We were monsters. All of us.
Not just Alex, Edward, David, and Michael but also the roadies and the support staff and anyone else who joined us on the road. I include myself in this group. And when I say “monsters,” I don’t mean that in a malevolent way. I mean that when you’re on the road with a young and hungry rock band on the cusp of stardom, the usual rules of decorum that one adheres to in polite society simply do not exist. Spend six months on the road, sleep in buses and hotels, perform a hundred shows before drunken, adoring crowds, and see what happens to your moral compass. Things just get . . . twisted.
Look, no one gets into the music business because they want a sensible, safe, and boring nine-to-five routine. (Quite the contrary, in fact.) This is true of the artists themselves, as well as the people who support their careers. You get into the music business because you enjoy the excitement of working with the stars, or trying to make the unknown but promising musician become a star. Sure, the perks of the job are enticing, as well—the drugs, the women, the opportunity to rub elbows with the rich and famous. But don’t think for a moment that it’s a walk in the park. The work is hard and sometimes tedious, the hours interminable; there is no division between professional life and personal life, not if you’re doing the job right. For better or worse, the job is your life. Whether you are an artist, record company executive, promoter, or manager, the perks and money can be amazing. But unless everyone does their job correctly, and fate smiles upon you as well, the artists will never develop into stars and no one will make any money. And the perks dry up quickly. The goal is to make the musician into a rock ’n’ roll deity—someone bigger than life. Then everyone rides the train for as long as possible.
I knew from experience that the ride was often short and unglamorous. But Van Halen was different, and they were different from the very beginning.
Despite the issues with the Aragon Ballroom show, there was certainly cause for optimism, and by the time we had a week under our belts, optimism had metamorphosed into something much more concrete. You had to be deaf, dumb, and blind—and stupid—not to see that this band was going to be something extraordinary. Sure, the set was brutally short, leaving David little time for his signature raps, but he was obviously a gifted and confident front man who moved with the grace and agility of an athlete. Whatever range his voice might have lacked was offset by his stage presence (and covered neatly by Michael’s backing vocals). Edward was a nightly force of nature. I was too busy to see much of that first show, but after seeing Van Halen perform its next two shows, in Springfield, Illinois, and Indianapolis, I was convinced I had landed the job of a lifetime. And the primary reason was the guitar playing of Edward Van Halen.
“Holy shit!” I’d hear people yelling. “This guy is like Hendrix.”
Now, I was never out on the road with Jimi Hendrix, but I’d heard and seen him play enough to know that this was a comparison one did not make lightly. Hendrix was the acknowledged greatest of all rock ’n’ roll guitarists, and to invoke his name in the same sentence with almost any other guitar player—especially one barely out of high school—was to risk being accused of blasphemy, but such was the burden foisted on Edward from the moment Van Halen was released on an unsuspecting public.
Still, I knew from experience. In the summer of ’69, when I was stage managing at the Fillmore East, I’d worked with everyone from Jefferson Airplane to B. B. King to the Who. That year I saw Jimi Hendrix twice, the first time from a sound booth at the Fillmore East, and then a second time on the last day of Woodstock from the light booth I was perched in, where I watched him play his legendary version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I came to believe it was a legitimate comparison, just as I came to believe that Van Halen compared favorably with any band I had ever gotten to know up close and personal.
Since then I’d been doused in LSD by the Grateful Dead, I’d shared shots of Southern Comfort with Janice Joplin, and I even fixed Chuck Berry’s amp for him (he was so damn grateful he offered to sing at my wedding—he didn’t, but that’s beside the point). I’d been out on the road with David Sanborn, James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, Tom Waits, the Sex Pistols, and countless others you might not know. The only band with which I traveled that compared to Van Halen in the late 1970s and early 1980s was the Rolling Stones. And I don’t think even they were as dynamic. I’m not saying Van Halen was a “better” band than the Stones. I’m talking about the power of a live performance, the ability to captivate an audience. Van Halen was the best I’ve ever seen. And I’ll say this: as great as Keith Richards was in his own genre, he couldn’t touch Edward for sheer musical brilliance and innovation.
So, was I excited about the prospects for Van Halen breaking out?
You bet your ass I was.
