You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
Van Halen!
Not the “Van Hagar” Van Halen.
I’m talking Van Halen Van Halen, with David Lee Roth up front with Eddie V shredding.
This is the original recipe for a band that has been through a lot of different looks since they broke onto the scene in 1978.
Over the years, I felt like you almost needed a program to know the players.
I guess that’s how it goes when you have been filling arenas since Jimmy Carter was president.
34 years!
In Rock and Roll dog years, that’s like 200 years. And like any long term marriage, sometimes it’s hard to hold it together forever.
I saw VH 20 years ago in North Carolina. It was so long ago, Rock and Roll hall of famers, Alice in Chains opened for them.
Sammy Hagar was a punk ass kid back then and he was wielding the microphone at the time. It was an open air ampitheater and as I recall, my good buddy was lit to the bejesus belt on liquid lightning.
That’s when he lit his program on fire and began running around the grassy knoll like a wild indian fighting General Custer.
It wasn’t long before myself and others had lit the same fuse and joined in. Soon there were dozens of us, running around with fire, programs burning, people yelling.
I remember the security agents rushing us with fire extinguishers, letting loose. It was crazy, like a scene from Lord of the Flies.
It was so chaotic, so huge and reckless, Sammy Hagar stopped in mid song to yell at us to put the fire out. It’s been 20 years, but I remember a toxic cloud of smoke and fire extinguisher dust rising over the ampitheater. People were cheering, the band rocked on and a rock and roll memory was forged.
Thanks Van Hagar.
But that was 20 years ago. What’s old is new again, sort of.
Here is the truth I now know about Van Halen. Van Halen is less about who is holding the microphone and all about Eddie twisting six strings till they scream.
Without Eddie, there is nothing. VH is a good band. Van Halen without Eddie is a 2012 version of Cheap Trick or Foreigner or Steppenwolf. Without Eddie, VH is a bunch of old, over the hill rockers, riding into the sunset on their early accomplishments.
But Van Halen has Eddie V at the helm and because of this they are still a rock and roll tour de force.
In case you don’t know Eddie V, let me just say this; he rips an ax like few before him have ever done.
EVER!
The man is a virtuoso. He is rock and roll’s version of Einstein. His fingers should be registered with the FBI as dangerous weapons. He is like a trasformer, his hands melting into a guitar, his body and instrument are so infused.
Friday April 27th: I am 10th row center. I am so close, I can see the sweat on Eddie’s forehead, yet I can barely follow his fingers as they rip across the strings at, not the speed of sound, but the speed of amplified perfection.
Van Halen’s latest tour is loaded with nothing but original flavor. It’s running with the devil and eruption and ice cream man. It’s Hot for teacher and Panama.
I’m sitting beside a guy who has followed the band from sea to shining sea. He will tell me about how they Rocked it in L.A. He even leans over during a cocophanous drum solo to tell me about the mood in the bathroom while the band is playing a song from its new album. I kind of want him to shut his pie hole.
His girlfriend is a tall drink of water dressed in the ubiquitous tight black rocker chick t shirt that reveals a little tramp stampage. Her jeans are spray on tight and she is working her seat like a stripper works a greasy pole. Her hair is straight out of a 1980’s Idaho year book.
On the other side of me is a guy who says he works in a hospital. He is hopped up on Eddie Van Halen infatution or something he stole from the E.R. He is a self proclaimed Van Halen expert who says there are only three great guitarists in the history of the world.
Les Paul. Jimi Hendrix. Eddie Van Halen.
The history of the world! Period.
I nod like I have an opinon about this. I quietly wonder about Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaugn and Carlos Santana, but that is an arguement for another time.
The show starts with an anomaly. KOOL AND THE GANG.
A 10 piece funky 70’s band loaded with horns and group dance routines.
The Nashville crowd is here to see an arena rock legend. When Kool or Gang yells at Nashville to get up from our seats and we don’t, he seems angry at Music City.
I wonder who booked this bizare pairing; “a guy with a cranial hemotoma?”
All in all; Kool and the Gang are cool. They play the classics, Celebrate etc…
Then the rowdies come out and the tiny stage is transformed becoming a much much bigger platform.
The Bridgestone Arena is packed. The Screen behind the stage is 30 feet tall.
The lights go down and suddenly, there’s a roar and it’s 1978 all over again.
Dave Lee Roth walks out on stage and says “Howdy Nashville.” He is surprisingly fit and trim.
Eddie Van Halen is also in good shape donned in a simple black
t shirt and jeans. His hair is cut short, compared to the early years, and there is no cigarette in sight. Then he hits one riff and it is unlike any other guitar I have ever heard.
His fingers are the pistons in a Maserati racing along the Pacific Coast Highway. The sound seems like it is coming from 5 guitars. He plays rythm and lead simultaneously. He plays the top of the guitar and the bottom of the guitar. He is twisting knobs on the guitar while pecking the strings like a writer typing a deadline story. The guitar has become a piano that he plucks and pulses and taps and bends.
It’s a blistering assault on guitar strings that will need therapy after this complete and utter musical ass whoopin.
