun at that stupid fucking hat while some clowns on Fred's payroll

load a gear into Eddie's assault vehicle. And this was such a bad idea that Eddie thought to himself. There was only one musician he was compatible with, and I mean compatible in the eternal mind-melt kind of way. That was his big brother, Alex, Van Halen's drummer. No other musical relationship ever lasted. Not with David Lee Roth,

Van Halen's original lead singer, who, depending on who you ask, either quit or was fired from the band back in 1985. And definitely now with Gary Sharon, the guy from Extreme, whose tenure as Van Halen's frontman at the end of the 90s was as short as one of the cigarettes that burned down to the filter in the headstock of Eddie's guitar. Then there was the one they called the Red Rocker, Sammy Hagar. He eventually went the way of Diamond Dave, out on the skids after his initial winning dynamic with the Van Halen brothers turned sour.

But not before he helped take the band higher and higher. Straight up they climbed, higher than they had ever gone before or since. Eddie wanted to go there again. Not for the money or the fame. He had all that. He wanted relevance. He wanted to matter again. What had it been?

Six years since Sammy left. Eddie wondered if it was all just water out of the bridge. If you could go home again. And as he watched Fred Durst's muscle load his gear into his illegal assault vehicle, Eddie Van Halen decided to do two things, Pronto. Number one, get the fuck out of Beverly Hills before he was handcuffed and tossed into the back of a police cruiser.

And number two, ring up his old friend, Sammy Hagar. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends, Oh my God, this is the same man.

A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends.

Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you thought it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the stunning stories

I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family Secrets. And just then, we felt the plain turn in the air. So much so that the bad. bags that were under people's seats just kind of flew into the aisle. Each week, we dive headfirst into the complex power of secrecy, how it shapes our identities and relationships, and how it ultimately can reveal to us our truest selves. My daughter, she's pretending she doesn't know, but is trying to cook and feed me and keep me alive because I wasn't eating anything, and me pretending like everything was fine.

He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move. And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off. and that was the last time I saw him. Listen to season 14 of Family Secrets, starting May 7th, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When, like, young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever,

and my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? You'd rather be disappointed in. Do that. Dennis Leary. I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance. Like he's about to attack me. Like making karate noises.

And his entire the Kardashian family over there, everybody's going, and the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and screaming. I immediately know that I've been asleep walking. David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Guy Branham. So anyway, Nicole Kidman broke up with Keith Thurban. Being half of a country

couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things. Tana Monsu. Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

16 years earlier, in 1985, Eddie Van Halen was once again behind the driver's seat. This time, it wasn't an old military vehicle, but instead his equally attention-grabbing Lamborghini. He pumped the clutch with his left foot, downshifted, and then let the Lambo hug the steep curve of the head. Then the road straightened out. This was the part Eddie loved. Clutch, stick, gas.

The Lambeau swooned like one of those busty coeds riding the rail at the show, leaving Malibu in the dust and setting its sights on the valley over the hill. In the next lane over, a jet black Ferrari suddenly appeared, keeping pace. Eddie looked over at Sammy Hagar sitting behind the wheel of his 512 BB. Eddie gave Sammy that world-famous ear-to-ear grin, the one typically reserved for when he had a guitar in his hands and was blowing even in his own mind. Eddie was as fast behind the wheel as he was on a fretboard and almost as happy. The two cars shot up the open road together, 80, 90, 100 miles an hour. Eddie clearly with a new

lease on life and Sammy proving that the boast he'd made in his most recent hit single was 100% authentic. He could not drive 55. Only now, Sammy Hagar was no longer going the road alone as a solo artist, but as the new lead singer for one of the biggest bands in the world, Van Halen. Sammy could hardly believe it. For Eddie and Alex Van Halen, it wasn't just believable.

After all, the circus cheeseball bullshit that they'd endured with their original singer David Lee Roth, it was absolutely necessary. To quote Alex at the time, we had a toothache for about 11 years, went to the dentist and had it extracted, and now we have a crown with a gold cap on it.

In a gold cap crown, as a gold-cap crown does. So Sammy Hagar bought a place near Eddie's second house in Malibu. And each afternoon, the two would race their fancy cars to Eddie's other house in studio in the San Fernando Valley, specifically Studio City. Work on the band's seventh studio album.

They're first with Sammy on the mic, and then race each other home after dark and after Eddie was good and shit-faced. Sometimes Sammy would take his ejacag or his cobra. Today it was a sleek midnight machine. As sleek is the music he was now making with Eddie, Alex, and Michael Anthony, Van Halen's long-suffering bass player. And holy shit was the music sleek and huge sounding.

