The filthy sex tape that almost brought down Van Halen: “Understandably horrified”
Van Halen was the last band that most people thought of as being the most responsible bunch of musicians in rock and roll.
Their shows felt like watching a 24-hour party rip through your town, and even when the rest of the world had to pick up the pieces after their city got rocked by them, they were on a massive road trip to see how much trouble they could get into whenever David Lee Roth was at the helm. But even for as much fun as they were having, all it took was a handful of bad decisions to put them in seriously hot water for the rest of their lives.
Sure, the band themselves weren’t exactly clean behind the scenes, but the kind of hijinks that they got into would have been enough to make the sleaziest bands in the world blush. There were nasty behind-the-scenes affairs that really made people question how much fun they were really having in the background, but even though many people would have left that to others’ imaginations, someone managed to capture them in all of their glory whenever they were cavorting with their female company back in the day.
Then again, is anyone that surprised that someone like ‘Diamond Dave’ was going to be one of the biggest sex fiends in the band? He was the one who was constantly talking about sex in every other song that they sang, and even if you couldn’t pick up on every single innuendo that he was talking about, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to find out what a song like ‘Feel Your Love Tonight’ or ‘Dirty Movies’ on Fair Warning are about.
But halfway through their takeover of the world, their road manager, Noel Monk, remembered the hot water that they got into when one of their roadies managed to come across tapes of them having sex with groupies on the road. Any other band would have wanted to keep those kinds of tapes to themselves, but after having the bright idea to show some of the videos to the female secretaries at their offices.
Since Roth appeared in “75% of the X-rated films,” Monk said that most of the movies had the staff “predictably and understandably horrified” by what they had seen. It might have been looked at as a fun gag at the time, but if this had happened in any other decade, chances are it would have got the band immediately cancelled, especially since most of them were being more than a little bit heinous whenever they showed up on camera.
If you look at what the rest of the band were doing, though, they weren’t about to let a couple of films get in the way of them taking over the world. The whole thing might not have been scrubbed from the public record by any means, but after being seized by the Warner Brothers offices, there was no chance that anyone was going to see those films ever again behind a wall of NDAs and God knows how much red tape.
Even if Monk was eventually let go as their road manager, it’s not like every member of the band was the most savvy when it came to their sexual escapades. There was even a woman who claimed to be pregnant with Eddie’s child after the guitarist was engaged to Valleri Bertinelli, but given the details and the time Eddie spent with the woman, chances are he needed a little bit more education as to what constituted impregnating a woman.
And given that Alex Van Halen is helping to keep the name of the band alive for as long as he can, chances are that those tapes will never see the light of day. You’re going to have to use your imagination as to what nasty things were going on backstage at a lot of those shows, but considering how much ‘Diamond Dave’ talked a big game onstage, what he has said publicly is only a fraction of what actually happened.