VH opens with Unchained off their Fair Warning album.
Diamond Dave’s voice has seen one too many shots of Jack. He sounds raspy and his timing seems off. He plays to the crowd. We love him because he is David Lee, but I find myself wanting him to sing like he use to sing on that debut album. I only will hear that clarity once in a while.
Diamond Dave use to have a good rock voice. But that was 30 years ago. He had a playfulness to his singing and he would infuse that fun into the song between verses.
Sounds like he got that fat city address, he always talked about.
“non stop talker what a rocker”
“Hey man that suit is you.”
These ae classic rock lines. And it was that playful banter that just became a part of the VH lexicon.
Some of that was missing Friday night. In fact, a lot of that was missing Friday night.
“You’ll get some leg tonight for sure. Tell us how you do!”
Never heard it Friday.
“One break coming up.” He didn’t give me this either.
I was disappointed. There were large gaps in the song when he should have hammered it home, and he left it hanging.
What Dave did do was spend 5 minutes narrating a sheep dog video about a ranch and his dogs and hearding livestock. It was sort of weird.
I started to cringe. Perhpas this is no different than Bruce spewing political banter for 10 minutes or Bono telling me about some cause in Africa. Sheep herding just doesn’t rise to the level of saving the world.
He also stopped the flow of the concert several times, talking to the rowdies off stage instead of singing songs. He was asking them repeatedly to come and clean up the stage because there was some water spilled on it. The old Diamond Dave would have slid through his own vomit and kept rocking. Now he’s nervous about breaking a hip.
Roth also kept asking us to bang the beach balls in the crowd up on stage. At first we thought he wanted to play catch, but when we hit the beach ball to him he told us that someone at another show got hit in the eye and he didn’t want that to happen here, I knew that I was watching a man who had an AARP card in his wallet.
WHAT THE F**k! Hurt with a beach ball?
I kind of felt weird watching diamond dave after a while. He seemed like he was off his meds.
And sadly Dave’s voice as they say, has left the building.
And of course Michael Anthony is gone. But you know what, Eddie’s son, Wolfgang can bang that bass. The apple does not fall far from the tree.
Wolfgang is twice the size of his father and he does more than a solid job. And Alex still smacks those skins with the ferocity of a nitrous burning funny car.
But none of it matters. It is a warm up act for the Smothers Brothers without Edward Van Halen.
Eddie is without cigarette and wiskey and a seemingly new dedication to music.
His blistering 1000 mile an hour picking style imitated, but never duplicated is on full display.
Watching him play is like watching a Cheetah run. It is pure and fast and special.
Like the Cheetah, built for speed, Eddie was put on this Earth to apparently play Rock Guitar.
He has a smile on his face throughout the show. I don’t know if he is happy to be playing, amused by Dave’s awkward banter about sheep dogs or happy to be playing with his son.
It doesn’t matter. Dave talks and sings off key, and then Eddie blows the lid off the arena. It is a sonic boom of guitar that could open a metal can of beans.
When Eddie plays, it sounds like a precise lick of synchronized furry. You wonder if a computer is actually playing each note, so perfectly, so independently, so precisely, that your ears are bleeding and screaming for more.
I see people in the crowd wearing ear plugs.
I thought about it.
NOT
That’s like going to the louvre and wearing sunglasses.
If I have to lose some auditory capacity in my old age, then Eddie V bring it!
I open my mind and my ear canal to the musical freight train that is barreling into my skull.
I’m in row 10 center. I can’t believe how awesome this is. The screen is 30 feet high, showing various hallucingenic imagery that only adds to the rock and roll experience.
I am on my feet for over 2 hours as the band blows the lid off the joint. There is even a cool drum solo by Alex. A drum solo. that is so old school.
And Diamond Dave actually does shine when he does a solo of his classic hit “Ice Cream man.” His warbling voice and mistimed vocals are ok when he is the only instrument on stage.
But then Eddie comes on finishes off the song. Ice Cream man – what starts as a fun nursery ryhme with Roth ends in a Tornadic explosion of rock and roll lava pouring off the ceiling. Eddie shreds his guitar and the roof blows off the Bridgestone like a volacano that is angry, pulsing magma, pushing firey froth into the sky.
The band finishes and says good night.
The crowd goes crazy. The band doesn’t leave the stage. Dave puts his cupped hand to his ear and says, “what you want an encore?”
The crowd explodes.
“we’re not leaving the stage,” he says as the boys jump right back on stage and begin playing Jump, off their 1984 album which was the biggest album in the world back in the day.
It still gets the heart pumping.
The crowd drenched with sweat starts jumping and diamond dave does a spinning back kick touching his heel. He’s still as limber as a Russian Gymnast.
I get up and nothing gets me down.
His voice sounds like a weed eater running through mulch, but he is saved by a Guitar God named Eddie Van Halen who recreates a life moment for 17,000 people who might as well jump back to their youth when time was endless and life’s possibilities were right around the corner.
I leave the arena, my head shaking, my ears buzzing. I have tingles on the back of my neck.
Thanks Van Halen.
And that is crazy.™