Review of the Van Halen 2007 tour, Kansas City show, 10/26/07

By Ken Henderson - http://khenzden.googlepages.com/vanhalen.htm

“There will come a day when youth will pass away…what will they say about me?” –David Lee Roth, lyrics, Just a Gigolo/Ain’t Got Nobody

Like a lot of Van Halen fans, I have always thought of David Lee Roth’s 1986 release Eat ‘Em and Smile as the last of the classic Van Halen albums.  Rolling Stone said it was truer to the Van Halen legacy than anything on the slick 5150, and another reviewer went so far as to call it the greatest Van Halen album that never was, a mere change-out of Dave’s backing band.  Eddie’s claims that Dave wanted to take Van Halen in a “Las Vegas” direction notwithstanding, EEAS was chock-full of straight-ahead, hard-charging rock ‘n roll—the kind that had made Van Halen famous in the first place.  And it was buoyed by the same bevy of over-the-top videos that took Van Halen to stratospheric heights with the advent of MTV—the kind that only Diamond Dave could envision.  Technically on par with if not superior to Van Halen in almost every way, the EEAS band made a Van Halen record for the ages, one that the passage of time hasn’t diminished one bit.

For its part, Van Halen hired journeyman Sammy Hagar to fill Roth’s shoes and produced the Journey-esque 5150.  Slick, over-produced, and commercially successful, the years have not been as kind to 5150.  Many of the tracks rightfully belong in that discount bin appropriately labeled “80s Crap.”  Most were neither timeless nor particularly good, even for the time.  Tripe like Love Walks In was an affront to all that Van Halen had stood for.  Other tracks found Hagar shamelessly aping Roth, such as his “Hello B-a-b-y,” growl that kicks off the record.  But the problem with 5150 isn’t just that it hasn’t aged well, but that it is not a particularly Van Halen record.  It’s an album lots of bands could have done.  Foreigner’s Mick Jones helped produce the album, and it might as well have been a Foreigner album.  Bands have been cloning each other as long as there have been bands, and in the mass market that is pop music, I suppose it’s commonplace for one artist to put out work that’s indistinguishable from another, it’s just that until 5150 it never was for Van Halen.

OU812 was a similarly slick, craven affair.  It’s a better album than 5150 and the apex of the Van Hagar years, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the best of Roth’s Van Halen.  Roth-era Van Halen led the vanguard of popular music—it changed rock ‘n roll; Hagar-era Van Halen was content to exploit the pop-rock middle ground, to play it safe and make sure the mortgage got paid.  Don’t agree?  Name the bands that were influenced by Roth-era Van Halen.  You can’t even count them all.  Now tell me how many bear the marks of Van Hagar?  I can’t think of any.  Gary Cherone’s Extreme maybe?  When Roth fronted the band, everyone wanted to be Van Halen.  When Hagar did, Van Halen wanted to be everyone else.

F.U.C.K. confirmed my nagging suspicion that Sammy Hagar’s party-hearty showmanship was little more than pretense—that it was merely done to compete with Roth and sell records.  Hagar had always struck me as a poser, a guy who goes home to the wife and kids at night, takes off the rock frontman persona and hangs it on a coat rack.  Can you imagine Hagar answering the door in a bathrobe at three in the afternoon the day of a show?  Me neither.  No, he’d probably be busy getting his hair permed and his bonded teeth whitened. 

Ironically, Balance confirmed my suspicion that the balance between the technical wizardry and the uncanny sense of the zeitgeist that had made Van Halen what it was had all but disappeared since Eddie took over the band.  The yin and yang that had existed in the persons of Dave and Eddie had given way to lackluster melodies, banal lyrics, and mediocre guitar-riff driven half-songs that seemed helplessly out of touch with modern music.  Hagar’s last studio album with the band, Balance was a dated, embarrassing affair that had little in common with Roth’s last album with the band, the seminal 1984.  The electric circus tent that had made Van Halen the biggest band in the world had given way to easy chairs and easy money.

