Everybody Wants Some Read Online Free

became a long jumper at Dana Junior High. He played trumpet in the marching band, and stayed active in sports, going out for baseball. After his older sister, Nancy, brought home psychedelic acid-rock bands like Electric Flag, Cream, and Blue Cheer, Michael’s attention wandered to the loud, animal side of music. He learned the walking bass line to Electric Flag’s “Groovin’ Is Easy” and admired the band’s bassist, Harvey Brooks. Straying from the conformity of the high school band, he idolized bassist Dickie Peterson of Blue Cheer—an iconoclastic hippie whose tough attitude was basically one giant middle finger to the world.
    At fifteen, with younger brother Steve on drums and friend Mike Hershey on guitar, Mike formed Poverty’s Children, later known as Balls. His bass was a cheap Japanese Teisco guitar belonging to Hershey—they removed the two highest strings to create a “bass” guitar. Though he played catcher on local baseball teams as a left-hander, he considered himself ambidextrous—in fact, he started playing bass as a lefty, and switched sides because a right-handed instrument was easier to find.
    Since Michael wasn’t sure how to tune a bass, he tuned the four strings to an open E chord for the first year. He soon acquired a Fender P-bass copy at a local flea market. Like Alex Van Halen, Michael also played with his father’s band, a polka combo, tooting a trumpet for pocket money up until college.
    By their midteens, Alex and Eddie were regularly performing live sets of covers by Black Sabbath and ZZ Top, while joining their dad for his regular gig at the North Continental Club in North Hollywood, acting as designated drivers when needed. They were several inches, many dollars, and quite a few decibels short of where they wanted to be, but they were resourceful and shameless enough to beg or borrow any equipment they needed for their gigs.
    In 1971, the Van Halen boys formed the Trojan Rubber Company, a power trio with neighbor Dennis Travis on bass. Already the boys were little-league outlaws. They smoked cigarettes like European street kids—their mom, Eugenia, even bought them packs to smoke. They had to call themselves the Space Brothers to get permission to play a Catholic high school—the priests and sisters found cosmic drug references more acceptable than a band named after condoms.
    By any billing, the Van Halen brothers became known for their spot-on impersonations of cool hard rock bands like Cream and Cactus. Eddie had been playing through a 100-watt Marshall guitar amp from the time he was fourteen. Competing in a local battle of the bands against kids eight to ten years older, Alex was already stealing shows with a bombastic set piece—Ginger Baker’s entire fifteen-minute-plus drum solo from “Toad.”
    While other kids were dating, experiencing heartbreak, getting into fights, and enduring the endless social humiliation of high school, Eddie sat most of those years out. Sequestered in his bedroom, he entered into a long-term relationship with his guitar. “Everybody goes through their teens getting fucked around by a chick or not fitting in with the jocks at school. I just basically locked my room for four years,” he said.

    His mind may have been with his guitar, but his skill as a guitarist made him popular. He experienced sex at an early age, and girls were always interested in this sweet, shy boy. In the eleventh grade, his steady girlfriend became pregnant. “It was very confusing,” he told writer David Rensin in TeenAge . “We didn’t even have enough money to go to a doctor to see if she was pregnant. And getting out of school to take care of it was a feat in itself. Luckily I had a friend in the school office who gave me blank admit slips.”
    The potentially life-changing event was over quickly, before gravity really kicked in for the young couple. “She wanted an abortion,” Eddie said. “We went to Planned Parenthood and talked it over. We were