I love Van Halen.
For those who need a reason, when Van Halen arrived on the scene, they weren't the "assless chaps and carnival patter" version that gave the world one of the all-time epic synth rockers ("Jump"), they were a young, brash, and insanely tight unit with the tenacity and of an East L.A. street gang.
Given access to the Warner Brothers distribution and promotional pipeline, these four heat-seeking missiles would detonate as one just high enough above Earth's atmosphere to reach everyone and let the chips fall where they may.
What this band had that few other bands ever have was the confidence that once the kids heard their music, they'd "run with the devil" to the nearest Honest Bob's Record & Tape Emporium.
How right where they, you ask?
Get this: One week, us kids is riding our Big Wheels in our Garanimals and, the next, we were chatting up the opposite sex in the high school parking lot, and EVERYBODY has a fucking Van Halen t-shirt, necklace, belt buckle, coke mirror, or other some such paraphernalia,.
Keep in mind that this was IN ADDITION to also owning that first album on vinyl, cassette, or 8-track tape. Then there were the singles and the bootleg copies of their Gene Simmons demos or early club shows that suddenly popped up at every head shop and flea market a week after "Running With The Devil" hit the radio airwaves.
If Van Halen had only broken up after that first album everything would have been perfect.
After all, you can only ever be new and original once.
From that point on, you're expected to, at the very least, match that same level of success with the next album or be deemed a failure for only going gold.
Admittedly, most bands would kill to be in that position, but very few have the composure, OR THE MANAGEMENT, to weather the storm.
In addition to pressure from the record company, concert promoters, and the constant demands for a piece of your time from newspapers and radio stations, when a band gets that huge that fast, the roaches come out of the woodwork.
Especially when one member of the band is placed on a pedestal high above the rest of the band and whose playing is immediately mimicked by an entire generation of guitar players.
We've all seen some hot shot guitarists - SRV and Hendrix come quickest to mind - but who among them had to quite literally turn their back to their audience for fear that one's licks n' tricks are suddenly copped by every guitar player on the Sunset Strip?
Mind you, that was gonna happen eventually, but Eddie wasn't about to let it happen before he and his band got signed. Meanwhile, the rest of the band is hoping someone doesn't come along and poach their guitarist before the band can land a deal.
Eddie could have been the new guitarist in Kiss if Gene Simmons had had his way.
Why else do you think an ego the size of David Lee Roth's went along with naming the band Van Halen?
We can only breathe a sigh of relief that Eddie's last name wasn't Lumbergh.
Make no mistake, Van Halen is not named after Alex in any way, shape or form and if Alex isn't nodding his head in agreement as he reads this, I'll eat my original Van Halen trucker hat from the '79 tour.
Having said that, if your guitar player's back is turned to the audience, then you, as a lead singer, must command just as much of the audience's attention when you know with absolute certainty that everyone there came to see "the guitar player that everybody's talking about".
Diamond Dave didn't just do that without even having to shift out of first gear, he brought in THE LADIES.
If Roth hadn't done so, those early club shows would have been total sausage fests and Van Halen would have never risen to the top of the bill at the Whisky, much less The Forum.
Roth is to be commended for being just as much a genius as Eddie by not falling into any of the usual cock rock poses that dominated the rock scene while also creating his own vocal style in the process.
In other words, when Dave sings, you know it.
But enough about the inner workings of the band, let's dig into the albums.
Much like the sequel to an unexpected box office smash, like "Star Wars", the material on Van Halen II feels a little rushed, as if it, too, could have benefited from a year or two of intensive club work.
The album's saving grace is that it sounds like the sort of album you could play all the way through at your average underage cornfield kegger and everyone in attendance would find at least one tune to groove along to whilst copping a buzz.
Like most second sequels, Women & Children First, is a big budget dud that shows the first cracks in the band's facade of unity. By this time, Roth's stardom has begun to eclipse that of "the guitarist for which the band is named" and a vague, unsettling darkness descends upon the sessions.
While "And The Cradle Will Rock" and "Everybody Wants Some" gained traction at album rock radio, there was no song with the crossover potential of a "You Really Got Me" or "Dance The Night Away".
As a result, Women & Children First only went double platinum.
Instead, Van Halen made the sort of album you almost expect to come packaged in a brown paper bag with three X's stamped on it.
With song titles like "Mean Street", "Dirty Movies", and "Sinner's Swing", Fair Warning is Lou Reed's "Walk On The Wild Side" given a Hollywood spit shine. That no rock critics saw the connection could be the straw that led Diamond Dave to opine that the main reason rock critics chose to write about Elvis Costello instead of Van Halen was because most rock critics looked like Elvis Costello.
Despite Fair Warning being their second album in a row without a crossover single, the band's popularity as a live act continues to skyrocket, the question on everyone's mind is "What does Van Halen do next?"
As thinly-veiled a cash-grab as Diver Down was, this writer must admit that the band's inspired renditions of "Pretty Woman" and "Where Have All The Good Times Gone" alone are worth the price of admission.
By now, of course, the Eddie guitar interludes that used to inspire generations of metal guitarists have become the tracks we skip over? Also, could it be possible that perhaps Eddie Van Halen, himself, was getting bored with his own guitar playing?!
No, that's not possible.
One listen to "1984" and "Jump" from the album 1984 practically screamed, "Yes, that's possible!", leaving Diamond Dave to suck it up and front Starship for the foreseeable future.
In between the synth-heavy explorations, 1984 actually manages to reclaim the band's rocker cred while also being insanely commercial with an actual surplus of single contenders in "Panama", "Hot For Teacher", "Top Jimmy" and "House Of Pain".
At least publicly, the boys had gotten their groove back, but, behind the scenes, Eddie was turning the rest of the band against Roth, whose solo ambitions were inevitable. Hell, Michael Anthony could have released a solo album and it would have gone gold in '85, so why the hell shouldn't Roth do a throwback EP full of favorite covers?
Sadly, while Eddie was dabbling in soundtrack work, the blossoming keyboardist viewed Roth's own desire to stretch his legs artistically as enough of a threat to drown his sorrows and frustrations in a myriad of booze and drugs, destroying the band in the process.