Everybody Wants Some: The Van Halen Saga
Van Halen is one of rock’s great soap operas. The band has gone through three flamboyant front men, a guitar god who had fought alcoholism and cancer, and a bass player who was recently replaced by said guitar god’s son after 30 years. So no matter who the author was, this books was going to tell a great story. And Ian Christie, who previously wrote an impressive history of heavy metal, Sound of the Beast, does a formidable job, but sometimes the teenage rock fan inside him gets in the way of his chance of producing a truly great rock bio.
One thing that Christie gets across is that he is firmly in the Roth camp with it comes to which era of Van Halen he truly loves. Not that he can be blamed, since Diamond Dave is the once and future King of the VH Empire, but when writing what he calls “the first definitive history of the ultimate American rock band,” sometimes you have to take the good with the Hagar. The fact that he includes an Appendix called “Van Hagar For Dummies” so he can point out to Roth-ites the “least worst songs” after Dave left the band, shows that even though Sammy is the voice of one’s generation VH, doesn’t mean he has to like it.
I was also surprised that for a band that prided itself on being the Sex Gods that groupie-d their way from one end of the US to the other, the backstage details are sparse. The only real story he tells is of Roth’s infamous system of giving backstage passes to roadies to hand out to hot women, then rewarding the employee with $100 for the one who picked out the girl Dave had sex with that night. But if you’ve watched MTV or VH-1 in the last 20 years, you’ve already heard the story. And with details of trashed hotel rooms and fire extinguisher fight, you get the feeling you’ve heard some of this before. But at least the often-cited “Brown M&M” gets a final explanation after years of urban legend.
The most interesting part of Christie is how he tries to unravel the mystery that is Eddie Van Halen. He carefully documents EVH’s rise from immigrant son to legend to hermit, with the hope that a shredding phoenix will rise from his alcohol-soaked ashes. Christie details Eddie’s tabloid marriage, and eventual divorce, to Valerie Bertenelli, and how his relationships with all of the Van Halen front men (including Gary Cherone) are not just love/hate relationships between men, but within himself.
Everybody Wants Some tells a four-star story, and I would have give it that rating if not for two things, which I expect better from a writer like Christie. First, when talking about the change from 80s metal in popular music, he says “guitar solos were shunned in popular music like a cause for AIDS.” It just seemed like a weak attempt to squeeze in a mention of the disease, even though random sex seemed to rule David Lee Roth’s life. Second, only a true Roth disciple could have positive things to say about Dave’s foray into talk radio (he says the show made Roth seem more “nuanced and interesting”). To paraphrase the voice on the loudspeaker on Van Halen’s “Unchained,” c’mon Ian, give me a break.
