DIVER DOWN
Eddie Van Halen is gone. And, well, Van Halen were such a fixture of the pop culture landscape I grew up in that it's impossible not to blog something about him.
So this is where I tell you that my first exposure to Van Halen was a fake radio show.
To explain: when I was in 9th grade or so, I had aspirations to be a radio DJ. So did an erstwhile friend of mine named Barry, and we would get together every so often to record a “radio show” on cassette using my cheap Memorex tape recorder placed next to the stereo speaker. We called ourselves KCBQ for the sole reason that he had somehow acquired a cassette of station ident jingles made for a station called KCBQ.
Anyway, we would play music from our combined record collections, and one day he brought over the debut album by some band I’d never heard of called Van Halen. We played “Runnin’ With The Devil” for the show. Musically I liked it, and they clearly had a sound that wasn’t quite like anyone else out there. But it would be awhile before I got into them. Most of my subsequent exposure to them was passive - I’d hear them on the radio, and my heavy-metal sister got a copy of Fair Warning and wore out the needle on it in her room.
My main resistance to them wasn’t the music so much as their “party hardy” image, which was very not my thing in high school. Also, while Eddie Van Halen was clearly a talented guitar player, I was already listening to widdly-widdly guitar solos from the likes of Alex Lifeson, Brian May and Tony Iommi, so for me he didn’t stand out that much, except for his guitar tone, which (along with speedy double tapping and spandex) became standard issue for every hair-metal band from LA, for better or worse.
But VH were worlds better than most of the bands they inspired, largely because they had a sense of humor and sounded like they were having a good time, which won me over eventually. What impressed me about Eddie VH wasn’t his chops (good as they were) but that he clearly loved playing so much that it came through in his music. Frankly they all looked like they were having fun up on stage, and it was infectious.
Which may be why my favorite VH anecdote is the one where a young teenage Rollins saw them upstage the headliner, Ted Nugent.
[FULL DISCLOSURE: I never saw them live. I’m referring to live concert footage here.]
Anyway, yes, VH were all over my teenage landscape by the time 1984 came out, and as good as they were, the ubiquity, the tabloid drama and their “party hardy” rock star status made them increasingly incompatible with the punk and college radio bands I discovered in the mid-80s. So perhaps it’s as well that Diamond Dave quit when he did. And being a fan of neither Sammy Hagar nor Extreme, I don’t really care for the post-Dave VH models.
But I listen to the VH classics on a fairly regular basis now, and have a better appreciation of just what they accomplished and why Eddie VH is so revered as a guitarist.
For example, one of my favorite VH songs is “Unchained” - not just for the Ted Templeton cameo, but for the weird off-kilter riff Eddie VH plays during the verses. It’s such an unobvious thing to be doing in a song like this.
Click to viewFor extra Eddie VH, why not enjoy this track of him blues-jam duelling with Brian May until he breaks a string?
Happy trails,
This is dF
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