Seems to me he's the baddest cat alive
Back in my formative years, developing some semblance of musical taste as a teenager, I discovered a dangerous band called Van Halen. Crap, that guitarist was insane! And genius! I worshipped Eddie Van Halen's six-string talents for ages, and I still love the vintage Van Halen albums, up to and including 1984.I guess I must have stumbled across these guys not long after their recording career got going. I seem to recall hearing songs from just their first three albums on the radio at the time. Then my acquisition of their albums began, and that's when I found even cooler and heavier songs than the radio stations were brave enough to play. I particularly remember some stuff from Women and Children First that suitably blew me away.... Fools and Loss of Control were a couple of blazing rockers that put everything and everyone else to shame. Aggressive and creatively and technically brilliant.
The band with Roth singing existed since '74, but it wasn't until '78 that they released a full length album. Van Halen definitely paid their dues, but it was largely guitarist Eddie's prowess on the instrument and with songwriting that catapulted the guys to stardom. KISS's bassist Gene Simmons even had a hand in developing their first demo tape, but a difference of opinions saw him split from that party. Not long after, the band was signed to the Warner Bros. Records label. And the rest was history.
Van Halen's first, self-titled, album went to number 19 on the US Billboard charts, at the time making it one of rock music's most commercially successful debuts. Pretty good for a band that didn't like to compromise and played heavy music to boot. But they did take a bit of advice from a night club manager and learned to write at least some songs that girls could dance to.... that was the formula that both earned them respect from the musician community and got them tons of radio airplay during their lengthy - if rocky - career.
Van Halen's music was popular throughout my high school years, the soundtrack to many weekend parties. And I played it constantly in my basement bedroom, usually with headphones clamped onto my skull, since my pop couldn't stand that "jungle music", as he put it so eloquently.
Between David Lee Roth's party hearty call to arms hollering and Eddie's mind-bending axe-picking, the group simply ruled the rock and roll sphere. Colourful photos of Van Halen were splashed across music magazines back in the day.... Roth clad in his wacky spandex designs and Eddie in his ultra-cool jumpsuits. These guys set the standard for fun and crazy clothes in rock... until it simply got out of hand with all of the Van Halen imitators in the 80's.
To this day, one of my favourite rock albums of all time is 1981's Fair Warning, the band's fourth release. Edgier and darker than anything else Van Halen ever put out, this disc not only introduced a rawer and more inventive approach to guitar and a few raunchy lyrics, but it also ushered in the use of electronic keyboards. Eddie had a solid grounding in piano in his youth, so he happily played with the keys, mostly creating some weird synthesized sounds on the album's last couple of tunes. On the follow-up album, Diver Down, we'd get a whole wack more keyboards. Not that we asked for that.
Strangely, but most deservedly, Fair Warning was awarded a spot on Esquire magazine's list of the 75 Albums Every Man Should Own. A cool fact to file away for a beer-drinking trivia contest.
I never cared much for the Sammy Hagar recordings.... once Roth departed after the monster album 1984, I pretty much forgot about the band. I did buy the first couple of albums with Hagar but got sick of them pretty quickly. Not just his voice, but the whole vibe was wrong. The songwriting just wasn't there. Not for me, anyway.
Van Halen's best years were long gone, but that incredible classic set of six Roth-sung discs will always remain in my CD collection.
Sneakers styled after Eddie's custom-painted guitars
.... really
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