Van Halen 2.0 sounded just like that metallic sphere looked on the cover of their album, 5150, which is to say polished, glossy, and yes, heavy. 5150, named after Eddie's home studio, which itself was named after a section of the California penal code that allowed for the detention of an adult suffering a mental health crisis. 5150 was produced not by Van Halen's longtime collaborator, Ted Templeton, but by foreigners, Mick Jones, who you should know is also the stepfather of Mark Rodson, but that's beside the point. But back to the point, Mick Jones gave that record that Van Halen was making a modern sheen. When it hit shelves on March 24, 1986, supported by monster singles like,

why can't this be love and dreams, 5150 went up. gangbusters. In the mid-80s, Van Halen mattered. The OG metalheads, on the other hand, begged to disagree. Van Halen could never be Van Halen without their beloved David Lee Roth. Call it a vocal minority because all that bitching and moaning was taking place as 5150 race straight to the top. And look, man, I don't care who you are, you have got to give it up for Sammy Hagar. Maybe you like the Dave years better. Hell, I like the Dave years better. But maybe you go even further. think they were more pure or they had less power ballads and fewer keyboards, or maybe you condescently refer to Sammy's tenure as Van Hagar or whatever, but it doesn't matter.

Sooner or later, you're going to come around to the Sammy Hagar version of Van Halen. Okay? It also doesn't matter. That Sammy Hagar came from a press shirt kind of world, and Eddie and Alex were the equivalent of a beer-soaked, stale beer-smelling dorm room. You know, best at both worlds. But here are the facts. Van Halen with Sammy Hagar went to number one.

on the Billboard album chart. And not just in 1986, but four times in a row over the next nine years, which is a feat that the band was never able to pull off with David Lee Ross. I love David Lee Ross. Now, this is no doubt. Dave was flashy as shit.

He got your attention with those mid-air splits off the drum riser. He was goofy and schlocky, showbiz to his core in the best kind of way, and he delighted him being Van Halen's mouthpiece. But David Lee Roth ran that mouth like a cocky 16-year-old, just as Eddie here was running. running his Lambo. Not that Eddie wasn't still a 16-year-old himself because in many ways he most certainly was. But unlike Dave, Eddie was a musical genius, faithfully serving his master like a samurai

of old. The thing was, for Eddie, his master, was his music. And music, to quote Eddie Van Halen, overpowers bullshit. That was the answer Eddie gave after he was asked if he felt vindicated when 5150 went to number one following the messy split with David Lee Roth. Eddie was in a great place. In Eddie's eyes, Sammy was not a peacock like Dave, but a true musician. And since Sammy played guitar, Eddie could stretch out in concert and play keyboards, which Dave always gave him shit about. But without Dave, the music continued to reward Eddie Van Halen, its most humble servant. He didn't even need a samurai bun in his hair at this point to be the noble warrior that he was.

But the music wasn't the only thing holding Van Hal and the band together. Despite outward appearances, this was still a fragile unit of four men. Every day something threatened to destroy it all. The boozing, the drugging, the non-stop fucking that was taking place in pup tents beneath the stage.

Yes, all four guys had their own tent in which they indulged in their wildest sexual fantasies and those tents were set up beneath the stage. at their concerts, don't ask me how, it just happened, so that they could act upon those sexual fantasies while the show went on. Eddie and L, both addicts, were just as prodigious when it came to hand-to-hand sibling combat as it did to musical telepathy. Sammy, meanwhile, had girl problems.

All his sleeping around on the slide got him at least one extortion attempt from a former Playboy buddy who said she was carrying his child. All while his wife's panic attacks caused her to nearly jump from a plane. Michael Anthony, meanwhile, was once again getting the shaft when it came to money, watching his share of the music publishing shrank down to a measly 10%. These tensions were enough to break up any band. But add to it, Eddie and Alex's increasing belief that Sammy wasn't working as hard as they were, a suspicion that they'd previously experienced with Dave,

and it's crazy that things didn't fall apart sooner than they did. And the reason things didn't all fall apart wasn't because of the music. It was because of Ed Leffler. Ed Leffler was more than just a rock and roll manager. He was a father who wanted to make all of his children happy. When he was brought on board along with Sammy, Leffler's first order of business was to make sure that relations between the Van Halen brothers and Sammy didn't go the way they went with Dave.

