Everybody Wants Some Read Online Free PDF Page B

base—you didn’t have to be twenty-one to get loaded underneath a palm tree and pass out on the lawn. But eventually Van Halen landed gigs playing as many as four sets a night at beer bars like Walter Mitty’s Rock N Roll Emporium. “To me that was the epitome of a rock and roll club,” Alex said. “And every night we played there I had this vision that we were playing some sort of large arena.”
    Los Angeles is a big city with a lot of neighborhoods. Several nights a week Van Halen played at Perkins Palace, Walter Mitty’s, the Proud Bird, the Civic Auditorium, Barnacle Bill’s, the Swiss Park, or the occasional pizza parlor. And as the band grew up and started playing more clubs, its audience came of age or got fake IDs and followed. For some reason, Van Halen still couldn’t get booked in Pasadena bars. “We couldn’t even get work at the local club, the Handlebar Saloon!” Eddie later told Creem .
    After failing the audition at least once, Van Halen won a regular spot beginning in April 1974 at Gazzari’s Teen Dance Club in Hollywood, playing cover songs for over three hours a night. Eddie bought platform shoes for the occasion and nearly broke his ankles. As documented in The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization 2 , Gazzari’s was a bawdy, go-go scene relic that survived into the 1970s with rock excess and a touch of vaudeville. The best dancer in the crowd won thirty dollars—incentive to copy the moves on Soul Train and American Bandstand and hopefully bump into the girls standing nearby.
    Roth honed his stagecraft by emceeing the dance contest between singing songs. His joining the band had opened the door to Hollywood—club owner Bill Gazzari famously called him “Van,” assuming the band was named after the singer. Though considered by many to be obnoxious, the band’s only impediment to sure success, Roth was already choreographing stage and lighting moves that made every little lick memorable. The Van Halens handled the music, and he took care of the rest.
    “We’re playing dance music for people who like to party tonight,” Roth chatted up a Pasadena crowd. From his earliest moments onstage, he was riffing on song titles, talking a mile a minute, looking to burn through his awkwardness as fast as possible and become a seasoned stage master. “No sense trying to be high-class and play nonsense shit. We’ll play something maybe you can relate to. At least you can get up and dance, man, find out if that honey you’ve been looking at wants to look at you.”
    With his windblown hair and hairy exposed chest thrust outward, Roth was a fusion of pop icons Farrah Fawcett-Majors and Burt Reynolds—but he wasn’t hanging next to Robert Plant on bedroom walls just yet. In 1975 he was still a loose, chatty kid, rattling off stage raps just to hold back the hecklers. He taunted rocker boys to “get mellow and imitate Soul Train ,” then laughed when they shouted their disdain for soul music. Nevertheless, while the strong bass lines and Alex’s drums punctuated the California air, the young ones danced boldly.
    Even as the band scored entry-level Hollywood showcase gigs at Gazzari’s—a glamorous position compared to the bowling alleys of Pasadena—they were taking home less than a hundred bucks a night, hardly enough for four guys in their twenties to keep their enterprise rolling. Eddie’s mother badgered her baby to take his future more seriously. With her musician husband cheering the boys’ progress with every step, it was up to Mrs. Van Halen to think sensibly. She insisted that Edward allow her to sign him up for computer classes at the DeVry Institute of Technology in Phoenix, Arizona.
    If Eugenia Van Halen had won that family fight and Eddie had applied his talents elsewhere, Phoenix might have become the center of some kind of unorthodox revolution in personal computing. Instead, under Eddie Van Halen’s influence, Southern California would soon become the holy land of