Everybody Wants Some Read Online Free Page A

worried about her parents and my parents finding out, about getting busted for cutting school. Eventually her parents did find out, and their reaction surprised me. It was ‘why didn’t you come to us and let us help?’ I thought they’d call us scum.”
    Stashing the experience in the back of his mind, Eddie stayed focused on his guitar and his band with his brother. Though their schoolmates were already wild about them, at one show they completely changed the life of a kid from a nearby school, Dave Roth. He was a sponge for all forms of culture, high and low, mass and micro, and followed every dance craze from the Twist to the Freddie—yet he was somewhat sheltered. His parents forbade him to go to big rock concerts—until he was nineteen and snuck off to see Humble Pie. So when teenage Roth first saw Eddie Van Halen playing guitar, he saw the light.
    “Eddie was kind of a mentor,” Roth later told a TV interviewer. “I saw what he did with his fingers, and I knew that’s what I wanted to do with my feet, and with my voice.” Praise be and hallelujah.

2. Rats in the Cellar
    By the time Alex Van Halen graduated from Pasadena High School in 1971, he and his brother were well-regarded fledgling musical professionals. Continuing to direct and manage his band with Eddie, Alex started music classes at Pasadena City College. He signed up for a composition class, where he arranged West Side Story for a fourteen-piece jazz orchestra, and was still subbing with his father’s wedding band when needed. “I was surprised by how well Alex played our kind of music—polkas and waltzes,” said Richard Kreis, a regular bassist in Jan Van Halen’s group. “He carried the rhythm of the band! And while we set up before the bar opened, he’d watch the door while I got the beer from the tap.”
    The brothers had outgrown their neighborhood bands—the Trojan Rubber Company closed shop after bassist Dennis Travis moved away. In 1972, Alex and Eddie formed a new group with bassist Mark Stone. They wanted to call themselves Rat Salad, the title of a Black Sabbath instrumental from the ultra-heavy, groundbreaking new Paranoid album. Instead, the Van Halen brothers chose the name Genesis—the optimistic beginning of a musical career of biblical scale.
    As Genesis began playing backyard parties in Pasadena, a friend jokingly drew up a poster announcing “Genesis at the Forum”—summoning a hilarious fantasy that the band would ever be big enough to play L.A. Forum. Then one sad afternoon Eddie came home from the record store and glumly informed Alex that their band already had an album out—he had discovered the latest record by the British progressive rock band Genesis on the new-release shelf.
    Afterward they became known as Mammoth, a wild and woolly beast that promised a heavy step. For a while, the Mammoth lineup included a keyboard player, which Eddie hated because the electric piano filled up the sound and tied down his guitar playing. Besides playing guitar, Eddie also sang lead vocals in Mammoth, though singing was not his strongest point.
    “Rock Steady” Eddie, as he became known at school, soon followed Alex to Pasadena City College, where he studied composition with Dr. Truman Fischer, also a former teacher of Frank Zappa’s. Fischer was a follower of the visionary composer Arnold Schoenberg’s stern belief in learning the rules so you could completely ignore them. From this professor, Eddie received his lifelong creative license: If it sounds good, it is.
    While setting up on stages in high school gyms and auditoriums, Mammoth met fellow heavy travelers like Snake, boogie rockers who played ZZ Top and Foghat covers. Snake also lent the Van Halen brothers equipment—which was to be expected. Alex remained perpetually a few pieces of gear short of the bigger, better show, and he was shameless about borrowing what Mammoth needed to slog onward.
    Snake’s leader, vocalist and bassist Michael Sobolewski, had