Diamond Dave, as every child knows, was not the lead singer of Van Halen forever. In 1985, maddened by his vanity, his mania, his martial arts, his “surgically implanted disco beat,” and his habit of banging on their hotel-room doors at nine in the morning looking for a roller-skating partner, the brothers gave him the boot. Dave’s insufferability is something East Coast radio audiences were apprised of when he (briefly) took over Howard Stern’s spot last year. What a disaster that was. Four months of Dave bigmouthing away and grunting “Nh! Show me!” to his in-studio guitarist before the suits at CBS put the whole thing out of its misery. (Christe comments gently that Dave’s “loosely organized rants seemed ill-suited for high-powered morning drive-time radio.”) But as Dave was to Howard, so Sammy was to Dave: beneath his beach-ball cheeriness, Van Halen’s second singer was a ruthless agent of mediocrity, and he brought them down. Sammy Hagar could probably sing better than David Lee Roth, but without Dave’s raddled, ironic, Bing-Crosby-on-Aquanet croon, the whole thing fell to pieces very fast. (Quality-wise, that is. They remained a commercial juggernaut.)
Eddie, however, boiling his strings and building his own axes, never quite lost it. Fret-melting spoodly-oodly whammy dives, sounds never before heard — such a facility kept edging into the supernatural. Christe nails it: “As always, he seemed to be operating effortlessly in a slow-motion zone, throwing out licks and flourishes as if he had all the time in the world and everyone else was crawling along at half-speed.” Where did this power come from? “A man can receive nothing, except it be given him from Heaven,” is how John the Baptist put it. Eddie, no less succinct, was of the same view: “It was just given to me. Anyone who thinks that they’re responsible for something like that can kiss my ass. God just picked me to do this.” Eddie’s religiosity burgeoned as he attempted to get himself off booze; the culmination was that extraordinary slab of Christian super-rock “The Seventh Seal” (from 1995’s Balance). “Splash that holy water on me/Drown my faith in Trinity, yeah!” To be fair to Sammy Hagar, he does a hell of a job with this song — and there’s no way Dave could have sung those lyrics.
In Ian Christe, whose previous book was the heavy-metal encyclopedia Sound of the Beast, Van Halen have their ideal biographer — savvy, sympathetic, expert, funny ha-ha. They refused to talk to him, the various wars of succession having left everyone mired in ancient rancors. Not to be deterred, Christe dived into the secondary sources, and his book enjoys to the full the privilege of having no contact at all with its subjects. (“Ken Burns never met Abe Lincoln, either,” he reminded me when I reached him via e-mail.) The quotes in Everybody Wants Some are culled from magazines with names like the Inside and Bass Frontier, but this is no cut-and-paster: the details are all here, and a remarkable degree of insight. From an affectionate but not-altogether-respectful distance, Christe tracks his protagonists along their comic-book trajectories: Eddie’s marriage to a soap queen; Sammy’s product diversification into clothing, mountain bikes, and tequila. “The still-inscrutable Alex,” runs one representative sentence, “appeared to be taking bizarre drummer behavior to new heights, performing with a Freddie Mercury walrus mustache and a neck brace.”
