No, really

These days I’m supposed to be putting my effort into cartooning. And I will be again soon! But sometimes events conspire to take over your brain and make you think about Van Halen, and what can you do?  They weren’t big events—listening to a Wolf Van Halen interview, finding a trashy band bio in a used bookstore, and thinking about the enigma of David Lee Roth—but once the VH train gets rolling, you can’t stop it.

So let me start out by saying: I really like Van Halen. To an extent that I don’t know that you’d expect if you looked at me and saw a graying chunky-glasses south Minneapolis music dude who’s equally likely to be wearing a Husker Du or a Marty Stuart t-shirt. If you asked me to list 80s bands I love most, most of them are what you’d expect: Husker Du, the Replacements, R.E.M., the Pixies; but catch me in the right mood, and VH is right in there with them. They aren’t a band who needs a big music nerd to defend them; they succeeded on their own terms to a level that’s tough to comprehend. But I’m gonna praise them anyway.

And here’s the thing: Van Halen are basically unique in the space of American music. There are groups who—often intentionally—share some features, but there’s absolutely no one else who hits all the same weird points that they do. Fundamentally, they rock the hell out; but they do it with a sense of fun and variety and musical adventurousness. Upstream, their antecedents would be groups like Cream and Led Zeppelin and (to go American) Aerosmith in their better 70s mode; but from the jump VH represented a nearly clean break with the electrified blues those groups were bashing out. Jimmy Page talks about first encountering an Eddie Van Halen solo—oddly, it was the one in Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”—and being startled by the impossible shit he was hearing; Marc Maron talks about how high school parking lots just abruptly sounded different in 1978 when the first Van Halen album came out.

And downstream, entire microgenerations of LA bands with big hair built themselves around chasing VH’s vibe while always missing big chunks of the picture (the arguable exception being Guns and Roses, but even then, they were only able to keep it up for a few years). Motley Crue and Quiet Riot and GnR all devote a lot of their time to making sure you know how dangerous and bad they are; and while there’s certainly artifice to Van Halen’s image—especially in the Roth years—it was generally aimed more at convincing the world that Van Halen was having as much fun as humanly possible at all times, in ways both wholesome and not.

Fun

The foregrounding of fun is probably the single thing that sets them apart, except maybe for the instrumental virtuosity (which we’ll get to). It wasn’t just in the image they worked to put out; it’s embedded in the music. Most Roth-era VH has an element of carefree silliness to it; “Hot for Teacher” ends with Roth yelling “oh my GOD” like he can’t believe the ridiculous shit he just got away with. Diver Down ends with the band singing “Happy Trails” a capella, a few songs after an acoustic shuffle that centers a clarinet solo from the Van Halen brothers’ dad.

Even when Roth-era VH moves from fun into menace, it’s always played with a wink. Every so often someone on the internet posts the isolated Roth audio from “Runnin With the Devil” and, stripped of context, it sounds absolutely ridiculous in the best possible way.

There are important musical elements that keep VH light in a way that none of their peers bothered to investigate. When I was in junior high, I remember rolling my eyes at hearing that Michael Anthony’s background vocals were the band’s secret weapon; now I think that’s absolutely the case (although I also heard EVH carp occasionally later on that Anthony was getting total credit for something that the two of them were doing in tandem; and maybe, but I think we can agree that “Eddie didn’t get enough credit” is not really a problem that plagued Van Halen). Whoever happened to be doing them on a given track, the strong major-key ooohs and aaahs that undergird most Van Halen songs lighten things and make things sound more like a party than some weird sex dungeon where Vince Neil would be hanging out. The same thing goes for EVH’s steady embrace of synthesizers; they sound great and lighten the mood. VH’s cover of “Dancing in the Street” would be leaden without the giddy Moog sequence bouncing around underneath it.

This was absolutely intentional, by the way—in the cruddy book that sparked all of this, Roth is quoted as saying that he wanted the band to sound fun and welcoming for everybody, male or female (assuming, of course, the megawatt-level horniness radiating off of Roth and most of his lyrics isn’t too off-putting*), and asking why bands like Motley Crue were so angry about everything all the time.

*which makes me think of an important distinction: Van Halen songs objectify women, which isn’t great; but they don’t sound like they hate women, which sets them apart from a lot of their peers. You’d never hear something as nasty as GnR’s “It’s So Easy” or “My Michelle” coming from Van Halen, no matter what the era. I recognize that as a cis guy I don’t have a ton of rhetorical standing to weigh in on how *much* that matters, but as a practical matter I notice that I know a lot of women who really like Van Halen, far more than their peers.

Roth

If I’ve talked about Roth quite a bit, it’s because over the years he was the most talkative about the band’s big picture and philosophy. I don’t know if I’ve heard or read about a person who contains more multitudes than David Lee Roth. You can make persuasive cases for him being an absolute asshole or a pretty decent guy; both of those cases are probably right. It’s clear that he’s a smart person who’s willing to put a lot of work into being a clown. It’s also clear to me that, although I’m no expert and diagnosing strangers at a distance is impossible, there is absolutely no way that Roth is baseline neurotypical; the only question is in what ways his brain works differently. At any rate, he figured out how to put it all to work.

