I’ve been listening to Van Halen a lot lately to satisfy my classic hard rock urges. That and even before I started this blog, I wanted to do some sort of album review website, in the same vein as Mark Prindle or John McFerrin, but with more of Robert Christgau’s edge to it (and overall brevity of his reviews; McFerrin’s are a bit wordy, and Prindle tends to go off on scatological tangents on his reviews, not that I don’t enjoy them both). My first artist I was gonna do reviews on was actually Van Halen (or Tori Amos), and last summer I started writing reviews of their albums. needless to say, I never got started on the project. Well, today, I present to you the first part of the Van Halen saga in record review form: The Roth Years. As soon as I invest in more Pepto-Bismol, I’ll listen to and review the Van Hagar era!
Van Halen (1978)
Van Halen’s eponymous debut set the world on fire in the sense that a new breed of hard rock was unleashed to the world. They followed in the same vein as AC/DC or Aerosmith but were less bluesy and more electric, mostly due to Eddie Van Halen’s distinct guitar sound and David Lee Roth being as much influenced by Robert Plant as he was by Louis Prima.
This album has at least 5 songs that are classic rock radio mainstays – “Runnin’ With the Devil,” “Jamie’s Cryin’,” “You Really Got Me” to name a few – but other than the band’s distinct sound that influenced a while generation of wannabes, it doesn’t offer much else. At times, Van Halen sounds the same after a while, and they they do try to “experiment,” such as the doo-wop influenced bridge in “I’m the One,” Van Halen just comes off as silly. Yet the band shows plenty of attitude, with songs like “Atomic Punk,” and “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love.” Van Halen mixed fun with frenzy, considering the landscape of hard rock by 1977/78; By then, Led Zeppelin had gotten way too serious for their own good, and Kiss were always a cartoon from day one. For better, and certainly for worse, Van Halen ushered in a new breed of hard rock that kicked your ass, yet also was able to be light-hearted at the same time. That said, half the songs on this album are so overplayed I never want to hear them again.
Rating (out of 10): 8
Van Halen II (1979)
Fuller sounding than their debut, and Alex Van Halen finally got rid of that awful echo effect that bounced off his snare drum on their last album! The first four songs are awesome, and they turn Linda Ronstadt’s “You’re No Good” into a kick-ass hard rock tune! “Dance the Night Away” is one of their best singles ever, and “Somebody Get me a Doctor” deserves more radio play than it gets. However, like every Van Halen before or since, Van Halen II has a few songs that just aren’t memorable or hooky. “Light Up The Sky” starts off incredible, but the middle part sees the song losing itself in Roth’s vocal exercises and an ill-adivsed drum “solo” by Alex. And Eddie shows off way too much on this album, especially when he tries to play “Eruption” on a nylon-string guitar on a track called “Spanish Fly.”
Rating (out of 10): 6.5
Women and Children First (1980)
OK, I’m not gonna lie. This album sucks for the most part. Van Halen fans seem to love it, whereas I don’t. The introductory one-two punch of “…And the Cradle Will Rock” and “Everybody Wants Some” (brilliantly used in Better Off Dead; David Lee Roth as a dancing hamburger!) raises you up, but the third track “Fools” just shows the band fucking around for the first two minutes of the 6-minute song, and then just using recycled riffs for the rest of the song. “Take Your Whiskey Home” is one of the Roth-era Van Halen’s worst singles, and I don’t even remember the rest of the album. That’s how boring it is. Iceberg, right ahead!
Rating (out of 10): 5
Fair Warning (1981)
Many people consider Fair Warning to be the “dark” album of Van Halen’s career. Sure, the cover art most certainly is more bizarre than before, and the songs take on a more menacing approach, but it’s not dark the way one would think Joy Division is dark, or Black Sabbath – or even the more ominous moments on Rush’s Moving Pictures. It’s more like the band is having a bad hangover type of dark (or found one too many brown M&Ms in their bowl).