This was not like going out on the road with a half-formed band that had been playing mostly covers in small clubs. Van Halen was a band that seemed almost instantly to be at the peak of its powers—in part, because they’d been writing and playing for years, accumulating the catalog and charisma of a seasoned band, one just dying for its big break. And here it was. I still get goose bumps even thinking about it. Standing just offstage with Van Halen in those first few weeks was one of the most exciting experiences of my professional life. They were playing brand-new material off probably the best debut record I have ever heard, and playing it with attitude and energy like nothing I had ever seen.
Incidentally, about that first record? I was introduced to most of it live, as performed by the band, three times in that first week. It wasn’t until we finally got a day off that I listened to the actual recording. And that’s when I knew: These guys are going to be unstoppable.
After Indianapolis—our third show in as many days—we had a day off. But the respite was short, as we were scheduled to do a show in Madison, Wisconsin, on March 7. That morning I continued my wake-up calls to the band. I’d been doing it for many years and had grown accustomed to the abusive reaction my voice seemed to provoke at that hour of the day. For some reason musicians just don’t like getting up early.
“Good morning,” I’d usually say, in as cheery a voice as I could manage. “Bags in thirty, we leave in an hour.”
This was a routine that lasted until the end of every tour and almost always resulted in some version of the following response: “Fuck you, Noel. We just went to bed.”
Like that was my problem or my fault, or I had any control over the schedule. Well, actually, I did, but once it was set in stone, there was no changing it. A tour manager’s life is dictated entirely by the clock—if he falls behind, everyone falls behind. So he has to be not just a stickler for details and organization but thick-skinned, as well. It was during the first North American tour that the guys started calling me Li’l Caesar, a nod to my supposed dictatorial ways (despite the fact that I really had very little power).
By the fourth gig, in Madison, Van Halen had already made a small but not insignificant change in support staff. It happened during a short afternoon rehearsal, when David suddenly stopped and turned to Marshall Berle.
“Hey, Marshall, I have to say this. The way you introduce the band? It’s kind of lame.”
This was somewhat cruel (and an early indication of David’s bluntness) but also entirely accurate. Marshall, who apparently was prone to microphone-induced anxiety, had stammered and coughed his way through three awful versions of “Ladies and gentlemen . . . I give you . . . the mighty V-V-V-Van Halen!”
He had already made it clear that he would be leaving the road shortly and returning to LA, so the announcer’s job was going to be open anyway, but I guess David felt compelled to take care of the matter right then and there.
“Who else can we get?” David asked, looking around the arena. Unsurprisingly, there were no volunteers. “We need someone who is going to be around for the whole tour.” Another pause as David surveyed the small crowd, which consisted entirely of Van Halen crew and management staff. Suddenly, he looked at me.
“Hey, Monk. How about you?”
I held up my hands in a desperate attempt to deflect the query. Even though I was going to be with the band on every date of the 1978 world tour—which eventually reached an exhausting 174 shows in a span of less than ten months—I was not about to get trapped into having to be on-site for the start of every show. Not only that, but I, like Marshall, had an almost pathological hatred of microphones.
“Thanks for the offer,” I said, “but I’m going to have to decline.”
To my relief, David shrugged and moved on. “Okay, well, who else we got?” Bullet dodged.
For some reason that I have never figured out, aside from the fact that he happened to be nearby, Rudy Leiren’s name was thrown into the ring. Rudy was a perfectly fine guitar tech and a loyal friend to Eddie’s, but as far I know, he had no experience as an announcer. He simply happened to be in the right place at the right time.
“Let’s go, Rudy,” David said, stepping away from the mic. Rudy walked up, looking a bit uncomfortable, cleared his throat, and shouted, “The mighty Van Halen!” His voice echoed through an empty arena, strong and clear, without a hint of a stammer. Everyone smiled; there was even some light applause.
“You’re hired!” David laughed.
And so he was. From that moment on, right up until the band imploded, more than six years later, Rudy the guitar tech was also Rudy the announcer—the howling, disembodied voice that kicked off hundreds of Van Halen shows. Marshall, whose obvious discomfort betrayed the fact that he was completely out of his element, left the next day for the safety of a Southern California office building (and did not return for quite some time), and Rudy took over the mic. It was, in my opinion, a favorable trade in every possible way. The band got a credible announcer, Rudy got to introduce his buddies, and none of us had to put up with Marshall. I’d call that a win.
