Red - My Uncensored Life In Rock Part 11

He walked up to me, hunched over like a little old man, a cigarette in his mouth. He had a third of his tongue removed because of cancer and he spoke with a slight lisp.

"Are you all right, man?" he said.

"I'm fine," I said.

"Well, you look a little beat up," he said.

I glanced at Al, who was laughing. Kind of. the thought flashed through my mind that I should get the f.u.c.k out of there-this guy is crazier than a loon. But he gave me the give-me-a-hug move, an awkward embrace for sure. He was not only the weirdest I'd ever seen him, he was more tore up than anybody I ever saw. But I hugged him. My idea was, if we were going to get along, we would make a new record.

"Let's go play some music," I said. "Play me some stuff. What do you guys got?"

He went digging through all these tapes and played me a bunch of song ideas, just him and Al jamming, like always. Some of it was really cool. I was going, "I like that, I like this, I don't necessarily like that." I stayed down there for a few days and tried to write with them.

The earliest the day would start was noon. There were times Eddie did not come down to that studio until nine o'clock at night. He lived next door. Al would go check on him.

"He had a hard time last night," Al would say. "He was up trying to write songs."

He may have lost a chunk of his tongue to cancer, but he was still smoking cigarettes. He claimed the cancer came from putting the guitar pick in his mouth while he used his fingers to play. I told him cigarettes killed our manager, Ed Leffler, but he didn't buy that. He walked around all day drinking cheap Shiraz straight out of the bottle. That's why his teeth were all black. "Ed, why don't you get a gla.s.s for that?" I said.

He held up the bottle. "It's in a gla.s.s," he said.

He was living with a pathologist, who kept taking slices off his tongue, to check for cancer. He beat the cancer. He told me he cured himself by having pieces of his tongue liquefied and injected into his body. He also told me when he had his hip replacement, he stayed awake through the operation and helped the doctors drill the hole. What a fruitcake.

I don't know what he was doing, but he would keep going for what seemed like three or four days at a time. He used to hang out with one of our opening acts on the tour and come into their dressing room before the show. Whatever he was doing, he kept it out of view. I never saw what it was, but he was doing something. Plus drinking wine all day. He would never be in one place longer than twenty minutes.

"I'll be right back," he would say. "I gotta take a s.h.i.t." Gary Cherone told me he did that once in the middle of a show.

His marriage was over. Valerie was gone. He finally invited me over to this giant, extravagant, sixteen-thousand-square-foot house that he and Valerie had built before she split. It looked like vampires lived there. There were bottles and cans all over the floor. The handle was broken off the refrigerator door. It was like a b.u.m shack. There were spider webs everywhere. He had big blankets thrown over the windows. The mattresses were stripped off the beds and leaned against the wall for soundproofing. He was making music and trying to get the sound right. He said we were going to record a lot over there. He had dug a trench to run wires from the studio to his house. We never used it even once for the three songs we eventually did record.

He was sleeping on the floor with a blanket and a pillow. There was no food in the cupboards. I had never seen a dirtier place in my life. It was like the house out of that movie Grey Gardens Grey Gardens.

This was Eddie Van Halen, one of the sweetest guys I ever met. He had turned into the weirdest f.u.c.k I'd ever seen, crude, rude, and unkempt. I should have walked, but Eddie's got a very charming, cunning side to him, where you feel like he's got a good heart. He's going to come through. He's going to clean up and we're going to get this thing done.

I thought some of the music was great, but it was all recordings. Getting him to actually play music proved more difficult. He started to play the song that became "Up for Breakfast" on the Greatest Hits Greatest Hits record. The keyboard part was already digitally recorded. Al and Eddie were going to play live to show me. I had a microphone in my hand. I was ready to jam with them like we always did. He started, and stopped. record. The keyboard part was already digitally recorded. Al and Eddie were going to play live to show me. I had a microphone in my hand. I was ready to jam with them like we always did. He started, and stopped.

"I've got to play the keyboard part," he said.

Ed would start the song, and then go, "Wait, wait, wait. I gotta change my amp." He'd never get more than a couple bars into it. "Oh, no, no, wait a minute. This ain't right. I gotta switch guitars." He couldn't make it through the d.a.m.n song. About two hours later, Al pulled out a tape and played me an already recorded version. I loved what I heard. The keyboard sequence reminded me of "Why Can't This Be Love" and another one of my favorites, "Mine All Mine."

But the sessions were a mess. Al was in complete denial. I would try and talk to Al about his brother, but he wouldn't hear it.

"You know him," Al would say, pointing at Eddie's signature painted guitar. "See all those stripes, whacked out things, all over the place? That's the way his mind works. Everything this way, that way, scattered. Can't focus. Can't concentrate."

We planned on recording an alb.u.m in three months, but pretty quickly it became apparent we had three songs that were going to be all right, and there wasn't going to be any alb.u.m. We brought in producer Glen Ballard, who made Alanis Morrisette's Jagged Little Pill, Jagged Little Pill, a total pro who really tried to make things happen. I had written my lyrics. Eddie had piles of ca.s.settes. We salvaged old tapes-sessions with Cherone? Roth? I don't know-sliced and diced them into new songs and I wrote lyrics. We had all that ready within one week. It took three months for Ed to do the guitar parts to three songs and a couple of solos. The Eddie Van Halen I first met could have done that in an hour. a total pro who really tried to make things happen. I had written my lyrics. Eddie had piles of ca.s.settes. We salvaged old tapes-sessions with Cherone? Roth? I don't know-sliced and diced them into new songs and I wrote lyrics. We had all that ready within one week. It took three months for Ed to do the guitar parts to three songs and a couple of solos. The Eddie Van Halen I first met could have done that in an hour.