Ed Leffler ran interference. Ed Leffler maintained a proper balance of power. Ed Leffler would take a bullet for his clients. In fact, he took a physical. to the face over and over and over, trapped inside an elevator at a show in Dallas, where an unknown assailant beat the living piss out of him and put him in a hospital. The guys never had to worry about Ed Leffler's loyalty, but they did worry about his health. First, there was that assault in Dallas, and soon after, there was his cancer diagnosis,

and it looked bad. As bad as the scene, Eddie was now witnessing outside the window of his studio City House every night. Some creep parking a van across the street watching him, watching his wife, Valerie, and their newborn son, Wolfgang. No one ever got out of the van. It just sat there, and the cops could only do so much. And Eddie called them, and they came and made the van move. And the van left, and then the van came back. Eddie wasn't about to sit idly by like an idiot, only to find out the hard way that the person inside was a demented psycho. So, just as it was wants his job to protect his musical innovations to protect his brand and his legacy from companies making money illegally off of those innovations, it was now his job to protect his young family,

which is how, in the early 1990s, an anxious Eddie Van Halen became the owner of a 25-calibre Beretta. We'll be right back after this world, word, word. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends... Oh my God, this is the same man.

A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe.

On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you thought it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring the 14th season of family secrets. And just then, we felt the plain turn in the air,

so much so that the bags that were under people's seats just kind of flew into the aisle. Each week, we dive head first into the complex power of secrecy, how it shapes our identities and relationships, and how it ultimately can reveal to us our truest selves. My daughter, she's pretending she doesn't know, but is trying to cook and feed me and keep me alive because I wasn't eating anything.

and me pretending like everything was fine. He kind of showed me out of the way and said, move. And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off. And that was the last time I saw him. Listen to season 14 of Family Secrets, starting May 7th on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When, like, young people come up to me and they want to be an act or whatever.

My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that. Dennis Leary. I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance. Like he's about to attack me. Like making karate noises.

And the entire the Kardashian family over there, everybody's going. And the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and screaming. And I immediately know that I've. Better sleepwalk. David O'Yellow. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Guy Branham.

So anyway, Nicole Kimman broke up with Keith Durbin. Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things. Santa Monsu, Camilla Marone,

Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Eddie Van Halen is a fucking legend. Did you see him play his guitar in that new video? With a power drill. And dude, dude, get this.

Van Halen's new record. For unlawful, carnal knowledge, dude. Check it out for four unlawful carnal knowledge. F-U-C-K. Fuck! They name their new record. Fuck! If you were high in high school in 1991,

you'll remember this sort of thing being said pretty much verbatim by a kid in a jean jacket with a peach-fuss stash leaning up against the hood of his car out in the parking lot next to yours. Just moments before, he dipped into the pocket of his flannel shirt to pull out a camel light to rip after just token that joint. Maybe that kid was you, and if so, I salute you. Who cared about Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page playing his guitar with a violin bow anymore?

Old fucking news, man, Jimmy's little trick couldn't hold a candle to Eddie's McKita as it revved up the strings of his brand-new Ernie Ball Music Man guitar in the video for pound cake, the lead single from Van Halen's ninth studio album, third with Sammy, titled Four Unlawful Cernal Knowledge, which, yes, was named, that way on purpose for the juvenile acronym. But calling the album for unlawful kernel knowledge saved it from being slapped with the dreaded parental advisory sticker that was cropping up on other notable albums released in 1991,

such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magic, weans, the pod, and the Guns and Rose's double album use your illusion one and two. And though Van Halen's new album was hailed by many as a return to form, a capital R rock record, Such praise by Van Halen's fan base couldn't save them from a two out of five stars review in Rolling Stone magazine. Only months later, that same publication would give Nirvana's never mind only one star higher than that, so what the fuck did Rolling Stone know anyways?

When Pepsi came calling the user right now, the album's socially conscious third single, for a commercial marketing their brand new Crystal Pepsi, Eddie, the band, and their manager Ed Leffler were making the kind of money Rolling Stone, could only dream of. Ed Leffler, for one, used his steady hand to guide Van Halen through their most commercially viable years. He was a fixer at heart. The only thing it seemed he couldn't fix was the cancer and his thyroid. By 1993, Ed Leffler needed more than Crystal Pepsi money. He needed a miracle. So Sammy Hagar went looking for one. Sammy knew that whether or not he ended up just another blip on the Van Halen radar was in large part due to Leffler's influence.

Sammy went above and beyond, and then he went under, the table that is, below the border, all the way to Mexico, where samples of Ed Leffler's urine were sent. Neurotransmitters were extracted from that urine and then sent back in tiny vials. The idea was that you'd shoot up those tiny miracle vials directly into your muscles, and the healing would begin, which, according to Sammy, is what Leffler did. Sammy even did it along with him. Wackadoo? I don't know, but desperate times, you know?

