WHERE HAVE ALL THE GOOD TIMES GONE?

“I just can’t get along with people. They don’t understand me… I spend a lot of time alone, playing my guitar.”
Eddie Van Halen

As they listened to Noel Monk break down exactly how, where and why their money was going to be spent, no one in Van Halen could have been oblivious to the cold, hard, undeniable fact that the proposition they were being invited to consider was, by the letter of the law, illegal. The practice of ‘payola’ – the offering of cash, gifts, holidays, drugs or sexual favours to influential individuals at radio stations in exchange for airplay – may have been as well established as the music industry itself, but just because everyone else did it, or turned a blind eye when it was sanctioned on their behalf, this didn’t make the act any less palatable.

And yet, as Van Halen’s manager patiently explained that, in the considered and trusted opinion of Warner Bros. Records, offering financial inducements to selected radio stations for guaranteed airtime was the only realistic option now available to them in order to boost sales of their new album from gold to platinum status, the decision to be taken seemed like a no-brainer. As Monk recalls, it was David Lee Roth who authorised the action plan on the group’s behalf. The emergency band meeting had been convened in the wake of a difficult conversation between Noel Monk and Warners’ head of artist development, Carl Scott. While Women And Children First and its predecessor, Van Halen II, had racked up a million domestic sales within three months of being filed in record shops, by mid-summer 1981 Fair Warning, the group’s fourth album, released on April 29 that year, had barely broken the 500,000 mark. Accustomed since day one to being regarded, and treated, as a priority act by Warners, Van Halen faced the prospect of slipping to second-tier status if they were deemed incapable of keeping pace with the label’s big hitters. Revisiting the conversation with Scott in his memoir Runnin’ With The Devil, Monk recalls asking: “Isn’t there something we can do?” and receiving the reply: “Yeah, there is. But it’s not cheap.”

No innocent with regard to the shadier side of the record business, by his own admission Monk had naively assumed that payola had gone the way of piano rolls and 78rpm discs by the dawn of the 1980s. That same afternoon, he would receive a crash