I was in there one day when Ed came in with a C-clamp. Glen Ballard asked me to come down and be part of all the sessions, try to keep the vibe good and help orchestrate this thing-help him, really. He didn't want to be in there alone with this madman.

Eddie had this Telecaster he wanted to play, but he could never get it to stay in tune. Every time he tried it, it played differently. They had been working on this for three or four days when Eddie took the guitar to his workshop, C-clamped it to his workbench, and ran cables out of the studio down the driveway. It didn't work, of course.

It seemed like whenever I went to the studio around five o'clock in the afternoon, Ed still hadn't shown up yet. I'd hang around, but by the time Eddie made it down to the studio at nine o'clock, I was gone. He would burn out everybody, staying up working all night. When I tried to talk to him about it, he looked at me like I was crazy. "You know I can't do anything unless I'm creative," he said.

Ed decided he wanted to play ba.s.s. He wouldn't let Mike play ba.s.s on these three songs. On one song, "It's About Time," it took him at least a week to do the ba.s.s part. Mike could have done it in an hour. When they finally laid down the rhythm guitar tracks, that was all I needed to sing. I didn't need his guitar solos. I didn't need any of the other production. As soon as they got that, I went in and knocked out my vocals on all three songs in two hours. Michael Anthony came in and we did all the backgrounds in another two hours. Half a day, we were done. Eddie was still asleep. By the time he came down, we were finished. I left. They spent the next three months doing Eddie's guitars.

We started rehearsals for the tour. The concert was the hottest attraction of the summer. Promoters laid down big bucks and snapped up eighty dates. The Van Halens wanted a new ba.s.s player. I told them I would not do a reunion without Mike. They still managed to grind him down to a small percentage of what he would have earned as a full partner-Al, Irving, and I all gave up pieces to give Mikey some-and he signed away all further rights to Van Halen after the tour. They were mad at him. They were mad at me, too. I just didn't realize yet how mad they were.

They were still p.i.s.sed about Cabo Wabo, and holding on to the idea that I screwed them somehow on the deal. If anybody did that, it was Ray Danniels, their former manager. When the government put the yellow ribbon around the club, they wanted to shut it down and wouldn't spend any money to keep it open. We were still fighting about that when the band broke up. Ray Danniels gave me Cabo Wabo in exchange for my interest in the Van Halen trademark. At the time, they didn't care, but by the reunion, the tequila was everywhere and people were always coming up and talking about the cantina. It drove them nuts.

They put it in the contract that I could not wear any Cabo Wabo T-shirts onstage or mention anything about the tequila or the cantina on the mike. I went straight to a tattoo parlor and I got this giant Cabo Wabo tattoo on my shoulder. I knew we would be carrying giant video screens and that, as the lead vocalist, I was going to get plenty of close-ups on those giant video screens. I didn't need a T-shirt.

They didn't know I did this. I made a point of wearing long-sleeved shirts. But Mikey knew. He would walk into a rehearsal and slap me on the shoulder. "How ya doin'?" he said. It hurt like a mother with all that black in the tattoo. Mike kept slapping me on the shoulder and making jokes, but the Van Halens didn't know what I'd done.

Rehearsals didn't go well. Eddie was having trouble finishing songs. Something would go wrong with his equipment. It was the same routine as when we'd first started messing around in the studio months before. He would start songs, but wouldn't finish. I left at dinnertime. Al would stay up all night with him. Eddie never played the whole set at rehearsal. All he wanted to play at rehearsal was the three new songs. He wouldn't learn the old songs. Something was always wrong. I'd walk into a rehearsal and he'd be tearing apart his speakers. The three new songs were all he knew, kind of, and he didn't know them all that well. We could play the keyboard songs-with the keyboards on tape-and he could noodle along, "When It's Love," songs like that. We never got through the other songs-"Runaround," "Top of the World," "Finish What You Started." He could not play "Why Can't This Be Love."

Photographic Insert II [image]

At the construction site for the Cabo Wabo Cantina in 1989.

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My Merlin 3 plane that I bought not long before Cabo Wabo opened.

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The Cabo Wabo grand opening weekend.

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For the grand opening of the cantina, Van Halen came down for the weekend and performed.

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Van Halen, "Poundcake" time, 1991.

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With Eddie on the Right Here, Right Now Tour in 1991.

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With my brother, Bobby Jr., in Malibu on Grammy night, 1992.

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Ed Leffler and his second wife.

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Kari and me at our wedding dinner with the Van Halen members and their wives.

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With Kari and Kama on Kama's first day home from the hospital after she was born in 1996.

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With John Entwistle from the Who at my Cabo Wabo birthday bash in 2000.

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At the Cabo Wabo plant in Jalisco, Mexico.

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With my daughter Samantha in 2001.

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At the Cabo Wabo agave fields in Jalisco.

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With the Wabos in Sacramento, 2009.

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The party onstage.

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Lars Ulrich of Metallica at my Cabo Wabo birthday bash.

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Singing with my son Aaron at the Cabo Wabo in Lake Tahoe.

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From left to right: Mickey Hart, me, Bob Weir, and Mike Anthony.

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Jamming with Mikey and drummer Matt Sorum at my Cabo Wabo birthday bash, 2008.

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The backstreets of Cabo.

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With Kari in our Cabo front yard.

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