Ultimately, however, neurotransmitter extracted urine was no match for the Big Sea. In the fall of 93, Ed Leffler was dead. Suddenly, the layer of protection that Leffler once provided, both internally amongst band members, and from the external forces beating down on them, was gone. The wheels slowly began to come off, but not before Eddie Van Halen's hair came off first. Eddie was sad about Ed Leffler's death.

He was pissed and he was frustrated too. He was overwhelmed by everyone who wanted a peace and offended by the human behavior that his dead manager had so fiercely shielded him from. The wine bottle in his hand was just about empty and he brought it to his lips and put the thing out of its misery. His own misery was just beginning. He walked into the bathroom, grabbed an electric razor

and shaved his head till every strand of his trademark long hair was on the floor. He stared at himself and tried to understand. He didn't know why he'd just done that. But the more he looked at himself, the more he saw his bald head as a clean slate, a fresh start. He quit drinking, just like his brother, Alex,

had done some years earlier with the help of rehab. Eddie didn't do it that way. He just put his mind to it, some Zen Buddhist-type stuff, salvation coming from within and all that. Being sober was a total mind-fuck. He had really been a real mind-fuck. relied on alcohol for so long as part of his playing, as part of his work, of how he served his lord, the music. Booze lowered his inhibitions, which, in his mind, allowed him to attempt

things he never would have attempted had he been straight. Now he no longer felt comfortable in his own skin. In fact, he was noticing just how much he hurt. His hips were killing him. Van Halen called their 1995 tour behind their 10th album, Balance, the ambulance tour, because Eddie was getting around with a cane, and Alex was wearing a neck brace so that he could play through three ruptured discs in his vertebrae. It was on this tour in April of 1995 that Eddie Van Halen found himself racing through the Burbank Airport to catch a flight down to a show in San Diego. The carry-on bag was gripped tight in his hand. He hobbled his way to security, those bad hips screaming at him, just burning. He wasn't accustomed to running from terminal to terminal

on his own like this. He was used to a charmed life of private jets, even if he claimed to reject all that rockstar bullshit that came along with it. He was no rock star. He was just a regular old guitar player, and this is just a regular old commercial flight that he was about to board. So he handed that regular carry-on bag to an airport security officer, and the officer unzipped it and looked inside.

His eyes went wide like, there's something very, very wrong here wide. He turned his gaze from the open bag to Eddie and then back again. And this gave Eddie pause. Eddie began to freak. His stomach was in his throat. And the officer stuck his hand inside the bag and then very slowly, very carefully. He pulled out.

Eddie Van Halen's loaded Beretta. One week later, Eddie stood before Judge, rocking that regular guy charm, explaining how the 25 caliber gun was something he'd initially bought for protection. You get it, right, Judge? You've got a family, right? A judge has got to understand better than most that the world is full of freaks and weirdos, all of them moving in ways the rest of us can't comprehend. And when Eddie Van Halen is moving, moving through space and time from one town to the next,

on tour, he regularly brings that same piece of protection with him. The Beretta is second nature, just like one of his guitars. The thing is, he normally travels on private flights, where he gets to make the rules. This whole thing is just a simple, stupid mistake. Eddie copped a plea, a thousand dollar fine, one-year probation, barely a crime. The bigger crime at Eddie's eyes was whatever Sammy was trying to pull. And I'm not talking about that mess down in Mexico and Cabo-Avo. The club Sammy had built with the investment help of his Van Halen bandmates,

the one that got them a ton of MTV airtime but was starting to feel like an albatross around their necks. I'm talking about the greatest hits album Sammy was assembling in order to pay for his divorce. A collection of solo greatest hits, which, whatever, you do you, Sammy, but he was tacking on two brand-new songs to squeeze Moss De Niro from the record company and not just any two songs, but two songs he had workshopped with Van Halen. The fuck was up with that, Sammy Hagar. Eddie and Alex were operating Sons Boos, but they were also operating without the usual smokescreen of Ed Leffler. So instead of this whole thing being a simple means to an end,

a project which, frankly, the less Eddie knew about, the better. Instead of all that, it looked to Eddie and Alex like Sammy was about to big-time them the way they thought David Lee Roth once had. Sammy prioritizing his solo career and not giving his all to the band. The band was the thing. The band was it. The band was family. In the eyes of Eddie Van Halen, Sammy Hagar was clearly going against that family,

against that code, the code of honor, discipline, and morality. And if a man doesn't have a family, doesn't have a code, then what does he even have? In the 1870s, the modern era had arrived in Japan, and the samurai suddenly found themselves obsolete. By 1876, even carrying a sword was illegal. Some of the country's most respected warriors became beggars. Others assimilated into modern society and found callings as merchants or farmers. Well over 100 years later, across the Pacific in California, the modern era found Eddie Van Halen trying to make sense of his place inside of it.

