When Van Halen Were At Their Best

When Van Halen Were At Their Best
by Ian Wigley

By writing this piece, I’m almost sure I’ll enrage more than just a few people. Never mind, it's never stopped me in the past, and it’ll not stop me in the future. Here we go…

It’s a common fallacy that Van Halen’s finest years stopped in 1984 when David Lee Roth spat his dummy out and left the band due to fueding and ‘musical differences’ with Eddie Van Halen. There are elements of truth to suggest that some of Van Halen’s finest outings were prior to 1984 (see Van Halen – Van Halen), but there is little evidence to suggest anything Van Halen prior to 1984 was very much better than 5150 or OU812, post David Lee Roth Van Halen.

The trouble with the music media and the general record-buying public is this: they suffer from The Beatles Syndrome (also known as The Sgt. Pepper Syndrome): namely, that the talk that has been talked about the band actually deluded the individual into thinking what had been was all that would be, and nothing would be better again.

With reference to The Beatles, everyone in the world seems to think we’ll never ever get a better band than The Beatles, therefore any band that comes out of anywhere in the world will never live up to the Fab Four, and are immediately given the tag Never-As-Good-As-The-Beatles. When David Lee Roth left Van Halen, he was irreplaceable apparently, and even if they did replace him, no one on God’s own earth would come anywhere close to Diamond Dave’s greatness. Therefore, Van Halen prior to Dave’s departure was the best there ever will be, period.

Now you’re all reading this cutting prose thinking I’m a David Lee Roth hater. On the contrary. In actual fact, I love the man. I think he’s definitely one of the greatest frontmen ever (beaten only by Freddie Mercury perhaps, or maybe an on-form Robert Plant).

Dave was incredibly good-looking, had a body most of us blokes would kill for, baby-blue eyes, a grin that melts ice-caps in Alaska, and charisma coming out of his ears. Granted, his voice wasn’t note-perfect (indeed, it was heavily doctored in the studio), but it didn’t matter; his live performances were awesome. It was these very performances that allowed us to forget his lack of vocal range and further allowed us to say he was one of the greatest ever.

David Lee Roth and Van Halen made a handful of great records (their debut is still their finest), they sold out stadiums and arenas worldwide, and they lived out their dreams of rock n’ roll more than most others did. They sold millions of records to millions of people across the planet, and they were arguably one of the biggest rock bands of the 70s and early 80s.

This wasn’t due to just Dave though; Van Halen had three fantastic musicians other than Dave in the band – Michael Anthony on bass (steady timekeeper, nothing too special), Eddie Van Halen re-writing the rule book on guitars every minute he had one in his hand, and Alex Van Halen on the drums, an incredibly talented drummer in his own (or anyone’s) right. The band was bigger than the sum of its parts, but it wasn’t just due to David Lee Roth.

Anyway, picture the scene: August 1984, Van Halen play the Monsters of Rock Festival at Castle Donington, England. They’re second on the bill, behind AC/DC, and the whole gig and the run-up to the gig is done in silence between Eddie and Dave. They shared a stage, but they never spoke, barely even looked in each other’s direction. David Lee Roth had to go. There wasn’t the inner-harmony anymore, the band obviously didn’t get on.

David Lee Roth went, soon after, to pursue a solo career and to get out of Eddie Van Halen’s face. That was it, Van Halen were done. Because no-one would be better than David Lee Roth, would they? And no album after Dave’s departure would ever match up to, say, Women and Children First. Actually, there was at least one Van Halen album after Dave that was better than most of the ones Dave played on…and although the guy who replaced Dave wasn’t as good as Dave in terms of charisma and looks, he did manage to feature on albums better than the majority Dave featured on.

Enter Sammy Hagar, blonde permed mop-head of a singer. Imagine the record exec: "Sammy, you will replace David Lee Roth as lead singer of one of the biggest bands ever.” You wouldn’t like to have been Sammy Hagar back then, would you? Think about it. Imagine trying to replace Liam Gallagher, or Morrissey, or Gene Simmons. You wouldn’t fancy the task, would you? Well, that’s what it must have felt like when Sammy Hagar voluntarily handed himself the arduous task of replacing David Lee Roth. Get in the band, sing all Dave’s songs, and further rocket them to superstardom—that was Sammy Hagar’s job.

What followed was this: 5150, in my opinion the second best Van Halen album. 5150, for me, is one big ball of Van Halen thrown straight between your eyes. Let’s remember that David Lee Roth had just left us with a pretty weak album, 1984, a mish-mash of ten songs that weren’t very good at all. Granted, "Hot For Teacher," "Panama" and "Top Jimmy" were good, but "Jump?" Holy Moses. What was "Jump" all about? Synths and that guitar solo from Eddie that was so badly placed in the song. It sounded like the sound-guy had just mistakenly dropped it in the middle of the album. Aside from the aforementioned few songs, that album had nothing, nothing at all compared with its predecessors. What we had after 1984 was a new guy, new blood, and an album that just kicked the spots off of most of David Lee Roth’s Van Halen.

