Grimsley came over tonight. He had a tape he wanted me to hear (yeah Grim is old school, he still uses cassette tapes and has a guy who make him bootlegs). The tape was a live recording of Van Halen from 1977 at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. This was right before their first record came out in early 1978. It's a pretty good recording, perhaps off the board (I think it can be heard on Youtube), and what you notice most of all, besides the explosiveness of the band, was just how Off The Charts EVH was as a guitarist at the time. My friends and I (me, Grim & Ono if I remember correctly) had seen Van Halen a year earlier, on New Year's Eve at the Santa Monica Civic. This was December 31, 1976, a full 14 months before the debut album hit the stores. VH was a hot club band at the time, all through 1976 they played at every club on Sunset, and you heard their name all the time, saw posters and flyers, "Van Halen this, Van Halen that"........in 1976, in Hollywood, they were everywhere.
My friends and I absolutely hated Van Halen that year. And it's funny, because we had never heard them. :) We simply hated them because we thought, "who the hell are they"?
You don't go around acting like you are the Kings Of Rock & Roll if you are just a local band out of Pasadena. And to my 16 year old mind, that's what these guys were doing. To me, you had to earn your egotism. It was one thing to be a cocky rock star if you were in a huge band and could play your ass off.
Ritchie Blackmore? Okay fine. He was pretty cocky back then, but no biggie. He was in Deep Purple and he could also back it up. I read Creem magazine, and Circus (and Circus Raves, too!), and you had to be a big band to get in those mags. A well known band who played real concert halls. Who was this Van Halen who thought they were big shots, but with no record out and only club gigs to their name?
It was an affront to everything I thought was cool, and when you are 16, things are pretty cut and dried. Anyhow, during the Summer of 1976, you heard "Van Halen" everywhere, but only in Los Angeles.
And then on New Year's Eve, we finally "had" to see them, because they were opening for (now here's the hard part) either The Runaways or Sparks. I have always thought it was The Runaways, but Googling tells me different. Grim swears it was The Runaways, too, but the point is that we "had" to sit through Van Halen first. They were the openers, and we were prepared to hate 'em because we already did (though I was secretly interested to finally see them after all the 1976 publicity).
The verdict was that they were pretty good. Not great or incredible, but certainly professional, and the guitarist seemed to be talented, even if he was not blowing anybody away (yet, lol). But the cockiness I had suspected was on full display, especially with the singer, who looked and acted like the more well known Jim Dandy of Black Oak Arkansas. After the concert, we all thought, "who the hell was that guy"? And the guitarist I remembered as a posturing little guy who had his licks down and had a big sound but was nothing special.
Then the first album came out 14 months later. And in the meantime something happened. Maybe they started to eat dynamite for breakfast (or at least Wheaties), with Edward taking a double serving, because when you hear this bootleg from the Pasadena Civic, just a year later in December 1977, it's like hearing the first nuclear powered band. Fans remember what a great rhythm section Michael Anthony created with Alex VH, an underrated and excellent drummer. And in those days, David Lee Roth (the cocky guy, haha) was "on point" and still sang all the words in every song. The downfall to his high level live performances would begin in 1983 with the Drunken Debacle at The US Festival, but I digress. In the early years, Diamond Dave sang 'em the way they went.
But what you notice more than anything on this live recording from 1977, is the playing of Edward Van Halen. It is, in a word, Supercharged. And when you hear it, you remember why he had such an impact when Van Halen finally hit it big in 1978. The first album was one thing, but seeing him live at that time (and up to the Us Festival) was a life-changing experience, especially for hard core fans of guitar playing. This was a guy who was, to paraphrase the VH song title : "On Fire". And that's putting it mildly. You kind of have to hear it to believe it (and it helps if you're a fan), but what I can testify to, as a long time fan of guitar, who has heard them all and seen many, is that EVH, at the time, was the most energised, "alive" guitarist I have ever heard. He's not just playing fast. He is playing "plugged in", with a stick of dynamite up his you-know-what, and he is doing it to an extent that has never been heard before or since.
I am not .kidding. Nobody ever played that kind of "live-sounding, electrified, over the top but in total control, humongous guitar" before, or after, EVH came along.
There have been many "faster" guitarists, ala Yngwie Malmsteen, but all one needs to do is listen to Edward at his peak, and there is no comparison with any shredder. It's not enough to play fast (nor is there any reason to, just for the sake of doing it), but to play with energy......that is a whole 'nuther thing.
I have only heard one other guitarist play with that kind of fire, and of course it was Sir Richard Blackmore. He was at his peak during the Rainbow days of the mid-80s. And his style was quite different from that of EVH, and he preceded him by a decade or so. But both gentlemen played as if connected to an energy that is nearly unfathomable to other players, but - most interestingly - readily identifiable to the listener.
The listener, the rock n' roll fan (the guitar fan), the fan who knows what makes rock so great, at least in part, hears Edward Van Halen in 1977, when he was only 22 years old (and only seven years after The Beatles broke up), and thinks to himself : "Yeeahhh! That's what I've been waiting to hear"!
It's an energy transfer, seemingly from the core of the Universe.
It's like he was plugged into The Speed Of Light.
I went from hating Van Halen (without ever hearing them) to them being my favorite band by 1979. And Edward became my hero, as he did for so many players.
There has never been anyone like him.
It is a mindblower that he came along forty years ago, but it seems like yesterday.
And nobody has surpassed what he has done.
That's all for tonight.
No comments:
Post a Comment