NO METHOD TO THEIR MADNESS : ‘We Really Generally Don’t Think,’ Says Metal Worker Eddie Van Halen

Given Van Halen’s track record over the past 13 years, one would suspect it had been following some brilliantly devised master plan.

Just as Led Zeppelin ruled heavy metal in the 1970s, Van Halen was the genre’s dominant act in the ‘80s, both in popularity and in influence on other hard-rock bands. From “Van Halen,” its 1978 debut release, to “OU812,” its last album of the ‘80s, the band scored eight consecutive million-sellers. A legion of guitarists sprang up to wail and screech in an echo of Eddie Van Halen. Scores of singers donned the tattered pants and copied the insouciant bad-boy antics of the band’s original vocalist, David Lee Roth.

The ‘90s aren’t starting badly for Van Halen, either. The recently issued “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” made its debut on the Billboard album charts at No. 1 (a more common feat this year than in the past because of changes in how the chart rankings are calculated). Perhaps a more telling measure of Van Halen’s continuing appeal has been its drawing power at the box office during a summer of slack sales for most other touring acts.

Most bands would have been at least momentarily fazed by the loss of a front man as mediagenic as Roth, who left for a solo career in 1985. He departed shortly after the album “1984” and its signature hit, “Jump,” had taken Van Halen from metal dominance to new prominence in the pop mainstream. Roth-less, Van Halen was far from clue-less. With veteran rocker Sammy Hagar taking over as its singer, the band solidified its standing as a top mainstream rock attraction with two No. 1 albums, “5150” and “OU812.”

Ask Eddie Van Halen about the musical method that underlies all this success, and he’ll tell you that the method is to have no method.

“We really generally don’t think,” Van Halen, 36, said in a recent phone interview from a Detroit tour stop. “There’s no preplanned anything to what we do, and people have a hard time swallowing that. There’s no master plan. There really ain’t.”

Or, as bassist Michael Anthony put it in a separate interview, “We throw it up against the wall, and when it sticks, that’s it.”

For a band supposedly flying by the seat of its pants (if Roth and his self-ventilating jeans were still around, one could say it was flying without the seat of its pants), Van Halen seems to have made a fairly astute move to a heavier sound on “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.” The two previous post-Roth albums had emphasized more of the heraldic synthesizers that buoyed “Jump,” as well as a polished, sleek backing vocal sound. Although he hardly fell into abnegation on the guitar (as one of his influences, Eric Clapton, did for a long time during the mid-’70s to late-’80s), Eddie Van Halen had toned down his act somewhat.

Now, just when bands such as Metallica and Guns N’ Roses are making musical and commercial thunder by playing it loud and rude, Van Halen is back with an extremely heavy-sounding album in which keyboards surface on just one song and guitar solos squiggle out from every cranny, like night crawlers after a downpour.

Keeping up with the competition? Eyeing the marketplace? Following a plan?

Repeateth Edward: no preplanned anything.

Rather than doing it by design, he said, Van Halen returned to metal-grade density spontaneously, keyed by a change in recording methods and studio collaborators.

As work began on the album, he said: “We all had the same thing in mind. ‘Let’s get the sound we have live, playing together in a room.’ Donn Landee (who engineered all the previous Van Halen albums) would isolate (instruments) to the point where it didn’t sound like we were in a room playing together--which isn’t bad, it’s just a different approach.

“We started working with Andy Johns in May of last year.” Johns is an Englishman whose engineering and production credits include the likes of Free, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. Johns’ knob-twiddling produced a sound that was “big and bad,” Van Halen said. “And when something is sounding big and bad, it inspires you to play a certain way.”

Alex Van Halen, the band’s drummer and, at 37, older brother of Eddie, said that Van Halen’s play-it-as-it-lays approach precludes any concern about being supplanted atop the metal heap by such rising contenders as Metallica and Guns N’ Roses.

“If you start looking around at other forms of music as competition, if you perceive that as a threat, the first inclination would be to write a song similar to that so you can beat somebody else at their own game,” Alex said. “The moment you do that, you’re not playing what you want to play.

“There’s room for everybody,” he continued. “From very early on, people are conditioned to be competitive. That’s why it’s tough just to groove. The less you try, the easier it flows.”

According to Alex, going through boyhood upheavals acclimated the Van Halen brothers to operating in an uncharted way.

Their early childhood was spent in the Netherlands, where their father, Jan Van Halen, scrounged for a living as a traveling horn player seeking out big band gigs. “We were taken all over the place,” Alex recalled. “If my dad was going somewhere, we’d all go to the gig and hang out. My mom couldn’t afford a baby-sitter.”

