1 OUT UPON THE OCEAN
Reality â every kind of reality â may be perceived as a particular deployment or arrangement of things to be relied upon and worked to oneâs advantage.
â François Jullien, The Propensity of Things
Asked in 1980 if he might consider himself to be trash cultureâs greatest ever product, Van Halenâs David Lee Roth gave an unusual answer. Rather than being insulted by the suggestion that he might be no more than the latest passing fad, ripe for disposal, he was rather engaged with what it might mean to be trash. âI donât know if Iâm the ultimate productâ, he replied. âWhat is âultimate trashâ? God, maybe I could ascend to that.â He thought for a while, and realized that, of course, it had to be. âYeah, yeah!â he said. âDefinitely.â1
Trash is, if nothing else, a two-faced thing â once the stuff of desire, it becomes, by and by, relegated to a kind of nothingness. It speaks, perhaps, of the lures and traps of desire itself, which may promise happiness but, in fact, only reveals the truth of its transience. Trash is what it is because it slips out of our grasp. To aspire to such a condition â a thought that tickled the Zen-minded Roth â is, when all is said and done, to be at one with the impermanence of existence itself. Most of us battle against this; against giving ourselves up to the world, but for the Taoist such an aspiration makes perfect sense.
The temperamental counterpart of trashâs transience and negation of the desire to be is stupidity; a mute absence and denial of âselfâ that points to the horror of a meaningless existential void. As Roth once said â and not without coincidence â âfor many people, Van Halen represent the abyssâ. Or, as Charles M. Young of Musician magazine once put it in 1984, the band Roth fronted presented a conundrum to anyone who might want to fix it with a label. Who were they? What were they? âVan Halenâ were, he suggested:
(a) The Four Stooges, (b) more murderous than Abdullah the Butcher [the wrestler], (c) what would happen if you put Al Jolson in the studio with Beethoven, (d) lucky it hasnât run into a bridge abutment, (e) the best, (f) all of the above.2
When he first met Roth in 1984, Young figured that what he was facing was clearly a manifestation of the mythical figure of the trickster â he who collapses the boundaries of all thought and action that enable us to neatly organize the world.3 This was why the closer Young looked â he had predicted in a review of Van Halen for Rolling Stone magazine in 1978 that they would be a bloated FM rock band within a few years â the less easy it was to grasp what was there. As the American mythographer Joseph Campbell wrote, the trickster âalways breaks in, just as the unconscious does, to trip up the rational situation. Heâs both a fool and someone whoâs beyond the system.â4 In myth, he is manifested in the form of innumerable slippery, elusive figures: Hermes, Reynard the Fox, Brer Rabbit and countless others. In popular culture he is Batmanâs Joker, Robin Hood, the cartoon Wiley E. Coyote or Clint Eastwood in the guise of âThe Man With No Nameâ, whose trickery Roth borrowed in Van Halenâs âHang âem Highâ. As he told Spin magazine in 1986:
The man who came from nowhere and goes home to no one. I always felt that. I always had a real good time with it ⊠Iâm living it. Iâm breathing it.5
As Lewis Hyde notes in Trickster Makes This World, âall tricksters are âon the roadâ.â They represent âthe spirit of the doorway leading out, and of the crossroad at the edge of townâ.6 Of all the members of Van Halen, it is perhaps not surprising that Roth was the one who never settled down or got married; the one who harboured a romantic ideal about being on the road â whether that meant being in a rockânâroll band, or adventuring in the Himalayas (he conquered K2, the worldâs second-highest peak, and only failed to surmount Everest due to bad weather) or getting lost in some remote jungle (as he did in Amazonia, in 1983). And like the trickster figure, whose chief aim was to sow the seeds of confusion, and to buck the rules of the system â to reveal their true workings â Roth, too, was really up to no good. He was deceitful and shameless, âamoralâ, Young noted, âdriven by appetitesâ rather than reason or logic, and getting away with stuff in a way that no one else could â and doing it with a childlike glee.7 âIf youâre getting a bad impression of meâ, he would tell journalists, âspread it around.â
Van Halenâs rise to the top of the US charts coincided with the era during which various rockânâroll baddies were the target of a holy alliance of conservative interests; self-appointed guardians of cultural standards who spent too much time spinning vinyl records backwards in search of âsatanicâ messages. In Rothâs lyrical imagery, though, they would have found nothing more disturbing than allusions to Max Fleischerâs odd, spooky cartoon from the 1930s, Swing You Sinners! Nevertheless, when the so-called Washington Wives, led by Tipper Gore (wife of later vice-president, Al Gore) were campaigning against the perceived evils of popular music and for the values of what they termed the âmoral majorityâ, Roth was quick to declare himself toastmaster general of the immoral majority, just as others who took all this seriously queued up to deny the accusations in front of Congressional hearings. When Roth declared to journalists that he wouldnât âgo down in history, but I [would] go down on your sisterâ, you were never quite sure if he really meant it, or if he was just â like the trickster â collapsing the boundaries of thought and action, saying exactly what should not be said in public. Perhaps he, and Van Halen, were channelling the Three Stooges, acting as irritants to respectability.
