Free Everybody Wants Some by Ian Christe Page A

holding a cane while entertaining a bevy of nurses.
    Released thirteen months after the first album on March 23, 1979, Van Halen II went gold the following month, and platinum the month after that. It peaked at number 6 on the strength of “Beautiful Girls” and the Top 20 success of “Dance the Night Away.”
    The record kicked off with Clint Ballard Jr.’s “You’re No Good,” also the lead track on a number 1 1974 album by California soft rocker Linda Ronstadt. Now the boys of noise were repurposing her broken heart for their own needs. Stepping lightly with a volume-swell guitar intro, the track kicked in like a comeuppance to all the feel-good mellow fellows of the West Coast music establishment.
    Alex identified “Light Up the Sky” as the band’s true musical direction at the time, or at least his personal preference—a swerving metallic number with a tender underbelly, stop-start rhythms, and a flashy guitar solo. He dismissed “You’re No Good” as “somebody else’s idea of a hit single”—presumably Templeman, who remained a record company man at heart, always looking to deliver chart action from the bands he produced.

    Eddie’s guitar ran thick through the mix, deftly spinning pirouettes around the thrust of the songs. He still declined to double his rhythm tracks. To thicken his “brown” guitar sound, he preferred to turn up the volume, overdrive the circuits, and let the amplifiers crackle with natural warmth. The beautiful bell-like intro to “Women in Love” would stand as one of his proudest moments.
    For “Spanish Fly,” another of Eddie’s high points, he played on an ordinary Ovation nylon-string guitar. An acoustic flamenco-style answer to the electricity of “Eruption,” the one-minute solo still relied self-referentially on tapping. While guitarists were still reeling from his finger-tapping innovations on the first album, now Eddie was admon-ishing his acolytes with tapped harmonics, opening another vocabulary for lead guitar.
    The band returned to the demo sessions for the first album, bringing back club-pleasers like “Somebody Get Me a Doctor,” “D.O.A.,” and the Deep Purple–influenced “Bottoms Up!” with its blasting backup vocals. Likewise, “Outta Love Again” was one of the oldest Van Halen songs, dating to before Mike had joined the band. “Beautiful Girls” had also appeared on the Templeman demos under the name “Bring On the Girls”—the album version made the band’s horny teenage approach to courtship a little nicer.
    More than on the first album, producer Templeman’s mellow Doobie Brothers chops shone through. Yet according to Roth, “When Van Halen II was recorded and ready to go, everybody at Warners thought it was a failure.” Van Halen were succeeding underneath the radar of their own corporate masters.
    From March to October 1979, Van Halen embarked on their first headlining tour, suitably dubbed the “World Vacation.” No longer only along for the ride, they were doing heavy lifting—thirty-six tons of gear were required to get the show on the road. Streamlining their operation, they did lose a little luggage by firing Marshall Berle and promoting Noel Monk to band manager as a reward for his success as road manager.
    The band now dressed in striped overload—thin stripes, thick stripes, vertical stripes, and horizontal stripes. “We know that people come to see bands that look and act special,” Roth said, “and that’s why we dress in some outrageous costumes and put on a visual show, live right in front of your naked steaming eyeballs. We’ve got the tightest pants in the business.”
    He was right—to kids who switched off the tube ten seconds before heading to a Van Halen concert, the band looked like Charlie’s Angels —two shag brunettes and a feathered blonde with a short, squat Bosley on bass guitar. The Van Halen generation was raised on The Partridge Family , where every family had a rock band in their