Read Online Everybody Wants Some by Ian Christe - Free Book Online

rock radio stations and soon took hold nationally. Angel had been smart to try to snake the song—the precision-tooled cover took Van Halen into the Top 40 pop charts in United States and the United Kingdom, a sort of American invasion. Eddie was at home when he heard the song on the radio for the first time at 2 A.M. He ran into his parents’ bedroom and woke them up shouting, “Mom! Dad! We’re on the radio!”
    The full album hit the new-release shelf in record stores nationwide on February 10, 1978, complete with a fetching new VH inverted tri-angle logo. Van Halen sold the California lifestyle and the world bought it. “We celebrate all the sex and violence of the television, all the rocking on the radio, the movies, the cars, and everything about being young or semi-young or young at heart. That’s Van Halen,” David Lee Roth told Waxpaper shortly afterward.
    The album was not an instant hit but a slow and continuously rising success. At the end of May, it was certified gold. After a thousand nights in the beer halls, the cover band from Pasadena was finally about to be taken seriously.
    Warner Bros. found Van Halen a production manager, Noel Monk, fresh off the road wrangling the previous year’s self-destructive great white hope, the Sex Pistols. He and acting manager Marshall Berle arranged an eight-man team to get the Van Halen convoy rolling. On March 3, Van Halen hit the road opening for Journey, a light rock band from San Francisco whose audience ranks were swollen with females. “People say this is Van Halen’s first world tour,” Roth cackled. “This is our first world vacation, man!”
    At first they felt out of their element, no longer basking in the approval of thousands of hometown fans. They left home wearing three-inch platform shoes, pushing Eddie and Michael up toward six feet, where Roth stood in his socks. Alex decked himself out in a black-studded leather jumpsuit, his hair a nappy UFO that jived with his reputation as the wildest banana in the bunch. The whole band wanted so badly to look ace that observers remember even the crew wearing platforms. Before the first month was over, it was back to more practical sneakers for the band and Capezio dance slippers for the high-leaping Roth.

    Everyone thought that Van Halen should consider themselves lucky to be earning a few hundred dollars a night, playing brief thirty-minute sets with dodgy sound, but they were used to raking in thousands selling out clubs back in Hollywood. The desire to succeed had brought them to the top of the barrel—now they flopped over into the very bottom of a much bigger pool. With sets as short as six songs some nights, no catering or sound check, the band soothed themselves by stealing food and girls from Journey’s backstage area while the host band was onstage. Eddie, out from under his parents’ watchful eyes for virtually the first time in his life, later admitted to “squeezing everything that walked” in 1978.
    For half an hour each night, Van Halen bounced across the stage as if they were weightless on the surface of the moon. David Lee Roth worked his body into contortions and then sprang airborne with vertical splits. And those legs were straight—the corrective braces he had worn on his legs for two years as a toddler did their job. Roth allowed no resistance to his existence, except the tiny internal pilot light that told him it was all turbulence ahead. His was an ever-renewing energy that could be toxic when pointed in certain directions, but there is no underplaying how high his hyperactivity lifted the band upward.
    At the time, few people thought rock would still exist in five years. Yet Van Halen played as if they didn’t yet realize that in rock and roll, nobody expected them to be this consistently good. Eddie traveled with a suitcase of guitar parts, often found open and scattered across motel rooms as his compulsive search for the perfect weapon continued. He continued composing new