It should come as no surprise that post-Roth Van Halen was initially successful—after all, the stage was set.  In the wake of the historic 1984, Pee-wee Herman could have fronted the band and seen good sales. As is the case 23 years later, many of us simply weren’t willing to accept the fact that the band many of us had grown up with, gotten laid to, gotten high to—the band that had changed our lives—simply was no more.  Van Halen—as we knew it—broke up in 1985, and we just couldn’t accept that.  Many seemed to think—at least for the time being—that three-quarters Van Halen was better than no Van Halen.  That lasted for about as long as Roth’s solo career did—about four albums—but, by 1996, the jig was up, and Sammy was sent packing.  (As with Roth’s departure, Hagar was either fired or quit—depending on whom you ask—but, unlike Roth, does it really make any difference?)

Thanks to the initial success the band enjoyed after Roth’s departure, Eddie evidently believed that lead singers were plug-and-play interchangeable.  He soon found out just how wrong he was.  He brought in Extreme’s Gary Cherone and naively believed that fans would again fill arenas and buy up lame albums, but such was not the case.  Van Halen was no longer the monster that it was when Roth turned over the reins.  On Hagar’s watch, the band had descended into a comfortable mediocrity, a bunch of 40-year-olds content to mug for the crowd and play to their diehard fans.  In stark contrast to 1985, Van Halen was mired in a suffocating complacency in the final Hagar years, and the debacle that was Van Halen III and the botched tour that followed, as unfortunate as they were, weren’t in the least surprising.

Eddie got to learn the hard way what would have happened had Van Halen not been the beast that Roth had handed him in 1985.  Sold-out arenas were a thing of the past.  Critically-acclaimed, landmark albums—also gone.  In their place was exactly what Eddie had always wanted—complete control.  Unfortunately for the fans, Eddie had forgotten to be careful what he wished for and had gotten exactly that in spades.  The transcendent, once-mighty Van Halen machine had at long last ground to a halt.  It had collapsed under its own weight.  The dream that had started with four buddies in 1972 had turned into a nightmare that had finally, mercifully come to an end.

The debate over who was the better lead singer has raged ever since Hagar joined the band, but it is as misguided as it is infantile.  The question was never about who was the better musician or could sing higher.  Of course Hagar can hit higher notes—he’s a tenor, Dave’s a baritone.  So what?  Yes, he’s a better musician.  Again, so what?  If musical ability was paramount, we’d all have been filling arenas to see The Three Tenors instead of these guys.  Maybe we’d be talking about arena jazz instead of arena rock.  There’s a long line of performers who were better musicians in 1985 than Dave Roth—Sammy Hagar was just one of them.  And, for that matter, there’s a long line who were and are better than Sammy.  Who cares?  Raw musical ability was just part of what made Van Halen the success it was.  It would never have achieved the popularity it did on musicality alone.  It was the ineffable combination of ingredients that made Van Halen what it was, and—love him or hate him—Roth was a big part of that.  With the trade-out of Roth for Hagar, the Van Halen lead singer position merely moved up from fourth to third in the band’s musical ability pecking order.  The advent of Hagar brought more musical talent to a band that already had plenty of it, and it ushered out the innovative, adventuresome, sword-in-one-hand-torch-in-the-other attitude that had built the band.  Think I’m wrong?  Think Sammy was an upgrade?  Let me ask you something:  how many records has Sammy sold by himself?  His solo sales total less than those of Eat ‘Em and Smile alone, not to mention the rest of the Roth catalog.  How many units would an Eddie Van Halen solo album move?  I’ll go out on a limb here and speculate, “Not very many.”  Smirk about Roth’s solo career all you want, but he did better than anyone else in the band—before him or since—could have done.  A lot of performers would kill to have had the success Roth did as a solo artist.

As much as Van Halen missed Roth, he missed them even more.  Roth’s solo work sounded thinner and thinner with each new album—the cast of characters he brought in to replace Eddie and the boys lesser and lesser able to do the job with each release.  The best thing Roth could have done after leaving Van Halen would have been to have treated Steve Vai and Billy Sheehan better.  Given that neither of them were drunks or nuts, they could still be making kick-ass music together irrespective of Van Halen—if not for Roth and his self-destructive tendencies.  Instead, we’ve had one Roth album after another with progressively less substance to it than the one before it.  At some point, there was little left, and Roth became a caricature of himself.  I will concede that he showed some moxie with the experimentation on Your Filthy Little Mouth, but the days of over-the-top guitar sizzlers coupled with catchy lyrics and wry humor were long behind him by the time that release saw the light of day.  Seeing him perform solo in 2000 and realizing he did almost no solo material, I understood—I completely understood.  He had come to terms with the unbreakable bond between himself and his former band mates.  No longer in denial, he knew that what people really wanted was to see him and the brothers where they rightfully belonged:  making kick-ass rock ‘n roll together.  This almost happened in 1996 in the immediate aftermath of Sammy’s departure, but, alas, it was not to be.

