Stephen Pearcy has described the effect Van Halen had on the Los Angeles club scene he came up in, and said the band forced everyone around them to raise their game. The Ratt founder appeared on “The Mighty VH” podcast with Tommy London and Tor for a conversation built around his own encounters with Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth, from unannounced visits to his front door through to sharing a bill.
Asked whether Van Halen redirected the whole Strip once they broke through, Pearcy was unequivocal.
“Yeah. They changed the whole face of rock. Seriously. I mean, what an impact, this guitar guy and this entertainment and the most solid rhythm section from two guys, and then brother Michael [Anthony], his voice. I mean, holy s**t. You see them at the Whisky A Go Go and hear that, it’s, like, ‘F**k, you don’t need a PA, Michael.’ … And then every John, Pete and Harry started to tap, tap, tap, tap, tap [on the guitar]. I mean, come on — [Eddie] changed the face of guitars… It was insane. You’re just looking at it, going, ‘How in the f**k is this guy doing that?’ I wasn’t into that technical s**t… Robbin [Crosby, then-Ratt guitarist] was into that s**t. I wasn’t. I was direct drive, and then started playing guitar less and less, and becoming a ‘singer singer’, once Robbin pulled in — the Jake E. [Lee] period,” he said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
Crosby, who co-founded Ratt with Pearcy and wrote much of their best-known material, died in 2002. Lee played in Pearcy‘s pre-Ratt band Mickey Ratt before joining Ozzy Osbourne.
Pearcy turned to the frontman side of it, and traced part of Roth‘s persona back to another source.
He continued: “Well, when you find out years and years later Jim ‘Dandy’ [Mangrum, lead singer for the 1970s rock group Black Oak Arkansas] had a lot to do with it, [Roth‘s] image and his stuff. But us singer guys, I totally went, ‘I have to be the lead singer in my [pre-Ratt] band Mickey Ratt.’ And that was around when Jake E. was in the band. But he had his own cool thing too.”
He added: “What Dave did for everybody, all the lead singers on the Strip, or most of them, especially if you had blonde hair or something, trying to emulate Dave — I mean, he had the image, he had the rap, he had the voice — and a lot of us out there that were seeing this were going, ‘Holy s**t,’ to all of it. You had to just up your game. They set the bar for what was to happen in the ’80s.”
Eddie Van Halen died on 6 October 2020 at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California, aged 65. The cause was a stroke, following two decades of illness.
He was diagnosed with mouth cancer in 2000 and had surgery on his tongue. He was later treated for lung cancer, travelling to Germany for radiation. In early 2019 he was involved in a motorcycle accident, after which a brain tumour was found and treated with gamma knife radiosurgery.
Pearcy formed Ratt in Los Angeles in 1982 out of Mickey Ratt, and signed to Atlantic Records off the back of it. Out Of The Cellar followed in 1984 and produced top ten singles, with the band going on to eight albums and sales in excess of 20 million.
He has released five solo albums, Social Intercourse in 2002, Fueler in 2004, Under My Skin in 2008, Smash in 2017 and View To A Thrill in 2018, and a sixth is on the way, after which he intends to write with Warren DeMartini again.
“We’re talking about writing new music in 2026, after I deliver solo record #6,” Pearcy said late last year. “It’s a whole other animal — Ratt — or should I say writing with Warren. It’s exciting, it’s what we did from day one, write.”