In fact, Rothâs behaviour provoked the kind of response that lived up to the central ambiguity of a trickster figure. That is to say, he divided opinion â even among self-declared Van Halen fans. In this, he led Van Halen with him to some extent, but more often stood out as the main offender against good taste. As rockânâroll outfits go, this was a band of formidable musical ability â a band able to make their musical peers âsound like sluggish, unimaginative hacksâ, as the Los Angeles Times noted in 1982. Yet, here they were â in the public imagination at least â âpowered by love-him-or-loathe him vocalist David Lee Rothâ and his ânarcissistic swaggerâ.8 As Henry Rollins (the frontman of Los Angeles punks Black Flag) recalled:
People I knew who didnât usually voice their opinions, always had an opinion about that guy. Either they were into Dave or they wanted to punch that grin right off his face.9
Rollins was one of Rothâs fans, but nonetheless felt able to say that he âcould see why a lot of people hated his gutsâ.10 How could Roth, on the one hand, be capable of executing those quasi-balletic, martial arts moves that saw him spend much of his time during live shows off the ground and sailing through the air, yet on the other, be a fall-down drunk; a man running off too much junk food and sugar, to say nothing of more illicit substances?
Rothâs ability to make even his own audience uncomfortable did not diminish with the passing of the years, with one witness to his ill-fated mid-1990s stint in Las Vegas suggesting that his âpenchant for rambling fictional scenarios, extended blues jams and oblique Zen humor ⊠tests the attention spanâ of even his most loyal fans:
More than any other rock act or Vegas veteran, Roth reminds one of Sandra Bernhard in his ability to dispense comedy, discomfort, pensées and musical homages in one unwholesome package.11
This was the kind of response that was common among critics, who seemed to be both repulsed by Roth yet drawn unaccountably to him, and thus to Van Halen. The following reaction â the opening salvo from an article in Rolling Stone in 1979 â was fairly typical of the need many writers felt, if they were going to say anything positive about the band, to first outline some of the problems they had with the mere idea and presence of them:
Van Halen is the latest rock act to fall out of a family tree of deadbeats whose ancestry includes slave drummers on Roman galleys, Ginger Bakerâs Air Force and the street crews of the New York City Department of Sanitation.12
The articleâs author, Timothy White, nonetheless ended by saying that, in the Van Halen II album (the subject of his article) this âblockbusting four-man outfitâ had created an âamazingâ artefact that might astound distant generations of rock archaeologists. For the most part, however, it was Rothâs lack of self-discipline and modesty that had critics reaching for their notebooks. Thereâll always be people in the peanut gallery throwing stuff at you was the kind of thing he might utter in response, therein painting a picture of the critics as noisy upstarts in the âcheap seatsâ, not unlike the hard-to-please children of the TV show Howdy Doody (1950s), who delivered instantaneous judgements on the entertainment from their own little peanut gallery.