“If you think we're going on tour…forget it, we're not gonna go out there and take your money, and if and when we ever do a tour with Roth in the future, we're gonna have to write and record a new album first, in the future.” –Eddie Van Halen, 1996

So, I’ve been waiting ever since Eat ‘Em and Smile for this tour.  When I heard that the tour had been postponed back in March because Eddie was entering rehab, I was disappointed but not surprised.  These guys have redefined band dysfunctionality.  Between drunkenness and infighting and divorces and weird health ailments—nothing surprises me anymore with Van Halen.  None of them seem to be able to grow up enough to give the fans what they know they want.  They seem to forget that they alone do not control the band’s fate—they still need people to buy those albums and fill those seats.  Eddie can christen whomever he wants as the lead singer of what he undoubtedly considers “his” band, but that doesn’t mean they’ll sell a single record or fill a single seat.  Coming up playing bars and Bar Mitzvahs, the first incarnation of the band knew that.  Then it went and got all successful and began to think the fans would buy whatever it decided to put out there.  Hopefully Eddie has learned his lesson now, but one can’t help but be a bit wistful for the lost opportunity the breakup in 1985 portended, the way things might have been.  What if Just a Gigolo was just a regular Van Halen tune from the band’s follow-up with Roth to 1984?  What if we could expect to hear it when they played just like we expect to hear Ice Cream Man?  What if, like You Really Got Me Now, California Girls was a VH cover rather than a DLR staple and the definitive version of the song?  What if Yankee Rose featured Eddie on guitar and Alex on drums?  What if Tobacco Road featured Van Halen turning yet another classic inside-out and making it its own?  What if A Little Ain’t Enough and Hammerhead Shark featured Eddie and Alex shredding instead of whoever was willing to work with Roth at the time?  What if Love Walks In and Dreams never were?  What if preachiness and drippy sentimentality had never entered the Van Halen vernacular?  What if the band had never rested on his laurels but continued its conquest of the world of rock unabated?  How might Van Halen have changed music in the 90s and 2000s the same way that it did in the 70s and 80s?  Maybe arena rock would have reached new heights instead of gradually fading into oblivion.  Ah, what might have been.

“Some things are impossible. The Beatles will never get back together and David Lee Roth will never again sing with Van Halen.” –Alex Van Halen

So, when they finally got their act together and went on the road, I didn’t hesitate long before buying some pretty pricey tickets and heading out to see them.  With Van Halen, you never know how long this might last.  They aren’t playing my home state of Texas this time around for some reason, so I bought tickets for the closest venue to me—Kansas City—and waited with anticipation for the show.  I read the reviews each night from the shows up to that point, and salivated at the chance to finally see Van Halen as God intended it.

Why are they doing this tour?  Three words:  Wolfgang Van Halen.  Eddie wants a ‘take your kid to work’ day, and, after the debacle of the 2004 tour with Hagar, he knows that Roth is really his only option if he wants to introduce Wolfie to Pop’s fame firsthand for a whole tour.  People aren’t going to fill arenas to hear Hagar anyway, and there’s no one else Eddie could enlist who’d have the draw of Roth.  Eddie has finally been forced to acknowledge what was obvious to more than a few of us in 1985:  he needs Roth.  Van Halen needs Roth.  Whatever mystical, ineffable quality Roth brought to the band has been missing ever since then.  Sammy was fine as a solo artist, but he never belonged in Van Halen.  Van Halen’s live album featuring Hagar singing some Roth-era tunes bordered on the blasphemous, and the fans have finally said—via their dollars—“We’ve had enough.  Come with Roth or don’t come at all.”