FROM DAY ONE— or at least week one—Van Halen was a partying band, and everyone on the road with the band got pulled into this orbit. Not that anyone complained, mind you. This was the late seventies, a time when there was virtually no stigma attached to any illicit substance, assuming it was used in moderation (a relative term; the bar for partying was set abnormally high in the music business, particularly when you were on the road). For the first year or two it really wasn’t much of a problem. The guys all liked to drink and smoke weed, and I got the definite impression that they weren’t exactly new to this lifestyle when I first met them. But it wasn’t excessive. Not in the beginning. David had some money, so he was the occasional conduit for coke, but it wasn’t like they were doing piles of blow in the dressing room before going onstage. We all knew how to work hard and put on a great show and then unwind afterward.
And then do it all over again the next day.
Drug use sneaks up on you—I’ve seen it destroy countless bands, and it would eventually prove to be instrumental in Van Halen’s unraveling, but for the first couple of years we mostly just had a fantastic time. If these guys weren’t born to play the role of rock stars, they certainly adapted to it quickly—all those years of playing wild backyard gigs had been a superb apprenticeship.
By the time we got to Madison, the boys had already embraced the time-honored tradition of trashing their hotel rooms. Now, it was a bit early in the game for Van Halen to start behaving this way, but again . . . it wasn’t like they had come out of nowhere. It only seemed that way to the uninitiated (as legend has it, corroborated by the guys in the band, they were not averse to trashing the homes of friends when they played on the backyard circuit). Manners flew out the window—along with tables, chairs, lamps, and anything else that was of little obvious use and had the misfortune not to be nailed down. I had been with other bands that had trashed their surroundings, but they had nothing on Van Halen.
Madison was a two-night stay, and as the damage accrued, I realized that we weren’t going to simply be able to sneak out of town without being held accountable. And, frankly, I didn’t want to do that. I knew that at some point I would have to speak with the hotel manager, try to put as positive a spin on the matter as I possibly could, and agree to pay for any and all damages. What I hoped to avoid was any sort of police involvement or bad publicity; fortunately, this was decades ahead of social media, when every inappropriate celebrity act is recorded by someone and instantly uploaded to the internet.
Van Halen was not yet big enough to attract much in the way of mainstream media attention, so the band could beat the shit out of a hotel room and no one would really care—as long as we agreed to pay for damages.
This particular room was nearly destroyed. Not only was furniture broken and or heaved out the window but the room itself had been smeared with ketchup. And when I say “smeared,” I am not being hyperbolic. It was here, you see, that I was introduced to the Ketchup Queens, a pair of delightful and exuberant groupies with a bit of a fetish for condiments. When I walked into the room I saw two beautiful girls, completely naked, lying next to each other on one of the hotel beds. The band members were standing over them, armed with plastic squeeze bottles filled with ketchup. At first I was horrified at the sight of the boys firing ketchup into their guests’ every available orifice (and some that, frankly, were not available), but my gaze was quickly drawn to the girls’ faces; they were hardly being coerced. Instead, they were laughing uncontrollably and soaking up the ketchup like lilacs enjoying a spring shower. Well, to each her own, I thought. It was all part of the process of becoming a tried-and-tested rock star; understanding that you could do almost anything, and ignoring the switch that stops you from doing it.
David seemed to understand that from the beginning, and embraced it wholeheartedly, in part because he so desperately wanted to be a star. Alex and Edward picked up on it pretty quickly. Michael, being the nicest guy in the band, remained a gentle and fun-loving soul even as chaos swirled around him. He was an unlikely rock star, and therefore suited to playing the least flamboyant instrument in the band. Michael was the antistar of Van Halen, and fans identified with him. He was impossible to dislike.
“Michael, it’s a good thing there are only four strings on a bass,” I’d tease. “That way you won’t get confused.”
It was just a joke and I’d say it before almost every show because I knew that it would elicit a laugh and a knowing nod from Michael, as if he was saying, “Yeah, I’m the luckiest guy on the planet.”
Even when we trashed hotel rooms and dressing rooms, Michael was usually the least involved. For him, it was the height of debauchery to use the food supplied by catering as paint for a mural—which he did rather often, and sometimes to impressive effect. We (meaning Red Roadie and I) actually introduced him to our favorite drink, the boilermaker, which made ample use of the Jack Daniel’s Michael already favored, and which ultimately became his weakness.
I didn’t stay in the room with the Ketchup Queens very long—just long enough to have gotten the gist of things. But when I returned a short time later, the room was an absolute disaster. The furniture was either missing or shattered, and there was a copious amount of ketchup all over the place, and on every conceivable surface, includng the floor and even the ceiling. As I surveyed the damage, and narrowly avoided some of the evidence dripping onto me from a particularly disgusting ceiling fan, I honestly couldn’t tell whether it looked like there had been an orgy or a gangland massacre. It was the kind of scene that would have made Caligula proud.