Roth isn’t a great singer; from a technical point of view, I’m not even sure that he’s a good one. His range is tiny, and he can drift out of tune. But in rock, you can really succeed as a vocalist just by knowing what you’ve got to work with and deploying it well, and Roth is a master of this (this hold true in classic country, too; Buck Owens’ voice is kind of terrible, but he knows exactly how to use it for maximum effect, and it winds up being great). What he lacks in technique, he more than makes up in energy and attitude. More than anything else, he’s an entertainer, putting maximum effort into making things fun. And this carries beyond his vocal delivery- he tended to push for the party-atmosphere cover song selections on the early albums, and one of the many ongoing areas of tension between Roth and EVH was the former prizing danceable songs and cock-blocking the latter’s desire to write “hypnotizing” Zeppelinesque epics. I firmly believe that this was Roth saving EVH from himself. David Lee Roth is no punk, but his populist-entertainer instincts (and familiarity with old-tymey showbiz music) guided Van Halen towards a lean, energetic back-to-basic approach to songs that wasn’t all that different from the guiding principles of 70s punk, even if the end results were pretty different (although, again, not different enough to fool the Minutemen).

Eddie

One thing that’s really become clear to me in my current VH thought-bath is how crucial Roth and EVH were for each other in the development of the band. Eddie Van Halen was a generational talent who changed the way people think about one of the dominant musical instruments of the age; he was also a massive introvert and a giant dork (in the best possible way) who really just wanted to nerd out with his guitar. If he’d never met David Lee Roth, it’s easy to imagine Eddie toiling along in semiobscurity and becoming someone like Adrian Belew, charting his own weird niche course out on the fringes of music, occasionally blowing people’s minds in the background of someone else’s work. Roth’s desire for and skill at crowd-pleasing changed the trajectory and, coupled with the amazing shit Eddie (and his brother; Alex is nearly as good at his instrument as Eddie is, just not really in a world-changing way) could do musically, put it all front and center.

The longer I play guitar, the more amazed I am by what Eddie van Halen could do. I mentioned on Bluesky the other day that, by accident of a long time listening and the way I happened to learn to play guitar, whenever I hear a U2 song I can picture *exactly* what the Edge is doing with his hands (to be clear: I’m not running him down here; I’m just saying he’s using a musical toolbox that I’m really familiar with, even if we take it in pretty different directions). It’s *rare* that I can tell what the hell Eddie’s doing, unless it’s just power chords for a rhythm part (and even then it took me 20 years to realize how few strings he’s usually hitting at one time).  And it’s not just his crazy solos that make him a giant; in his era, Steve Vai and Joe Satriani were doing lightning solos with big divebombs in the same style, but to nowhere near the same effect, because EVH had taste and a great sense of musicality to go with his technique. His guitar parts served the greater purpose of a song (and oh yeah—he was also a very good songwriter), instead of just dick-wagging for its own sake (excepting things like “Eruption,” which, well, if you’re gonna wag your dick, that’s the way to do it).

His sense of dynamics and musical structure were fantastic; especially with someone like Alex playing drums net to the huge wall of guitar, it’d be easy for a band like Van Halen to kick out songs that were like hammers pounding on you. But they don’t pound, unless it’s intentionally in the service of a given song. Van Halen songs swoop and soar with purpose. They have bombast, but it’s Beethovenian bombast, structured and tasteful (speaking of Beethoven: Eddie Van Halen’s middle name was Lodewijk, which is a Dutch form of “Ludwig.” So in A Clockwork Orange, there’s an argument to be made that when Alex is going around talking about listening to the old Ludwig Van, he actually wants to hear VH but keeps getting served up Beethoven instead. No wonder he acts out.)

The picture that’s developed for me of Eddie Van Halen is a fascinating one. I don’t think he ever really wanted to be famous, and I don’t think he knew what to do with fame when he achieved it. I think he wanted to be recognized as a great guitarist, yeah; but the impression I get is that the Roth-cultivated eternal backstage party got old pretty fast for him, and he picked up some pretty serious substance problems as coping mechanisms. There’s something really appealing about the idea of the introverted kid who becomes a world-changing virtuoso after spending high school in his room fucking around with a guitar (although it both deepens and complicates that picture if you think about the fact that both Van Halen brothers were isolated in high school partly because of Dutch and then American kids being dickheads about them being half Indonesian).

And it’s clear that he was obsessed with the guitar; on top of being next-level as a player, he was a technical master, constantly rebuilding and modifying guitars in pursuit of some sound or technique. There’s a pretty funny runner in the book I’ve been reading where people lend Eddie a guitar and get it back a few weeks later with the bridge reinstalled backwards, the pickups rewired, and the action jacked way up.