How was the show?  It was spectacular, a veritable assault on the senses.  People forget how rich the VH catalog was with Roth.  They played nearly every one of their hits and even a few of their more obscure tunes, one right after the other with little stage banter or other filler in between.  Many of these haven’t been performed by Roth or VH in over 20 years.  Given the hungry bunch they still were back then, they did more albums with Roth than with Hagar, and despite those albums being longer ago in time than their work with Hagar, they are undoubtedly the band’s legacy, the only work it is really known for now, especially outside the core of diehard fans.  To the world at large, Roth-era Van Halen was Van Halen, and that’s why their only two diamond-status albums (10 million units sold) are both from the Roth era (not, as I’m sure diehard fans would allege, because people have re-bought the early VH albums as the business transitioned from vinyl and cassettes to CDs—only diehard fans do that, and there aren’t enough of them to buy ten million of anything).

Eddie and Dave looked amazingly fit.  I would add “for their ages,” but, heck, they looked great for any age—they both have bodies most teenagers—and especially portly Wolfgang—would envy. They’re simply in shape and at the top of their respective games.  They act like they care about the fans and what the fans think—and that’s the first step back toward what made them so successful in the first place.

Eddie’s playing was spot on most of the time and sounded more like the original recordings than I’ve ever heard him sound.  When he deviated, it was usually to jazz up a piece or two, not because he screwed up.  And he seems to be enjoying himself—far more than the last couple times I saw him with Hagar.  I’m sure a large part of this is having Wolfie in the band.  But at least part of it is having Dave out front and listening to these classic lyrics being sung the way only their author could belt them out.  He and Dave seem to genuinely like each other and want to get along, to which I say, “It’s about freakin’ time.”

Alex is, as always, both amazing and dependable, the foundation of the band.  The oldest of the three original members, he has also aged the most, but he can still pound the skins better than most of the guys doing it for a living now.  If he’s not the top drummer in the world, he’s darn close.  His solo was over-the-top, and he never missed a beat the whole night.

Wolfie—what can I say about Wolfie?  He’s no Michael Anthony, and Mike is sincerely missed.  He has virtually no stage presence.  He looks like some fat kid they pulled out of the audience to play on stage with them for a song or two.  His stage presence isn’t a function of his age—it’s his personality.  Some people have it, some don’t, and he doesn’t.  No slam meant toward him—he’s a capable bass player.  But so are thousands of others across bar bands all around the world.  Being “capable” used to not be good enough for Van Halen.  While Michael Anthony was no musical maestro, he was a superb backing vocalist and a great performer.  I don’t know what happened between him and the Van Halen brothers (past history makes me side with him for now), but it’s regrettable, whatever it was.  (And a special shout out to Eddie—regarding your remark that Mike’s out because “you can’t be in two bands,”:  sure you can.  Lots of people work with multiple bands.  Maybe if you hadn’t wasted years at a time being drunk and apathetic, Mike would never have worked with Sammy outside Van Halen in the first place.  Can you really blame him?  You have yourself to thank for yet another fiasco involving the personnel in the band.)

Dave?  All I can say about Dave is:  DAVE IS BACK.  He sounded better than he ever has, even before 1984.  Why?  Because, unlike the shows way-back-when, the concert wasn’t just a big party that happened to include some singing, lots of alcohol and drugs, and finished up with well-endowed hot blondes backstage.  Roth never forgot the fucking lyrics, actually sang every song in key, and literally tore each one of them up.  He was as close to the recordings as I’ve ever heard him, his normal bouncing around the stage and other antics taking a backseat to simply proving once and for all that he could still sing the words he wrote better than anyone else.  He went out of his way to include the other members of the band and to share the spotlight.  And he still injected enough of Diamond Dave into the proceedings that you could never mistake him for anyone else.

For a little while—an all too brief two-hour set—it was as though the whole mullet-laden Hagar years had never happened.  It was as though the band had picked up exactly where it left off with the last show in 1984.   I closed my eyes and imagined what life would be like if that had been the case.  A lot has happened since then—the world has changed, and not all for the better.  Terrorist assholes blew up the World Trade Centers, we’ve got a moron in the White House, and we’re embroiled in a costly, immoral war from which we will not soon extricate ourselves.  Pop music is more about gangbanging and violence and filth than it is about having a good time, and the innocence of youth has given way to cynicism and mistrust and the language of hate.  But, Friday night, all that seemed not to matter, and three guys from Pasadena reminded us all why we loved them so much.  For a brief, fleeting moment, all our troubles and all the infighting and negativity in the band seemed like a distant memory.  And on one chilly October night in Kansas City, David Lee Roth fronted Van Halen, and all was again right with the world.