The next morning, I met with the manager.
“I’m very sorry,” I began. “There’s really no good explanation for the condition of our rooms.”
“How bad is it, Mr. Monk?” he asked.
An image of the previous night’s debauchery flashed across my mind’s eye. I winced. Then I choked back an urge to laugh.
“Not great,” I said. And then I gave him the gory details. By the time I had finished, the manager’s face had turned red. “Really, it’s unusual for them to behave this way,” I added, lying through my teeth to the poor guy. “They’re a nice bunch of young men. Maybe there’s something in the water that caused a personality change.”
The manager laughed.
“Mr. Monk, you’re not the first band that has ever stayed in our hotel. And you’re not the first to wreck one of our rooms.”
I let out a sigh of relief. “Okay, what do we do?”
“Very simple,” he said. “Just write a check.”
I went upstairs and called the boys in to my room. I explained that the hotel manager would not be pressing any charges, and that he had graciously agreed to simply allow us to pay for damages. He would be up shortly to survey the carnage and give us a bill.
“Do we have the money for this?” David asked.
“Don’t worry,” I replied. “Warner Brothers will be picking up the tab.”
They all smiled and exchanged high-fives.
“That’s great, Noel,” Edward said. “Good job.”
“Thank you. Of course, eventually it will come back to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s called recoupment, boys. I’ll explain later.”
It would be some time before they grasped this concept: that everything came out of their pockets. For now, though, they seemed satisfied with my explanation, and with knowing that there would be no further consequences. After the manager had surveyed the damage, presumably made an appointment with his shrink, and put together an itemized bill, I paid with plastic.
“We appreciate your understanding and professionalism,” I said. “And your discretion.”
He nodded. “And we appreciate your business. Feel free to come back.” He paused, smiled. “You’ll get the floor that’s being renovated.”
SOMETIMES THE TRASHING OF HOTEL ROOMS was simply the by-product of boredom and entitlement. This was not a normal lifestyle we were leading. Throw in groupies and copious amounts of mind-altering chemicals, and you have a recipe for destruction. It rarely stemmed from any sort of hostility. It was just childish and irresponsible . . . and, quite often, a lot of fun. But there were occasions when interpersonal dynamics and fragile band relationships factored into the equation. I am talking specifically about the deep and unusual bond between the brothers Van Halen.
It was fairly early in the tour when I saw them go at it for the first time, but it would not be the last. Look, I get it—families are complicated and codependent organisms. I grew up in a dysfunctional household myself, with an alcoholic father and an abusive mother; my sister and I both suffered in this environment, and because of that I am no stranger to the complexities of family dynamics. Still, the Van Halen brothers seemed to test those familial bonds to an extreme, beginning with their relationship to their father, Jan Van Halen.
The first few times I met Jan, I found him to be a likable man who had led an interesting life. He obviously loved music and wanted his sons to succeed. Most of what I learned about Jan’s life was revealed during sessions the two of us shared at a local shooting range in Los Angeles. Jan enjoyed making his own ammunition and collecting and trading weapons. But most of all he enjoyed shooting. Does this make him sound like a scary guy? Not to me. I’ve been around guns most of my life and know they are only as dangerous as the hand in which they are held. Which, of course, is not to say that everyone should own a gun. But Jan seemed like a reasonable enough fellow, although he had that peculiar way (not uncommon for the Dutch) of seeming both laid-back and intense at the same time. Still, we shared many good times together.
The shooting range we visited most frequently was close to Jan’s house. We would swap old stories, and his were always more harrowing than mine. And as I got to know Jan a little better, I saw behavior that I found odd and frankly unappealing. For one thing, he was an alcoholic. Forget for a moment that drunks and drug addicts shouldn’t mess with guns—Jan always seemed responsible in that particular arena; it was the way he talked about drinking and how it affected his kids that gave me pause.
