Once a band achieves fame, it becomes fairly easy to read a variety of articles about the members, or the music. If a band’s early days gets addressed, often those details are relegated to two to three paragraphs of a profile. So a while back comics creator Cully Hamner intrigued me, when he made folks aware that Greg Renoff‘s upcoming book, Van Halen Rising: How a Southern California Backyard Party Band Saved Heavy Metal, was to be released in October 2015. Renoff’s book title makes clear part of what he sets out to reveal, but the aspect that really hooked me into learning more was the author’s decision to focus on Van Halen’s pre-1978 days (aka before they were famous and successful). To get a glimpse of Renoff’s writing style (as well as a taste of his post-1978 Van Halen knowledge) be sure to read his recent Medium piece, which also features legendary photographer Helmut Newton. If that is not enough fun for you after reading this interview, please be sure to peruse Renoff’s Van Halen Rising website.
Tim O’Shea: This book was researched partially by 230 interviews you conducted. How long did it take to conduct all of them?
Greg Renoff: I did my first interviews in 2008. When I first started, I was spurred on by curiosity about Van Halen’s early days more than the idea I’d write a book. I talked to a LA nightclub owner who’d booked Van Halen in 1976 and then to a Pasadena drummer who’d seen the Van Halen brothers perform live long before David Lee Roth joined the band. Then about a year later, I had a break from teaching and decided to dig into the topic some more by doing more interviews. After I started hearing more tales of the band members’ wild days before they were famous, I saw that there was a great story here that needed to be told in book form.
Were there certain early interviews that were critical linchpins that led you to greater information and sources that you otherwise would not have known about?
Good question, There are many people I could list here but I will single out three. In 2009, I contacted a now great friend of mine, Michael Kelley. He’s a walking encyclopedia of rock lore, and had seen Van Halen on the Sunset Strip back in 1976. Sometime after I also met Roger Renick, who’d grown up in Pasadena and knew the scene and the band’s ascent in Los Angeles close up. Roger then put me in touch with Janice Pirre Francis, who’d met the band back in 1976 and spent many years in the band’s inner circle. Their help was invaluable as I researched and wrote the book.
Would you have wanted to interview some of the critical members, or do you think with the passage of time, they may misremember aspects of the early history?
Occasionally, I will encounter people who believe that a good rock band bio could be written based only on interviews with the band members. I disagree. While I had hopes that I would interview members of Van Halen (I did interview Mike Anthony), I was equally interested in trying to speak to everyone from promoters and bar owners to fans and fellow musicians who were in the band’s orbit in those days. By late 2012, I had interviewed key figures like Ted Templeman, Donn Landee, Neil Zlozower, Marshall Berle, and Pete Angelus. That’s how fully fleshed out, accurate histories get written - by interviewing a wide range of observers and participants.
Given that you were trying to capture pre-1978 Van Halen history (and conducting interviews starting 30 years later), were there certain critical sources that you could not interview-as they were no longer living?
Yes. Sadly, two of the band’s 1977-era techs, Gregg and Sandy, both had died by the time I started working on the book. And of course I would have loved to have interviewed Mr. and Mrs. Van Halen. They would have had a perspective unlike any other.
What aspects of the early history proved to be the most challenging or elusive to research?
The big challenge was that almost no systematic primary research had been done on the band. As a result, when I attempted to pin down when Van Halen formed, when Roth joined, when Mike Anthony joined, when the band was in NY with Gene Simmons, when the band signed with Warner Bros., and when the band recorded their first album, I came across a maddening array of answers, almost all of them wrong. I’m happy to report that I was able to gain clarity on almost all these issues through my interviews and by extensive archival research. (I ended up with piles of newspaper ads and reviews from their early days.) So the long-muddied timeline of Van Halen’s early years in LA will be made clear when the book comes out.
In preparing this book, was there aspects of the band’s discography that you gained a greater appreciation for, having learned about the band’s early days?
Perhaps the thing I gained the greatest appreciation for was the work done in Sunset Sound by the band under the guidance of Templeman and Landee. While I certainly like parts of the Gene Simmons demo, Templeman took those same songs and turned dross into gold. He knew how to help craft those songs and how to get all of the best performances on tape. And of course Landee’s made the album sound amazing. But the bottom line is the band members delivered when they recorded the first album, and that’s what makes VH’s debut magical.
How early in the development of this book did you decide you would go for an ambitious title that includes the claim “a Southern California Backyard Party Band Saved Heavy Metal”?
That came late in the game, actually. By late 2012, I started to see VH’s role in the late 70’s music scene from a broader perspective. I thought then that there were things I wanted to say about a band that broke through at a time pop music was dominated by disco, soft rock, and new wave. I strongly believe that despite the band’s fame and legacy, most rock fans under-appreciate the band’s impact on rock history.
How important was social media to helping you research this book?
Very. Actually, Facebook was amazingly helpful in leading me to new interview subjects. I’d see a person’s post about how they’d hired Van Halen to play a backyard party back in 1974, and I would then message them. Without social media, and the generosity of so many great people who grew up in Pasadena, this book would have been much less rich in content.
In researching the music scene that Van Halen started out in, are there any bands or musicians you learned about that you found yourself asking: “How did they not become just as famous”?
Sure. I will give you one example. If you talk to guitarists like Great White’s Mark Kendall, Tracy G of Dio fame, and George Lynch about the late 1970s scene in LA, they will all tell you about Jimi Bates, a guitarist who played in a band called Stormer. He was an absolute monster, and I was told that Eddie, who knew him well, used to stand and watch him solo because he was so amazing. Sadly, he’s no longer with us.
Having achieved fame in the 1970s and 1980s, what do you think of the current incarnation of Van Halen: are they chasing a chance to be big again when they have reached the (albeit lucrative stage) of nostalgia popularity?
My take is that the Van Halen brothers (who I believe call the shots inside the band at this point) desperately want to avoid falling into a nostalgia trap. Thus they have never sanctioned the release of a box set, or even allowed Gene Simmons to release the demo recordings he has of the brothers playing KISS songs with Gene. To be sure, I don’t think the brothers think they’ll ever be as relevant as they were two decades ago, but I think they resist the idea of retrospective looks back at the past that would involve digging into the archives and releasing material. From the fan’s perspective, that’s unfortunate.