How Gene Simmons discovered Van Halen: “The world’s most expensive demo tape”
For Eddie Van Halen, the music usually came before everything else. No matter how much David Lee Roth liked to strut around the stage like a glam rock equivalent of Bugs Bunny, it didn’t matter as long as Eddie got his time in the spotlight playing his signature tapping licks. There was a certain level of theatricality to everything they did, though, and that might have been because Gene Simmons helped discover them in the first place.
Because if you think about it, does Simmons really understand the meaning of the word ‘subtle’? In a group like Kiss, the entire premise of every show was to assault every sense in the listener’s body and leave them wondering what the hell just hit them after they saw a levitating drum set, bombs going off, and a demon so evil that his mouth dripped with blood and could breathe fire.
Underneath that beastly physique, though, there was a calculated businessman looking to put everything together. Simmons usually knew the ins and outs of the music business, but he was always looking for new talent, and he knew that there was something special with Van Halen when he heard their first demo.
Then again, it’s not hard to see what Simmons saw in them. Compared to all the other blues guitarists out at the time, hearing someone like Van Halen for the first time would be enough to blow minds the minute that Eddie launched into one of his trademark tapping solos.
To his credit, ‘The Demon’ flew the band to New York to get their first demo financed, but he was met with crickets when he turned it into his record company. Apparently, the idea of a nonstop party band didn’t exactly appeal to the group that was known for putting a literal circus together onstage, so they passed on Van Halen, leaving them wide open for Warner Bros to pick up.
Still, Eddie still considered this the real beginning of their recording career, saying, “He said, ‘You guys are a hot band, I’d like to work with you’. What it boiled down to was he wanted to take a shot at producing a rock band, so we said, ‘Sure’ because he was paying for it all. We went to New York, made the world’s most expensive demo tape, and never ended up using it.”
Even though Eddie didn’t care for overdubbing every one of his parts, he harboured no ill will towards Simmons after the fact, even going so far as to credit him on the inner sleeve of Van Halen’s debut record. Looking at the demo that the group made with the Kiss frontman, they already had the makings of the entire first half of their career.
A lot of the debut record was about creating a party atmosphere, but they already had more than enough on the cutting room floor when they were done. There are even a handful of songs on the demo that wouldn’t get completed until Van Halen II, like ‘Women in Love’, and even the basic skeletons of tracks like ‘House of Pain’, which wouldn’t see the light of day until their last album with Roth, 1984.
When looking at the way that the group behaved afterwards, they picked up a few cues from him. Even though they let the music do the talking a lot of the time, it’s impossible to think that Roth’s habit of swinging around a samurai sword and hanging from the rafters at some shows didn’t at least a few pages out of Kiss’s playbook.
