Monday through Friday, they fill prescriptions, write code, consult on health plans and restore historic homes. On Saturdays in Iowa City, they put on white pants, aviators and fake mustaches, climb into a retired ambulance and become Van Hayden. Mary Beth Koeth for ESPNDave WilsonOct 8, 2026, 07:00 AM ETCloseDave Wilson is a college football reporter. He previously worked at The Dallas Morning News, San Diego Union-Tribune and Las Vegas Sun.Multiple AuthorsOpen Extended ReactionsIOWA CITY, Iowa — As Jake Olson sat behind a drum kit in the Tigerhawk Beer Garden on the south side of Iowa’s football stadium with a statue of Hawkeyes legend Nile Kinnick staring back at him, tears welled up in his eyes behind a pair of aviator sunglasses.For Van Hayden, the world’s greatest (and only) Van Halen cover band that is also a tribute to legendary Hawkeyes coach Hayden Fry, this is the big time.Olson and his bandmates are all devoted Iowa fans and cargo-shorts dads, living their dreams of being hyper-regional rock stars while paying homage to the idol of their youth. Outside Kinnick Stadium, there’s no time for sentimentality.
There’s a big game against Ohio State about to kick off, and the university has invited Van Hayden to get the party started in the plaza on the south end of the stadium, the same entrance that Olson and his brother Andy, a guitarist in the band, used to walk into as kids.That’s why a group of Midwest business professionals, including a pharmacist, a health plan consultant, a former tax accountant and a web developer, are misty-eyed as they prepare to rock. The longtime Iowa tailgate enthusiasts set up shop in front of the Vanbulance, the band’s Van Hayden-themed ambulance, and start shredding. Van Hayden kicks things off with its version of “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love,” which is called “Ain’t Stoppin’ Our Run” and ends with a repeated chant of “Let’s Go Hawks!” instead of Van Halen’s “Hey hey hey!” It gets the people going.David Lee Roth told Rolling Stone in 1984 that his motto was that it didn’t matter if you win or lose — what mattered was if you looked good doing it. In 1978, Fry took over an Iowa program that hadn’t had a winning season in 17 years and began his program makeover by asking the Pittsburgh Steelers for permission to mimic their look, because he wanted the Hawkeyes to “look like winners.” He even hired a designer to create the iconic Tigerhawk logo.
“Where I come from,” the West Texan said, “it’s called selling the sizzle before the steak.”Van Hayden would make him proud. Aside from lead singer Robby Marvin, aka Hayden Lee Roth, the crew sports Fry’s standard game-day attire: black pullover with a Tigerhawk logo over a white-collared shirt, aviator sunglasses, a fake mustache and white pants. The Vanbulance, striped in the style of Eddie Van Halen’s yellow-and-black “Bumblebee” guitar, pulls off the look in black and gold with its own winged VH logo. The back features a pair of the aviators with the word HAYDEN underneath it.
There is total commitment to the bit.Dale Arens, who recently retired after 40 years with the Iowa athletic department and worked closely with Fry and his family, said the band has their full blessing, and both Arens and Fry’s son say that Fry would appreciate the sizzle being sold.”My dad would’ve gotten the biggest kick. He would’ve been honored on this thing,” Fry’s son Kelly told Arens. “Dad would’ve probably said, ‘I don’t know who Van Halen is, but that Van Hayden is sure a good-looking band.'”VAN HAYDEN WAS born, like many necessities, out of the boredom of the COVID era. Olson, a 51-year-old pharmacist in Milwaukee and a longtime musician, made a pact in spring 2021 with a friend to learn Van Halen’s entire “5150” album.”Just the kind of funny dumb things you do when you’re having a couple barley pops talking to your friends,” he said.But then they did it, and decided it’d be fun to shock their friends by playing the songs live, maybe at a tailgate.
They just didn’t know how they’d sneak up on them, or what their name would be.What about Van Hayden, Olson thought? Two icons of the 1980s mashed up into a perfect Iowa band. “Once you have it, it’s like, how come nobody else did this?” Olson said.But how would you surprise someone with an entire band? A flatbed trailer would give it away, and it seemed onerous to lug the equipment around.
Then you’d have to figure out a power source. The idea rattled around in Olson’s head, until one day when he was driving through a small town in Wisconsin and saw the city’s ambulance for sale.It’s perfect, he thought. It had storage. It had seating.
It had a power source. He could load it up with speakers and the audio equipment and everything would be self-contained. He told Andy about the idea. In April 2023, things got real.”My brother, who thought the idea was hilarious, actually bought an ambulance for $8,000,” Jake Olson said.
“And then we kind of went, ‘Uh-oh, this is serious. We actually have to do this now.'”So they set out to find a band. Jake (Alex Van Hayden, drums) and Andy (Eddie Van Hayden, guitar) got things started. Their friend Brent Buresh (Michael Van Hayden), 51, a longtime actuary, is on bass, playing an appropriately cheesy Jack Daniels-themed guitar.
Andy’s daughter Willow (Wolfie Van Hayden) even joined up on keytar, but has since gone off to college at Johns Hopkins.Now they just needed a singer. In the spirit of the original Van Halen lineup, they valued having a showman over all else. Then they remembered they once saw Marvin do the entire “Thriller” dance at his sister’s Hawkeyes tailgate. Nobody was sure he could sing, but then again, did it matter that much?
Eddie Van Halen famously said of Roth, “I’m a musician. Dave’s a rock star.”Marvin was willing to sell it at all times. He ran track and played football in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, at Coe College, and even ran relays with legendary Coe running back Fred Jackson, who went on to star with the Buffalo Bills, so he had Dave’s hops, too.”I’m not the most vocally gifted person in the world, but I’m kind of willing to put all inhibitions aside and just make a fool of myself to put a smile on people’s faces,” Marvin, 43, said. A former tax accountant and father of two who now restores historic homes, he embraced the role of frontman.”Let me tell you, I wasn’t in the market for men’s leggings — we call them ‘meggings’ — up until that point,” Marvin said.
They are almost as uncomfortable for the crowd as they appear to be for him, and he got them trimmed with black and gold fringe and paired with a No. 84 Van Hayden jersey, and they all coordinated the mustaches and shades. They just started practicing whenever they had time, and Jake figured out how to power an electronic mesh drum kit with 9-volt batteries where he could set up and tear down quickly, and the Vanbulance helped keep it moving. If they sucked and people didn’t like them, Olson said, they could just hop back in and drive off.They got the taste of rock star life. A suburb of Iowa City with an ordinance banning amplified music told them to kick rocks.
“We were kind of like, ‘Can the cops show up and give us a ticket?'” Olson said. “That would be great for footage.”The family men don’t have much time to practice. They keep the Vanbulance in a storage unit, and after their 9-to-5s all week, show up in Iowa City on game-day mornings, pull that bad boy out, hook up their rigs and rehearse for about an hour. Then they head out to entertain Hawkeyes fans, sacrificing their own tailgating days for a non-paying gig fighting game-day traffic in an ambulance for multiple stops.”We’re doing this for fun.
We’ve loved tailgating for so long, and we just want to provide that energy to the fans and get them hyped up to go into the stadium,” Olson said. “We’re not doing this for money or fame or anything else. It was all just to make one tailgate and our group of friends laugh.”Van Hayden got its first Iowa game-day break, in true Mi
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