The family emigrated when Alex was 8 and Edward 7, settling in Pasadena. “For my dad, America was the land of opportunity,” Alex said. “Then he found out differently, of course. The big band thing wasn’t happening here, either.” The senior Van Halen, who died four years ago, made his living in day jobs, including janitorial and factory work, but he kept playing music on weekends.

As a result of the move, Alex said, “the only friends we had were each other. That’s part of the reason we’re so close. We knew no English whatsoever. It had a lasting effect on us in terms of (being able to accept) traveling and touring, and not being sure what the next day brings.”

Both brothers studied the piano from boyhood. “Mom had this grandiose idea of us becoming concert pianists,” Alex said. “We kept it up about 10 years. It made for a great foundation in music. You learned all the theory, and it forced you to listen to different kinds of music.”

Alex also learned to play the saxophone. But his parents obliged when he asked them for an electric guitar and amplifier. Eddie, meanwhile, was given a set of drums.

“One day, Ed picked up the guitar, and it seemed that the music just kind of flowed from him. I said, ‘You take the guitar, I’ll take the drums.’ ” Alex said he was game for the swap because he had seen the Beatles’ movie “A Hard Day’s Night” and “all the girls were running after Ringo.”

The brothers played rock through high school, then went on to junior college--but only as a cover for their real intention of pursuing a career in a rock band.

“My mom didn’t dig it at all,” Eddie Van Halen recalled. “She wanted us to be something respectable. When we first got signed to Warner Bros., my mom just hated it. Alex and I both had been born when my dad was on the road, and she didn’t want that for us. It was kind of weird in the house. My mom (Eugenia, now 75) hated it, and my dad loved it. You know what she said (when the band got signed)? ‘Yeah. How long will it last?’ ”

These days, the Van Halen brothers are getting a taste of what their mother was leery of. For the first time, they are touring as sometimes-absentee daddies. “Oh, man, I miss my baby so much,” said Eddie, whose wife, actress Valerie Bertinelli, gave birth to their first child in March. They named the baby Wolfgang, after Mozart. “When we get a couple of days off, I fly out to see them. If it wasn’t for this miniseries she has to do, they would be with me. Since I can’t breast-feed, she took him. Whenever I go out, he’s going to be out with me,” he said of touring trips. Alex said his wife, Kelly, and 2-year-old son, Aric, also will be with him on tour most of the time.

Van Halen put itself in a position to be signed by branching from the Top 40 club circuit into self-promoted shows that attracted substantial crowds around the Pasadena area. Anthony, from Arcadia, had jumped to Van Halen from a rival band, joining Roth and the Van Halen brothers. Like Eddie and Alex, Anthony was the son of a former big-band musician.

“We played covers early on,” Eddie Van Halen said. “You couldn’t find a gig unless you played the recent hits. We had to play KC & the Sunshine Band, ‘Get Down Tonight.’ It was a hell of a challenge,” given Van Halen’s basic rock-trio-plus-singer lineup. “We would have to sing the horn section parts. You had to be creative.”

Along the way, Eddie Van Halen came up with some guitar innovations of his own, developing techniques that called for tapping out notes with two hands on the guitar neck, and introducing the spiraling, screaming, sound that has become a hallmark of contemporary heavy metal guitar. In most hands, the Van Halen guitar style has become a cliche and worse--a torture device that conjures up visions of dentist’s drills and fire sirens. Van Halen himself has used his pyrotechnics more judiciously, playing with a strong rhythmic sense and bringing a sense of structure and melody to his solos.

“With me, it’s just been part of my playing for so many years,” he said. “With other players I see, it’s like, ‘Watch me; watch me do this trick.’ At the same time, it’s nice we do have an influence on people. I guess imitation is the best form of flattery, but it gets a little old.”

Van Halen says he can’t see revamping his style just because it has become so prevalent. “To me, it’s the way I play, and I’m not going to change because everybody is copying me. What I have done over the last few records is focus more on songwriting than just be the gunslinger speed guitar freak. It’s fun to solo as fast as you can and do all the crazy stuff. But as you mature, you realize you have to have the cake before you put a candle on it.”

A recent Musician magazine article about jam sessions Eddie Van Halen played with jazz-rock fusioneer Steve Morse and country guitar ace Albert Lee during this year’s National Assn. of Music Merchandisers (NAMM) convention in Anaheim suggested that Eddie ought to step out more often. It criticized the Van Halen band as a gilded cage that discourages experimentation and growth. Van Halen rejects the idea that he needs fresh musical surroundings.

“People are always asking me, ‘Ed, when are you going to do a solo record?’ But I write all the music for Van Halen. I’m not unhappy playing with my family, as opposed to doing my own thing. Van Halen is not constraining me from doing anything I want to do.”