Postscript

I rarely criticize something without giving my thoughts on how to fix it.  Take these for what they’re worth—I’ve never had a band and have no business telling anyone how to run theirs.

• Eddie, lose the cord.  You oughtta be wireless by now.  It’s 2007, for chrissake.
• Wolfgang, what can I say?  Get a personality.  Move every once in awhile—it won’t hurt ya.  Watch some footage of Mikey and do half of what he did, and you should be okay.
• Alex, shorten that drum solo.  When you stood and held up your index finger to tell us that there was yet more to come—that should have been the end of it.  Take a bow instead and be done with it.  You’re a great player, but the length of the solo is hard to handle, especially in a show with no intermission that’s already a virtual assault on the senses.
• Dave, lose the matador jackets and costume changes.  You’re singing well enough that you don’t need ‘em.  Come out shirtless or in the black T-shirt you wore for a bit and just sing your lungs out.  No need for roundhouse kicks or other faux martial arts (but the mike stand twirling thing was cool).  And lose the sailor hat and the inflatable mike humping at the end—you look ridiculous, and you’re singing too well to sabotage yourself that way.
• Eddie, stop overplaying.  Yes, we know you’re a guitar god.  We don’t need to be reminded on every song.  Just play the song and only riff occasionally.
• And, Eddie, one more thing, play Eruption straight through.  Throw in Cathedral at the end if you want, but play your signature solo like you care enough about us to practice it.  Axe wielders the world over can play it—you oughtta be able to, too.  If the volume knob trickery ain’t happening for Cathedral, no one’s going to care—just drop it.
• The whole band—rearrange the set list to kick off with Jump and end with something else—maybe You Really Got Me Now.  In other words, do your first and last hits in reverse.  Jump is not a good song to end on—it doesn’t show off what made you the best band on the planet, and a lot of diehard rock ‘n rollers don’t care for it.  I don’t care if it was your most successful single, You Really Got Me Now or Panama or Hot For Teacher are far more representative of Roth-era Van Halen.  Hell, if the rumors can be believed, you fought incessantly over Jump—why play it like it’s your signature song? 
• Whole band:  play some of your videos onscreen while you perform their tunes.  How cool would it have been to have seen a clip or two from Hot For Teacher while you played it?  Same thing for Jump and Panama.
• Throw in Big Bad Bill and pipe in Dad Van Halen’s clarinet track.  Then you can announce that you’ve got three generations of Van Halens playing.  People would dig that.  And, besides, the song suits Dave’s whiskey-stained voice extremely well.
• Do a second encore.  Save Panama or some other tune, but do a second encore—people have been expecting it at every show and summarily disappointed each time.
• Talk more between the songs and consider taking an intermission at some point.  I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but Dave’s stage antics have been cut too deep.  It’s almost like he’s been emasculated.  Dave Roth unleashed is the best frontman that ever lived.  Dave Roth on a short leash courtesy of Eddie Van Halen is hard to watch sometimes—he doesn’t seem like the same guy at times.  Turn Dave lose and let him talk a bit, reminisce with him a bit, joke around—it won’t kill ya, I promise.  He didn’t even do the talking part before Ice Cream Man this time, and, yes, I was disappointed.
• Eddie, Al, and Wolfie should be introduced by Dave, and Dave should be introduced by Eddie.  No one except Wolfie was introduced Friday night.  Yes, I know we all know who you are, but I still found that a bit weird.
• One last thing:  don’t yell into each other’s microphones.  Eddie, you yelled into Dave’s mike Friday night and nearly deafened him.  For a split second, he was literally stunned—he looked like a rabbit that had just been smacked on the back of the head.  Use your own damned mike or at least pretend to be a pro and remember that you won’t be able to hear someone else’s mike in your ear monitor, so yelling is only going to annoy them.