I don’t doubt that Jan loved his children, but he had an odd way of showing it, and of attempting to foster that love. For one thing, he believed that one of the best ways to bond with his boys was to drink with them. I’m not talking about a father sharing a beer with a couple of grown children of legal drinking age. I’m talking about a guy getting shit-faced with his teenage boys in the hope that the camaraderie of drinking would encourage honesty and transparency in their relationship; that booze would enhance their relationship to such an extent that there would be no secrets. Jan would be the cool dad whose kids would tell him everything that was happening in their lives: the good the bad, even the ugly. Now, it always seemed to me that Jan utilized this method to excess, to put it mildly. By the time these guys got around to bonding and communicating, they were too blasted to discuss anything of substance. To me, it all seemed completely pointless, and probably just selfish on Jan’s part. It was a way to rationalize his own drinking and to avoid the admittedly hard work of raising responsible children. Instead, he was an alcoholic father blatantly passing the torch (or bottle) to his sons, who would also become alcoholics. I suppose this hit a nerve with me because I too had grown up with an alcoholic father, although mine was more obviously abusive than Jan. Still, I understood the pathology and had suffered from it firsthand, so, even though I liked Jan, I couldn’t help but question the wisdom of his parental strategy.
I heard similar and corroborative stories from Alex, as well. He used to tell me that he felt like he got along best with his parents when he was completely smashed. Not when he’d had a couple drinks but “smashed.” And when Alex used the word smashed, it carried weight, since it took more to get Alex loaded than almost anyone I have ever met. By the time I met Alex he was already well down the drunken highway, drinking copious amounts of Schlitz Malt Liquor on a nightly basis.
I liked their mother, Eugenia, but she was a complicated and unhappy woman, and my affection was born largely of compassion. You see, she suffered from what I can only assume was a type of mental illness, represented most glaringly by an irrational and sometimes paralyzing fear of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Now, I understand that Jehovah’s Witnesses confuse nearly all of us who are not of their particular Christian faith and interpretation, but Eugenia’s feelings about them went well beyond annoyance; she was inordinately terrified of them. I don’t know the origin of this phobia. During World War II, Dutch Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses (among others) were rounded up and hoarded away in concentration camps. I know only that it was excessive and irrational. Eugenia firmly believed that Jehovah’s Witnesses had followed her from Amsterdam and were trying to destroy her. She would pull you aside as if she had a secret to tell you; then she would reveal her fears and suspicions, and eventually get around to asking whether you were “one of them” and intended to do her harm. The first time this happened to me, I mistakenly presumed that she was joking. She wasn’t. Instead, once assured that I wasn’t a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses dispatched to hurt her, she would ask if I had seen any of “them” on my way to her house. Were they lurking nearby? Hiding in the trees, perhaps? I didn’t know how to respond; I simply felt sorry for her. It was clear from the look of abject terror on her face that this nightmarish scenario was entirely real to her. And it was crippling.
Irrational and unfounded though it might have been, this fear resulted in Eugenia’s becoming largely a prisoner in her own home. While the boys played music often in front of Jan, their mother was an infrequent presence at concerts. As the wealth of the Van Halen brothers grew, I couldn’t help but wonder whether they had done everything they could to help their mother. Then again, maybe they did. Perhaps there had been private consultations and medication and interventions of one sort or another. I can only assume that they did try, and that their efforts were unsuccessful.
Alex sometimes seemed to bristle over his heritage—or a portion of it, anyway. For example, he used to note that he had “chine eyes.” I couldn’t tell whether or not he was kidding, but I hated it when he talked like this—usually after he’d been drinking. I don’t know what it was that he saw, but it had never occurred to me that the shape of his eyes, inherited from his mother, could be something negative; it didn’t seem to occur to all the women routinely fawning over him, either. He was a good-looking guy (as was Edward) and together the two of them certainly did nothing to detract from the Van Halen brand, so to speak—despite Alex’s apparent insecurities.
Alex drank because it was in his DNA to do so, and he was tutored at the knee of a pro, but I also think it had something to do with the fact that he toiled forever in the shadow of his far more innovative younger brother. I felt from the beginning that the brothers’ relationship was complicated by the very thing that also made them so close: music. Specifically, as I said, by the fact that Edward was so clearly the more gifted artist. No shame in that. But it had to have been challenging for Alex to see his little brother develop into a superstar. Don’t get me wrong, Alex was good—damn good—in his own right, and would later go on to be named number 51 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 Greatest Drummers of All Time. He could play the hell out of his drum kit, and his work functioned as the backbone to Edward’s riffs, Michael’s rhythmic drive, and David’s crooning vocals. But Edward was, for lack of a better term, a savant. He lived and breathed his craft in a way that most people couldn’t even begin to imagine. It was the way he interfaced with the rest of the world—everything was filtered through a lens of music. It came to him naturally, intuitively, but more than that, it was like it came through him, as if he was simply the universe’s conduit for kick-ass chords and mind-blowing guitar solos.