Fair Warning opens up with “Mean Streets” which has a lightning fast double-tapping solo by the ever-so-impressive Eddie, and is easily one of their strongest songs ever, and as the title implies, is a tale about street life. “Hear About It Later,” one of the few tracks that reflects on Fair Warning’s supposed “darkness,” shows David Lee Roth lamenting about having no money or house on the hill, and “neighbors complaining about the noise next door.” The song has a good melody, but if that’s their idea of a bad day, I’ll switch places with them in a heartbeat. Side One closes with “Unchained,” the lone radio staple on this record, featuring your typical Van Halen-styled awesome riffage. Unfortunately, Side Two of Fair Warning sees the band losing focus. “Sunday Afternoon in the Park” is a misguided bass solo (I’ve defended Michael Anthony to the teeth about how the Van Halen brothers screwed him over, but he really wasn’t that good of a bassist; adding weird effects doesn’t make a bass solo great, Michael!!!!), and “One Foot Out the Door” sounds like they shat it out in about 10 seconds. Supposedly, there was infighting within Van Halen (basically David Lee Roth VS Eddie), and it probably helped mold the overall “brown” tone of this album.
Rating (out of 10): 6.5
Diver Down (1982)
A pretty hodgepodgey album, and a rather bizarre mix of tunes, Diver Down contains 5 covers, including some very surprising ones, a lot of White Album-esque genre-shifting (at about a third of its length), and some classic Van Halen styled songs. They do yet another Kinks cover, “Where Have All The Good Times Gone,” and it’s as good if not better than “You Really Got Me.” “Hang ‘Em High” rocks, and I always thought “Little Guitars” never got its due; Its intro is a brilliantly played flamenco-styled ditty by Eddie, showing his versatility, and the song itself is one of the band’s most light-hearted rockers. Diver Down also has no problem in being probably the most unusual album in the band’s entire career. It’s not straightforward at all. “Cathedral” is a short instrumental, showing eddie having fun with delay and volume pedals; It’s interesting – indulgent but interesting nonetheless. They manage to cover both Roy Orbison’s “(Oh) Pretty Woman” (with an awesome instrumental track entitled “Intruder” preceding it), and “Dancing in the Street” by Martha and the Vandellas, paying homage to early rock & R&B (even if “Dancing” doesn’t quite work that well). They also switch things up by covering “Happy Trails” and “Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now)” an old Jim Yellen and Milton Ager composition from the Roaring Twenties, with Eddie & Alex’s dad on clarinet (!!!!!). This album seems to be a tug-of-war between the more serious side of the band (Eddie, basically) and the light-hearted, humorous side (With the main perpetrator, no questions asked, being Roth). There’s some filler, but it’s overall pretty enjoyable.
Rating (out of 10): 7
1984 (Wow, I wonder what year that was released….)
1984 just so happens to be the best album of the original lineup, and the best in their career, and it helped elevate the band to a wider audience, due to the band’s more prominent use of synths (which lead to in-band warfare between Roth and EVH, and lead one way or another to Roth exiting the band a year later), memorable MTV video classics (“Jump, “Panama,” “Hot For Teacher”), and their first quasi-ballad (“I’ll Wait,” which is a lamentation about jerking off to a playmate pinup, which I guess is balladry to David Lee Roth). There are some underrated songs on the album – “Drop Dead Legs” and “Girl Gone Bad,” namely – that proved that Van Halen were still capable of gut-blasting rock & roll, despite their new widespread success. After 1984, Roth either quit or was fired from the band (details on the matter are murky still), and the band was never the same after this album. They tried new sounds, hired new singers, created new (and more complicated) drama, leaving 1984 as a culmination of Van Halen Mach One, which were undoubtedly the band’s glory years.
Rating (out of 10): 8.5
Next up (or at least when I get to it), the Van Hagar Years!!!!!!!
Now to close this post off, here’s that scene from Better Off Dead using “Everybody Wants Some” is the coolest way possible!
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