And also: on top of his many musical gifts, both obvious and subtle, EVH has to get credit for one of the great pieces of graphic design in the 20th century, and I’m not kidding. The canted-white-and-black-stripes-on-red-field scheme that he started painting his guitars into is cool-looking, unique, and instantly recognizable. You see it and the words “Van Halen” appear in your brain immediately. There are lots of people being paid a lot of money as graphic designers who will never come up with something that good. And it was an afterthought for him!

Hagar

EVH and Roth needed each other to get the enterprise going; but it’s easy to see why the partnership couldn’t last. If I can see some praiseworthy qualities to David Lee Roth—and I definitely can!—I can also see how he’d be a giant pain in the ass to have to deal with, especially in an artistic endeavor that you cared a lot about, and double especially when there were always millions of dollars on the line. On top of that, both Van Halen brothers seemed to share an irascible streak that left them not very inclined to suffering fools, and some element of cultivated foolery was very much part of the Roth package. Of course a breach was inevitable.

“Are the Sammy Hagar records worth a damn?” is one of the driving questions among Van Halen appreciators (it’s worth noting that no one asks that about the Gary Cherone record). I think they are, but I also think that they’re different in a way that highlights what was so magic about the original partnership.

If David Lee Roth is a smart (if erratic) guy playing a clown, Sammy Hagar is more of a not-particularly-bright guy who thinks he’s Yoda. When Hagar stepped in as singer and lyricist (my understanding of the VH division of labor was that Eddie wrote songs as instrumentals, sometimes collaborating with Alex, and then Roth or Hagar wrote words to what they were presented), a lot of the cleverness and edge went out the window. It’s not disastrous, because the element of fun was always Van Halen’s secret weapon and Sammy Hagar is blessed with the cheerful disposition of a golden retriever (my wife mentioned a long time ago that, say what you will about him, Sammy Hagar is the most relentlessly positive people in rock music); so there’s some playfulness and fun there, but it’s not quite the same. “Summer Nights” is a great song, but it’s full of groaner lines that Hagar sings sincerely when Roth would have been winking his eyes out of their sockets. And Hagar has a sincere mode that Roth totally lacks; at its best, it can get you songs like “Dreams” and “Right Now” that, well, they’re not going to tell you everything you need to live your life, but they’re pretty good and uplifting. At its worst, you get millimeter-deep shit like the part in “Mine All Mine” where Hagar says “you’ve got Allah in the east / You’ve got Jesus in the west /Christ, what’s a man to do” and, based on delivery, clearly thinks he’s really pulled off something profound.

This screenshot, that circulates around Bluesky periodically, captures the essence of Sammy Hagar, I think:

 Every collaborator’s saying “knock off the tornadoes dammit,” and he’s blissfully, heedlessly chuckling to himself about his ‘clever’ inversion of “sky is turning black, knuckles turning white.”

All that said, I think the Hagar stuff can be pretty good! If you’re of a mind to appreciate Van Halen albums, 5150 is about as good as they can get; it’s different from 1984, but not in a way that’s really more drastic than the way a lot of bands evolve from album to album. The Hagar era fell off steadily after that, but for the rest of those records, the singles were usually pretty good at least. In the end, the Roth/Hagar duality winds up feeling to me a lot like a thing I heard the excellent music history podcaster Andrew Hickey say about the Beatles and the Stones: when people praise the Stones, it’s generally using the Beatles as a point of comparison, while when people praise the Beatles, it’s usually on their own terms. Roth and Hagar, same deal.

Let’s end this

Since I wound up talking about this in terms of personalities, I should say: Alex Van Halen is a hell of a drummer. Again, listen to the intro of “Hot for Teacher” and marvel at how the hell he’s doing that. But I don’t have a ton of sense of him beyond “intensely private, has a lot of boundaries that it makes sense to respect.” He and Eddie were clearly close; his nephew speaks well of him (and speaking of his nephew: as far as I can tell, Wolf Van Halen seems like a pretty cool guy who is amazingly level-headed considering what his childhood must have been like. Also, as my friend Chad pointed out “Wolf Van Halen” is maybe the coolest name it’s possible to have in the English language).

Back when bass was my main instrument, the consensus among music heads (and again, I think it’s fascinating that basically every subset of musicians I’ve ever been in has been strongly VH-respecting) seemed to be that Michael Anthony was a silly manchild who could barely play bass; now I think that’s silly. His basslines are simple, but they need to be, given all the hell being unleashed on guitar and drums. And like I said earlier, his soaring, mood-lightening backup vocals are one of the keys to the whole thing. The jack daniels bass? Profoundly silly, but silliness is another of the keys to the whole thing. He got the boot eventually for reasons I don’t get, but they were in their nostalgia act period by then and I’m not sure it matters.

What does all of this add up to? I’m not sure. It adds up to “you should listen to some Van Halen if it’s your kind of thing.” And I guess that hey, this was unfocused, but does Whitesnake merit a few thousand words’ worth of musing, no matter how unfocused? Do Poison? They do not.

And now: back to comics.