Van Halen

Last Friday, I had the opportunity to work another event on behalf of my sons' high school marching band, at the Van Andel Arena concession stands. Just two nights removed from the Incubus concert at the same venue, I got into the Van Halen show, one of the summer's most anticipated events in my book, and probably quite a few others as well.

As it turned out, the show was somewhat anti-climactic, for reasons I'll explain a little later. But before I get into describing the night's events, let me go back a ways to cover my own thoughts on Van Halen the band.

My first live Van Halen experience took place back in 1978 or '79, I can't quite remember what year it was. It was their first national tour, the one they did in support of their debut album, titled "Van Halen" of course. They opened for Black Sabbath, and as I recall it, the youngsters from L.A. absolutely blew away the old geezers from England, and this was back when Ozzy Osbourne was still with the band. (It was Sab's "Never Say Die" album tour, if that helps date things any.) Van Halen had already blown a lot of us kids away with their first LP, which was so revolutionary and immaculately produced that we wondered if they could really play that well or if it was just a bunch of studio tricks. It's hard to recapture today just how fresh and radical Eddie Van Halen's guitar playing was when he first emerged on the hard rock scene - he's gone on to have so many imitators that it's easy to think he was just jumping on a style that already become popular. But listen once again, if you're so inclined, to that opening trio of songs: "Running with the Devil," with it's overwhelming siren intro melting into a subsonic bass stomp, a piano glissando and then a mammoth riff crunching and echoing like crazy, topped off with David Lee Roth's insane howling and yelping vocals putting a human touch on the monstrosity. Then there's the jaw-dropping, ear-blistering, I-can't-believe-I'm-hearing-this attack of "Eruption," a frenzied froth of whammy bar slams, frantic fret-burning 32nd notes and absolute go-for-the-throat maniac guitar solo fury, cutting after the last decay of post-apocalyptic echo-chamberized feedback into the classic cover version of the Kinks' "You Really Got Me." Just those three tunes earned them deserving entry into the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame, but of course there were many other great songs (but few great albums and IMO a lot of self-indulgent filler for their notoriously short releases, most running little more than a half-hour in total length.)

When Van Halen took the stage at that first concert, well, I can hardly think of ever being any more blown back by a musical group. They were just hyper, hungry and loud, fulfilling every bit of hype that had been generated by their album and the word of mouth testimonies about the "new Hendrix" guitar god that accompanied it. Roth leaped hysterically around the stage, Eddie had already polished his grinning, swaggering, hardly breaking a sweat persona when riffing, only stopping to get serious when it came time to replicate "Eruption" and other Big Moments on stage, doing all the classic lean-backs and other poses that signify that the soloist has reached the epitome of jammingness. The bass player and drummer were beastly in their own way, but it was basically Roth (before he turned completely into a preening, cartoonish vamp) and Eddie who set the band apart. After they had played their set, awhile later Sabbath came on and were so stale and old sounding that my friends and I actually left the concert out of boredom.

From there, VH went on to have a pretty solid string of hits, releasing numerous albums, going through the celebrated breakup with Roth, the Valerie Bertinelli era and all that "Behind the Music" melodrama, basically making a fortune and losing it and taking a toll on the health of the main players while the supporting cast waited for the excitement to die down so they could resume their duties. I stopped buying their albums after their second ("Van Halen II") came out, since I got into punk rock shortly after, and from what I've heard, their albums pretty much went downhill from that point anyway so I picked a good time to get off. But through the 80's and 90's, many of their tunes were hard to ignore (though honestly, the Sammy Hagar stuff never really caught on with me in any significant way.) So having said that, let me tell ya about what happened on Saturday.

Beer problems.

I mean, BIG beer problems. I am getting very pessimistic about the quality of management being exercised over the service infrastructure of the arena, because it seems to get worse with every show we work there. I've mentioned these problems before, but that night was the worst. The taps were in such bad shape that we had to resort to opening 24-oz. cans and pouring them by hand into plastic cups (of course we couldn't let the cans into the arena - we even have to pour water out of the plastic bottles!) So the lines stacked up and really the crush of people never really let up until we reached the magic hour of 9:30 when we could finally tell people that beer sales had been shut off for then night. But really now, can you imagine how irritable the crowd got to discover that they couldn't just stroll up and buy the frosty brew that they so badly thirsted after? One memorable moment was when Bill "Huge" Simonson, a local sports-talk radio host, came to the counter asking for a cold Miller Lite. (Huge is a well-known and presumably well-paid enthusiast for Miller Lite on his M-F drive time radio show.) When I told him that our Lite taps were tapped out, he couldn't stoop to mention Bud Light by name, but instead merely told his friend to get "some of that other stuff." I found his brand loyalty strangely admirable, for reasons I have a hard time understanding myself.

But while that made for a busy, pressurized, hectic night for us working the stands, you are more interested in finding out, what does Van Halen sound like after all these years?

Well, they are very loud. Not quite as hyper. Eddie's version of "Eruption" is like the extended, slow-down remix version of the track, with a lot longer gaps and meaningless forays into meaningless noodling than he would have ever indulged in back in the day. But he's still a cool, charismatic character on stage. Wearing camouflage pants and having lost his shirt somewhere along the way by the time I was able to get out from behind the counter to catch the closing portions of the show, he looked like nothing more or less than a rock-n-roll survivor, in good physical shape but a little worn out from many bumps and bruises along the way. The same could be said about many in the crowd, though I must say it was kind of disconcerting to see a lot of gray haired middle ager upper management types with their wives being ushered to their seats. I still think of Van Halen as drawing a "Bill and Ted" kind of crowd, but we've all grown up haven't we? Well, grown older anyway.

So after all was said and done, I got to see Eddie's long solo, "Panama", "You Really Got Me" and before the show even started, a very fun, meandering sound check version of "Jump" which was a treat for all of us, including the road crew who were all gathered out in front of the stage gazing up like the adoring fans that they probably are at heart. My bottom line is that Van Halen is little more than a glossy, muscular party band that doesn't really have much of anything to say but that's not what we came to hear anyway. The people seemed to have a good time, overall - there are a few memorable scenes that took place in the concourse involving arena security, inebriated fans, various pushings, staggerings and body-gropings that I could describe but won't bother to here. But when all was said and done, like any party, the end inevitably came and we all went back to our ordinary lives with a grin on our face, wondering what was that really all about anyway?