5150 kicked off with a pretty lame song ("Good Enough") but then delivered some of the hardest good-time rock n’ roll songs most of us Van Halen addicts would ever see. We had the power-ballad "Why Can’t This Be Love," "Get Up," "Dreams," and then that song "Summer Nights."

"Summer Nights," in my house, can be put on at any time of the week and make me literally run to the kitchen to get the fish slicer and bop around my front room, hands running up the fretboard (read fish slicer) in unison with Eddie. I can put that track on in my little Ford Fiesta on a long July night, close my eyes, and just practically imagine I’m driving a soft-top Ferrari. Zeitgeist, that’s what it is, zeitgeist: capturing the moment. "Summer Nights" did it before the opening chords of Eddie’s guitar had stopped ringing.

Ten or so years of Diamond Dave had been blown out of the water in 30 or so seconds…the rest of the song is a formality. The battle had been fought and won in the opening seconds of 5150’s fifth track. I once saw Van Halen’s live video (Without a Net, Live in New Haven, Connecticut) and when Eddie hits those opening chords for "Summer Nights," he just grins. Edward Van Halen, you have good right to grin, if I had delivered a slice of rock n’ roll like "Summer Nights," I’d be grinning too.

If "Summer Nights" wasn’t enough, further down the line was "5150," the title track. Now, I’ve been known to play a guitar or three every day or so, in a really average way, but there’s no way I could ever manage anything close to what Eddie Van Halen achieved on the 5150 album. I’m not sure how multi-layered Eddie’s guitars were in the studio on this album, nor am I sure how many effects his guitar was attached to, but one thing I’m pretty sure about is that he did superhuman things with that guitar.

There are average guitar players and there are guitar players who push the boat out, and Eddie pushed the boat so damn far out that in years to come few others would scarcely be able to compete. His guitar sound “fit the bill,” it did just the right thing at just the right time in that particular music genre. It was big, it was everything the rock/metal genre needed in that particular year, and it fit with the words of the songs that just typified that album.

To further highlight the great musicianship of 5150, we need to talk about Alex Van Halen’s drums. Rock drummers across the board are always trying to go one-better – the best example being Tommy Lee of Motley Crue and his spinning drum-kit – and Alex Van Halen was no exception to this rule. Alex, however, did the ‘one-better’ thing subconsciously; he never tried to be better, he just was (another example of this type of thing is Stone Roses guitar player John Squire, content with just playing, not needing to get one-up, but always being better than the rest).

Alex was an absolutely fantastic time-keeper (which is what drummers have to be, obviously), and he was flashy without trying. He kept up with the frenetic pace of Eddie’s guitar (it’s usually the other way around in bands, guitar players keep time with drummers’ rhythm) and he did things with his hands and feet that few others could manage. Do yourself a favour, listen to the opening bars of "5150" and check out the kick drum, it’s crazy. Alex must have used a double kick pedal, he must have, failing that he’s an octopus and has a pedal on each foot. It’s the same across the album, every song has drumming on it that’s usually reserved for thrash metal bands like Slayer or Metallica, but it fits so well.

5150 draws to a close soon after the title track, and ends rather anti-climactically, namely with the track "Inside," but it really didn’t matter—what we’d had prior to this was all the proof we needed that Sammy Hagar and Eddie Van Halen had managed to live up to past glories. They had done so with a personnel that clearly wasn’t as talented as its predecessors, and that’s the important bit.

Van Halen went further down the Sammy Path by releasing OU812 a couple of years later, and although this wasn’t 5150, it was a tight album, although not a patch on Van Halen’s debut. They achieved considerable worldwide success on this release, a hit single ("When It’s Love"), and sold-out stadiums like their plane was going down. For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, their next studio outing, was weak, and it sort of spelled the end for Sammy, but it didn’t matter too much. Sammy had proved his point – he could make an album better than just about all David Lee Roth made, and he did it in the face of all adversity.

So I started this article singing the praises David Lee Roth, and I’ve almost finished it by extrapolating the 5150 album. Granted, I’ve gone in two different directions, but I’ve achieved (I think!!) what I set out to achieve – to tell the world that Van Halen wasn’t just David Lee Roth and his wonderment, it was also Sammy Hagar. The next time you’re at your local record store and your fingers reach ‘V’ in the CD section, spare a thought for that mop-head named Hagar who took on Dave Lee Roth and won.

Ian can be reached at ian@babblog.com.