Crazy from the Heat

‘I was there with these two girls once; they were strippers. They said 'Dave, we’d like you to go upstairs, the two of us, with you’. So I said, ‘okay’. It was angus, and it was hot and sweaty and humid, and we commenced to deliver the groceries at 138 beats per minute or more. One of the girls had $1500 in singles and fives and tens, her end-of-the-week tips and pay and everything in her g-string. Nobody noticed, you know, when the g-string came undone - well, I noticed - nobody noticed the money, like, floating around. I woke up at some point around dawn, the two of them were asleep, and all three of us were covered with money, every square inch of skin had a dollar bill pasted to it - there was nothing but. The whole bed was covered with bills. Our bodies were covered with bills. There were bills in my underwear. Take a little picture of that’. So begins perhaps the ultimate rock autobiography. Throughout the late-seventies and eighties, Van Halen were the archetypal American rock group. Whats more they were also the highest paid band in the history of show business, taking a cool $1 million for a night’s work at a festival in 1983 and making the Guinness Book of Records.