Actually, he said, he has done some extracurricular music-making, but nothing he foresees releasing. “I’ve got a lot of twisted things, especially piano stuff. It’s like a spooky horror thing,” with sounds altered by inserting knives and screwdrivers and such among the piano wires. “But if it’s not fit for Van Halen, maybe it’s not fit for anyone.”

Besides the return to heavier rock, the biggest change on Van Halen’s new album lies in lyricist Hagar’s exploration of darker, more weighty themes. On songs like “In ‘N’ Out,” and “The Dream Is Over,” Hagar sings about economic hard times; “Pleasure Dome,” “Judgment Day” and “Right Now” all carry ethical messages.

Even the lusty “Poundcake” is a rejection of indiscriminate randiness in favor of loving monogamy (Hagar, 43, says “Poundcake” is a pet name of his for Betsy, his wife of 23 years). As for the album title, that too is more than just a joke, band members say. “It’s a way to say that censorship is a stupid thing,” Hagar said. “If we were some young band starting out that didn’t have any power or money, they’d make us change it. We were trying to make a point.”

The serious themes are a surprise, coming from a band that built its success on good-time rock ‘n’ roll containing a heavy measure of raunch. But Hagar says his thinking lately has run counter to what he calls the “fun, fun, fun” approach of Van Halen’s David Lee Roth era.

“In ‘N’ Out,” which depicts a character’s futile cradle-to-grave struggle to dig out of debt, evolved out of tragic personal experience. “My 17-year-old nephew got killed in a car wreck last year,” Hagar said, an emotional catch coming into his voice. “His parents,” Hagar’s brother- and sister-in-law, “couldn’t afford to bury him, and came to me for help.”

“The Dream Is Over” was intended as a message to the post-baby boom generation, with its diminished economic prospects. “I don’t believe the American Dream is still intact,” Hagar said. “It’s becoming an unattainable thing. It’s all a crap shoot out there. No more rules,” because there is no longer a clear path for securing the dream of a home, a family and financial well-being.

“I didn’t know whether to paint an angry picture and say, ‘Don’t waste your time trying to get something you can’t,’ or give people hope,” Hagar said. “The song is in-between. The chorus, where I’m saying “Dream another dream,” is supposed to give you hope. I don’t know what (the ‘other dream’) is, but I hope I’ll be able to give that information the next time.”

“Pleasure Dome” addresses the pitfalls of walking the economic heights that Van Halen has long inhabited.

“The ‘Pleasure Dome’ is what you want to go after, but you can get so damned lost in it, like Elvis Presley,” Hagar said. “It’s where you can do what what you want and nobody will bother you about it. That can (screw) you up bad. It’s not about me, but it’s what I see when I look down all the different paths available to me. It’s an insight to how it could be. People in my position can have almost anything they want, night after night, year after year. I have to stay centered. I have a wife and two kids. They provide a sanctuary for me, so when I come off the road, I can recoup and get centered again. I want that reality in my life, so I can continue doing what I’m doing and not burn out.”

Alex Van Halen is the band member who has come closest to being “lost in (his) own pleasure dome,” as the song’s refrain puts it.

“Everybody goes through a point in life where you have to push things past the edge,” the drummer said. “I was fortunate enough to step back and say, ‘Whoa.’ I didn’t want to end up like Keith Moon and John Bonham, God rest their souls. I over-partied at one point. I drank way too much more than I should have. We had just got off the ‘5150’ tour. I got home, and we had three months to kill. I just went out and tied a big one on. The guys in the band (and his wife) had the (guts) to say, ‘We don’t want to see you dead, trust us, you should do something.’ I was out there.” Van Halen said he quit drinking 4 1/2 years ago.

“That’s one of the trickiest things in your life, how to have fun without hurting yourself,” Eddie Van Halen said of “Pleasure Dome.” “So far, so good. I’ve got a little baby boy now, and that changes everything. If I come in from the studio after having a few too many beers, I feel bad, like, ‘I don’t want him doing this.’ ”

The emergence of sober themes doesn’t mean Van Halen isn’t still up for a rowdy time on stage, Hagar said.

“You still see all that when you see the show. Now there’s another dimension to it, that’s all. It’s because the band has gone deeper, it’s giving more. It’s more than just ‘fun, fun, fun.’ But girls still show us their (breasts). And I still get excited and stick my face in them.”

What: Van Halen.

When: Tuesday, Sept. 10, and Wednesday, Sept. 11, at 7:30 p.m. With Alice in Chains.

Where: Pacific Amphitheatre, 100 Fair Drive, Costa Mesa.

Whereabouts: San Diego (405) Freeway to Fairview exit; go south.

Wherewithal: $22. (Sept. 10 is sold out; only lawn seats available Sept. 11.)

Where to call: (714) 546-4876.