Cynthia Rose, writing about Van Halenâs Diver Down album of 1982 for the New Musical Express (NME), heaped praise on the musicality of the band, particularly brothers Eddie and Alex Van Halen, but observed that, while âthe tunes more than pass muster ⊠no quarter is given for anyone to get used to front man David Lee Rothâ.13 With the benefit of hindsight, this reaction was merely a further development in Roseâs seeming inability to rid herself of the spectre of the so-called âDiamond Daveâ and Van Halen. In truth she seemed destined always to be the one who would try to answer the question that Charles Young of Musician would pose â what, or who, is Van Halen? In NME â not entirely known for its support for long-haired American rockers â she always ended up with the job of reviewing the bandâs new albums; and, while she could never really hide the fact that there was some fascination there, that maybe she really liked them a great deal, it was an acceptance that was always equally cut through with disgust. She had been conned by these tricksters into liking this âthingâ. In her review of Fair Warning (1981), for instance, Rose was â as on other occasions â impressed with what the band had served up, musically. âThese guys do architect actual and varied songsâ, she said, âfrom Fair Warningâs stinging âSinners Swing!â and vivid âMean Streetsâ to the hyperkinetic âUnchainedâ âŠâ
this LPâs best numbers are constructed around Eddieâs whip-you-with-electric-eels showmanship and buoyed up by brother Alexâs Oblique Strategies drumming â which lashes the cymbals, varies the support system and attacks from behind instead of coming down on top of the rhythm in traditional thump and grind fashion.14
Yet, once again when it came to âlove-him-or-loathe himâ singer Roth, she felt compelled to lay at his door not only the blame for âthe sheer unbelievable obnoxiousness of the bandâs sartorial gambitsâ â she did have a point in that regard â but personal responsibility for âVan Halenâs successful vandalism of Western rockâs disarrayâ.15 Roth, however, slipping free of the grasp of the critic, was already one step ahead and turned those kinds of observations back at their source. âSure, Van Halen is storm and thunderâ, he told Don Waller in the Los Angeles Times:
Sturm und Drang, delivered at high velocity and close intervals. Itâs preposterous in magnitude. Itâs all bluster â a big fireball that eats itself up. Youâve gotta laugh at that sometimes. Look at the clothes I wear [Laughs real hard].16
It was almost as though he was saying â âanything bad you say about me and my band, I can outdo; you canât even beat me when it comes to criticizing myself.â But by 1984 you could have been forgiven for thinking she had always been a fan, as she congratulated Roth for reaching a level of âcareer construction that outstrips even that of Bob Dylanâ.17 Who knows what that meant, but it was a kind of accommodation â a throwing up of the hands to say: âOkay! I give in. You win.â Perhaps she saw that Roth, like Dylan, was a shape-shifter who fled any attempt to pin him down: a slippery fellow who had now earned the right to get away with it, or to get some recognition for remaining true to his tricksy ways. Indeed this might explain her appraisal of Van Halenâs MCMLXXXIV/1984 album, captured in a piece of writing which itself took the form of an elaborate ruse any trickster would have been proud of. Within a summary of the albumâs supposed influences comes the following:
The literary sources behind this album are two minor classics of the late 1930s: Leemingsâ Fun with String (Pub. Frederick A. Stokes) and Betcha Canât Do It (âhow to put 12 persons in II beds and other intriguing stunts guaranteed to break the ice at any partyâ) by Alex van Rensselaer, publisher Appleton-Century. Donât be deceived by the small âvâ in van Rensselaer. The two Van Halens are almost certainly distant blood relations of some sort, for much ideological pilfering from the obscure but original manual has taken place on numbers such as âPanamaâ, âGirl Gone Badâ, and âTop Jimmyâ.18
This fiction caught the spirit of Roth and Van Halen as accurately as anyone had, and also inadvertently threw light on something else without perhaps being entirely aware of it â the absent artistic âIâ of Roth, which flew in the face of the fetishism of authenticity, which so defined rock music and the most thoughtless and unimaginative examples of its associated criticism.
Elsewhere, the âlove-them-and-loathe-themâ reaction to Van Halen was equally in evidence. Barney Hoskyns could say in one breath that while âDavid Lee Roth is clearly a di...