Once And Future

Van Halen’s first six records are more important than the entire Led Zeppelin catalog, but not for the reasons you’d expect. Yes, one could make a decent argument that VH served as the hairy end-product of experiments authored by groups like Star, and the New York Dolls. Yes, Eddie Van Halen is an awesome player with a rare and potent set of skills. Yes, the first complete discography in my own record collection was Van Halen, bought with allowance money and including the records Van Halen I, Van Halen II, Women and Children First, Diver Down, Fair Warning, and 1984. These reasons, and many more, are what makes Van Halen awesome. The reasons for the band's importance, however, were won and sealed by an entirely different circumstance.

In 1985 Van Halen fired their lead singer and primary lyricist David Lee Roth, and in doing so, taught thousands of burgeoning eighth grade rock kids that the music doesn’t give a fuck. The Van Halen saga teaches us that rock and roll can disappoint and confuse, and that people who make great music together sometimes hate each other. Van Halen teaches us that art – no matter how deeply we feel we understand it, or how perfect it seems on it’s face – is a thing created by interests and priorities separate from our own. As adults, we know this. For most folks it’s knowledge hard-won from a lifetime's worth of constant disappointment. Children however, especially adolescent children, already testy with hormone flooding aren’t really equipped to deal with something as confusing as this parting was at the time.

Most of my own confusion was that I’d always figured (wrongly) that, despite what the band’s name might imply, David Lee Roth was the leader of Van Halen. He sang and wrote all the songs! He starred in the videos! How – I wondered - can the leader be fired from the band he leads? The rumor mills, unassisted back then by internet-delivered insta-news, were featuring both Gary Cherone and Sammy Hagar as replacement. Those names just added confusion. Cherone was the lead singer of a pop-metal outfit, and Hagar was famous for a novelty song about compulsively disobeying speed limits. David Lee Roth had a fucking samurai sword! He could leap in the air five feet in the execution of perfect spinning windmill kicks, in rhythm, while singing, and screaming. I cannot express to you the unholy weirdness involved in the full realization of this break-up. The word “surreal” springs to mind. If Led Zeppelin had fired Robert Plant in ‘71 and replaced him with Neal Sedaka, and then gone on to record and tour with Sedaka for the next twelve years, only to switch from Sedaka to Paul Anka and tour with him another five years, then we might have some sort of credible precedent on the books. I got in two separate fights over this at school, one of them marking the termination of a three-year best friendship.

Time moved on. Roth set out with a solo act featuring legendary shredder Steve Vai, and deploying a concert stage big enough to contain four NBA regulation-sized basketball courts and a more traditionally-sized arena rock stage. The Van Halen bros. actually ended up hiring Cherone and Hagar (not at the same time, although that would have been awesome) and spent the 90’s following an effective album & single & world tour & nine month hiatus & nine month rehab hiatus & twelve month hiatus hiatus protocol behind music that sounded almost nothing like it had in the days of Roth. During downtime, the Van Halens kept busy ripping DLR in music magazines.

For his part, Diamond Dave actually kind of sunk into obscurity. Even just reading back that sentence the idea seems impossible, yet I watched it happen. This man was the most visible, most awesome, most absolutely sicko rock star of his time. He helped codified the rules of dress and behavior for lead vocalists / front men of the post-classic rock period. If David Lee Roth isn’t David Lee Roth between 1975 and 1985, Then Vince Neal, Mike Patton, Anthony Kiedis, and Perry Farrell never get to be exactly who they became.

Eventually Roth’s solo career lost all Van Halen-related inertia. By the time Kurt Cobain was dead, David Lee Roth was but the answer to a trivia question. Every so often there was some drama: a “drug bust” (he was arrested buying a tiny bag of weed in Washington Square) in 1998, a rumored near-reunion with Van Halen in ‘96, and - in what seemed at the time an inspired spasm of stunt casting – a brief run on terrestrial radio replacing Howard Stern in New York City A.M. drive. The show lasted little more than a week. Roth sank into has-been-ness yet again until his re-acceptance back into the VH fold in early 2007.

The lesson this shit-show seems to teach us is not important enough to justify the action itself. If there’s a bright spot, it’s that Roth – through all his post-VH trial and strife – has seemingly managed to keep his instrument in performance-shape despite his wanderings. Eddie and Alex Van Halen seem game as well, although they never had to endure the extended breaks from touring that Roth was forced to wait out. There are tour dates about to be released, and a new VH record dropped two weeks ago, the first to feature Diamond Dave in many a moon. I have not heard it, but I’m sure it's awesome, as most of the things the Roth-led VH does are. If it’s not, however, there are always those first six records. They sound the same wild alarm they always did. They sound like drinking underage in secret parking lots. They sound like fucking in the back seat of a moving car. They sound like being totally, wickedly, young.