Everybody Wants Some Read Online Free Page B

graduated from nearby Arcadia High in 1972. He crossed paths with Alex Van Halen at Pasadena City College, studying psychology until his father gave him permission to switch to music. Even on rudimentary originals, Mike’s powerful lungs, expanded by blowing trumpet and running track, were an obvious strong point.
    Another of Alex’s classmates at Pasadena City College, Dave Roth, frequently supplied Mammoth with a PA system, but at least he had the good sense to charge ten bucks a night for rental. At one point, Roth auditioned for Mammoth, but the band was unimpressed with his free-wheeling renditions of Cream and Grand Funk Railroad standards. At that ill-fated meeting, a nervous Eddie left the room so older brother Alex could break the bad news.
    Undiscouraged, Roth formed the Red Ball Jets, an R&B-influenced act that played old rock and roll covers like “Johnny B. Goode,” a band where a huge horn section wouldn’t have been out of place. They rehearsed in the basement of Dr. Roth’s office building in San Marino, and frequently faced off against Mammoth in local battles of the bands in public parks. “It was never about the music for him, it was about the show,” Eddie recalled. “He was like an emcee, a clown. He was great at what he did.”
    Biding his time with theater courses in junior college, Roth was a big personality for a small suburban city. His constant manic energy grated on the down-to-earth teenage rock scene. He wore ridiculous costumes, talked constantly, and strutted and preened like the sex god he obviously believed he was. Mike Sobolewski’s first reaction when meeting Roth was, “Jesus Christ, get this guy away from me!”
    Borrowing liberally from his inspirations, Roth built his singing voice from an articulate palette of screams, including the primal roar of Ian Gillan from Deep Purple, the orgiastic squeals of the Ohio Players and Cold Blood, and a whole bag of tricks from obscure midwestern soul singers like Major Lance. Jim Dandy Mangrum of Black Oak Arkansas, a godfather of cock rock, claims that Roth asked permission to film his shows at a Hollywood club. If true, Roth was learning stagecraft from a lurid master. “It’s better to steal,” Roth later told MTV. “Inspiration doesn’t come from nowhere. You don’t lie in a dark black room and a burst of light appears with the hand of the Lord offering you a song. It doesn’t happen like that. You have to steal it from somebody. You change this and you change that—if it was good enough for Beethoven, it’s good enough for me.”
    Reconsidering his early rejection, Alex Van Halen sensed a fellow warrior in Roth. Besides, his brother was struggling as lead vocalist of Mammoth. Though his voice would have been adequate in any other local act, compared to the wunderkind’s magical guitar his singing sounded dodgy. Not only did Eddie’s playing shame other guitarists, it shamed his efforts as a frontman. Alex started to envision a whole package. Besides his boundless drive, Roth came with a rehearsal space, an Opal Kadett station wagon for transportation, plus the PA system that was currently costing Mammoth plenty of dough. So in late 1973, David Lee Roth joined Mammoth, and the band ditched the Blue Cheer/Cream power-trio configuration that had gone out of style in the late 1960s, becoming a quartet like Led Zeppelin—the template for the 1970s.
    As Eddie’s reputation spread, his picture-perfect renditions of the guitar gods gave way to a fluid yet unpredictable style he described as “falling down the stairs and hoping I land on my feet.” “I sometimes wonder myself when it was that I turned the corner and went my own way in playing,” he told Musician , “because the last thing I remember was playing ‘Crossroads’ and being Eric Clapton. All of a sudden, I just changed.”
    Shortly after David Lee Roth joined Mammoth, their hapless keyboard player was given the boot. The next business was a name