The end of the road
I have to say that we went into this with our eyes and hearts wide open. We offered what we considered was both a breath of fresh air and a chance at reconciliation to a dear friend. We were tentative at first, as was Dave, but I must say that, for a while, everything worked out fine. There was the initial blow up about not having any professional photographers on staff, and that our drug supply was not as good as the one at Rolling Stone, but these were small speed bumps in the parking lot we call Lies Magazine. Dave realized quickly that our resources were limited and began to adjust his attitude to this fact. We thought everything was fine.
As per our original agreement, we gave Dave a stack of CDs to review, asked him for ideas about what the next issue should look like, and had him write a letter to the readers (which appeared at the beginning of the magazine). Most of this time, I was not in the best of spirits. Coming off of my untimely demise, I was not having an easy time adjusting back to living life once again. Couple this with the fact that my death seemed to up the demands on my time, it was nice to know that Dave was taking over many aspects of the magazine which I find utterly mundane. While working on a coffee table book design (freelance gigs continue to pepper my life with change and needs for new computer equipment), I noticed that Dave had gone through a whole ounce of pot in about five days. Usually this takes us (the entire staff of Lies, which is about twenty people) two weeks. When I confronted him about this, Dave said he couldn't be bothered with "that shit" while Singled Out was on MTV. I would say that was the first sign our relationship was beginning to wear thin.
I then asked Lisa if she had any ideas to get Dave out of the beanbag chairs in our rec room and into working on the magazine. Dave and Lisa then holed up in a hotel room for three days, after which time, Dave seemed to think he had some kind of control over the rest of us. Actually, his control only extended to the sexual urges of Lisa. Which, while not a bad conquest, is not the controlling stock in the magazine. Soon after, Dave began to list out demands. I won't go into the particulars, but "breast augmentation for the female editors" was one of the them. Sorry Lisa.
Soon after, it became apparent that offering Diamond Dave the guest editor slot for this issue might have been a major mistake. He began talking about getting the band back together and going out on tour. When I told him that most of the members of Billy's Gun were either married or not interested in singing songs about getting laid anymore, he said we were all pussy-whipped. He and Lisa then hid out in a hotel room for another four days.
By this time, we had decided that the best thing to do was get the issue rolled into shape and worry about Dave whenever he deemed it time to reappear. Since many of you might have thought more of the Van Halen saga would be told in our magazine, here is what we found out through our conversations with the once-lead singer: Basically, the whole problem David Lee Roth had singing with Van Halen again goes back to an incident that occurred in late 1983. Eddie was drunk off his ass and playing jazz on the piano when Dave walked into the studio and announced to the greatly inebriated guitarist that the band would never be any fucking good as long as he [Eddie] insisted on drinking all the time. Dave apparently thought that the guitarist would get better (e.g. more creative) if he got stoned a lot and then coked up for the gigs.
Backstage at the 1996 MTV Music Awards, Dave brought this conversation up with Eddie, who has been sober for "a really fucking long time," apparently. Dave told us all he said was, "Remember when I told you that you were no good 'cause you were drunk all the time? Well, I was wrong, you're much better when you're drunk." After that, it was pretty much downhill.
So we bid Diamond Dave good-bye. For the record, he had a few good ideas, but mostly he smoked up all of our pot and had sex with one of our senior editors. The later is probably okay, since we don't see Lisa much anyway. Officially, Dave was fired from his post as guest editor. But we didn't want to make too much of a big deal about it, so we wrote him a nice recommendation for his next job--whatever that may be.
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