Alex knew this, and I believe he understood and appreciated this more than most people would. Maybe it’s about proximity—maybe if they hadn’t been forged in the same environment, not just as children but also as adults trying to withstand the industry together, spending so much time in the same spaces, eating, drinking, working, and touring (and playing) around the clock—it would have been a different story. Alex was always his brother’s biggest supporter and advocate, but I’d be lying if I said I never saw it get to him.
I’m not saying he didn’t love Eddie—I’m sure he did. But it was fascinating, and eventually depressing, to watch their relationship change and to see the balance of power shift so completely. And yet, Edward never totally freed himself from Alex’s influence. At his lowest, Alex could be extremely jealous; and, more so than Edward, Alex could be inscrutable if not downright mean, especially in the band’s later years (and by later I mean near the end of my tenure), as he fell completely into the abyss.
The first time I saw Alex and Edward get into an argument that escalated into much more than an argument, it was somewhat startling. It was during that initial tour and I was leaving their hotel room as it happened. They had been drinking, of course. As a manager, I’d always rather see my band members smoking weed than getting shit-faced on whiskey. While weed might have been illegal, it rarely provoked anything more painful than a boring conversation. But get Alex and Edward drinking, and it was only a matter of time before old wounds born of sibling rivalry began to ooze.
That first occasion, we had all been sitting in the hotel room, drinking and talking. Suddenly Edward and Alex veered off into their own little discussion, the subject of which was completely foreign to me. And when I say foreign, I mean that I did not understand a word, as they began screaming at each other in what I later learned was Dutch—the tongue of their motherland. It was one of the strangest things I had ever seen—these two ordinarily placid Southern California rockers, who usually spoke in a sort of pothead surf patois, suddenly nose to nose, spitting and snarling, and growling at each other in a foreign language, as if they had become possessed. I started to leave the room as their voices got louder—it was all just a little too crazy and pathetic, even for rock ’n’ roll. But before I could exit, they were on each other, slamming their fists into each other’s faces, grabbing great fistfuls of hair, and rolling around on the floor like drunken idiots.
As we separated them, all I could think was, Holy shit . . . I’ve got a couple madmen on my hands.
The truth is actually both less and more complicated than this. If you want to romanticize the Van Halen story, you can point to the brothers’ supposedly cosmopolitan and artful upbringing—ethnically diverse parents with an artistic bent; the boys were born to be musicians. On paper, sure—but the other side of the coin was that they came from a monumentally fucked up family that provided neither emotional nor financial stability.
In some ways, they grew up quickly; they also behaved like children well into their adult years. This, after all, was the way children settled disputes, with physical aggression. Moreover, despite appearing rather soft and skinny, both Edward and Alex carried themselves with the air of people who had spent time on the streets. I had been around a lot of people like this and had fallen prey to some of this behavior myself at times, but I was surprised to see it in the Van Halens.
I saw them come to blows only a few times, and invariably it ended with the two brothers hugging it out, as if this were the most normal thing in the world. Maybe it is. Maybe, in some families, you have to exorcise the anger on a semiregular basis, and the only way to do that is by hitting your brother in the face. I suppose, on some level, it’s preferable to suppressing years of emotional buildup with a grab bag of fun narcotics, but what do I know?
Despite occasional flare-ups, there was, in that first year or two, anyway, a genuine sense of camaraderie among not just the band members but the entire traveling circus. This was another reason why I fell in love with Van Halen: the job was fun. In all the time I spent devoting my life and sanity to this craft, I had never seen a group of guys that had such talent, personality, and unmatched sense of brotherhood between them. Van Halen wasn’t just a band but an honest-to-God team; a band in which all four partners shared equally in the culmination of their hard work and superhuman efforts (although this would change in later years). It didn’t matter who wrote the music or the lyrics—all the revenue was split four ways. This egalitarian approach to the business was designed to keep everyone happy and equally invested; it also served to remind them of their roots. They were friends first, bandmates and business partners second.
Quaint, isn’t it?
But they believed in this philosophy, at least for a while, and it helped make the first couple of years an unmitigated blast. Van Halen was a family, and that family included everyone who was on the road with us.