His samurai bun hairstyle echoed into the distant past as he rode upon his faithful steed, an old military assault vehicle, leaving Beverly Hills in the house of Fred Durst for more regular guy pastures back in the valley, back to where he belonged, reunited with his gear. He then reunited the band with Sammy Hagar. which didn't last. Just as the two reunions with David Lee Roth didn't last. The Van Halen timeline, perhaps more than that of any other rock band in history, is full of this kind of confounding musical chairs.

Even Eddie's son, Wolfgang, eventually replaced Michael Anthony on bass. Keeping it all straight is beside the point. Besides, Eddie Van Halen didn't do timelines. Maybe it was 2001, but to Eddie, he was still 1978 in his heart and 1986 in his mind. who knows if the year 2020 actually felt like 2020 to Eddie Van Halen. He was 65, no longer wearing his hair like the samurai. But his fate remained tied to those warriors of old. Eddie's kind was now the antiquated one,

the innovator who did what he had to because he had no other choice, no means, only an unquenchable creative drive. Now in 2020, there was nothing but choices. Cheat guitars, kind of decent, I guess, available at the click of a button, free apps on which you could record your own songs, the world's music library from all of human existence on your phone. There was even a video game in which you held a piece of plastic in your hands, and you were the guitar hero.

Eddie Van Halen was a dying breed. And dying, by the way, was part of the whole deal. You live by your code, you serve your lord, which for Eddie was the music, even if it kills you. And death was coming for him. First, it tried to strike him in his tongue, part of which was removed to cut out the cancer. Eddie went into experimental mode,

just like years ago when he experimented on the edge of his bed with his Frankenstrat and a six-pack of Schlitz-Talls. Only this time, the experiments were medical. In a 2006 interview with Howard Stern, Eddie revealed that he'd secretly started a pathology, lab in Long Island with a doctor, and that through that lab he'd beaten his tongue cancer, but that he couldn't reveal exactly how he'd beat it, because by doing so, he'd piss off big pharma and maybe go to jail. Which sounds crazy to some of you, I know, but a few years later,

Sammy Hagar and his memoir wrote that what Eddie had done was to take a piece of his tongue, a healthy piece, liquefy it, and then inject it back into his body. If this sounds like the failed Ed Leffler fix all over again, you're not wrong. But did Eddie Van Halen's fix actually work? Eddie thought so, at least for the moment, at least until the cancer came back later, stronger, and this time fatal. Despite the chemo he received, and also despite the fact that he was using again, not just alcohol, but drugs.

He was also convinced that the cancer came not from the enormous amount of cigarettes he smoked throughout his life, but from the metal guitar picks he would hold in his mouth whenever he needed both hands free to exhibit his two-handed tapping technique. I'm not saying that Eddie Van Halen thought he was superhuman, though. To many of us, he certainly seemed so. But from a very young age, he pursued alternative methods when it came to overcoming obstacles. A guy who has to create his own guitar, create his own style, is going to be the same guy who creates his own cure when he's staring down a fatal disease.

But Eddie Van Halen was no doctor. He was a guitar player. who is incapable of any other profession, just a regular guy trying to stay in music's good graces. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. All right, hope you dug this episode. Apple Podcast listeners, make sure you have auto downloads turned on so you never miss an episode of Disgraceland.

This week's question of the week is not easy. Which four guitar players belong on the Mount Rushmore of guitar playing? It's Eddie Van Halen, that's for sure. Is it all dudes? Are there any women? Does Clapton make the cut? All I know is Eddie is on it. Hit me up. Voicemail and text 617-906-6638 and let me know.

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This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. And my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? I'd rather be disappointed in. Do that. David O'Yello. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts.

Dennis Leary, Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things, Tana Mangeau, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes a suspect is found guilty before a verdict is ever read in court. On the Wicked Words podcast, I talk with the writers who dig deep into the cases that changed history, including Marsha Clark, who went from prosecuting one of the most famous murder cases to writing crime fiction. It doesn't matter that you didn't take part in the murder. If you were at the scene at all, you're guilty of murder. Every week, the real story is revealed.

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