 4/26/2011 2:27 PM ET Rob Schneider has tied the knot with his girlfriend, Mexican television producer Patricia Azarcoya Arce. The longtime couple celebrated their union in a small celebration in Beverly Hills and, according to the actor everything went well for the newlyweds. "Patricia and I were surrounded by our closest friends and family; it was the happiest day of my life. We had a great time at the wedding and are looking forward to our honeymoon," Schneider revealed in a statement. |
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Rob Schneider Marries Long-time Girlfriend
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
KISS leader Gene Simmons in studio: "I'm an idiot!"
| Friday, 22 April 2011 | |
KISS leader Gene Simmons in studio: "I'm an idiot!"  Gene Simmons "I'm an idiot!" Really? KISS founding member and lead bassist (yes, we just wrote lead bassist) Gene Simmons admits in studio and on camera for all to see! "I'm an idiot!" Well, you said it Gene, not us. Lol. KISS has been logging various studio clips of them in studio recording and doing demos for new music. Check out clips with Paul Stanley, Gene "I'm an idiot" Simmons, Tommy "FrankenAce" Thayer and Eric Singer (insert short joke here). Gene video with the infmaous "I'm an idiot" line is right HERE Paul Stanley up close and personal talking about Gene Simmons nylons HERE Metal Sludge Metal Idiot |
Black Sabbath not fit for reunion
Tuesday, April 26th, 2011
Ozzy doesn’t think all four members have what it takes to regroup and hints he’s fallen out with bassist Butler
Unfit for action: Sabbath during their 1999 reunion
But he hasn’t ruled out the move, despite Geezer Butler stating it will never happen.
In February the bassist said: “I would like to make it clear, because of mounting speculation and rumours, that there will definitely be no reunion of all four original members of Black Sabbath, whether to record an album or tour.”
Before that, Osbourne suggested Butler’s attitude was one of the main hurdles to a regrouping, explaining: “If I do it, Geezer has got to promise to stop moaning. I love him, but he’s always on about something.”
Now the singer suggests he and the bassist are not on speaking terms. He tells VH1: “I’ve spoken to Tony Iommi, I speak to Bill Ward from time to time, but I haven’t spoken to Geezer for a while.”
And he has another doubt: “To be honest, I don’t think we can all physically do it. I’m up for it and I keep fit every day. But if it’s meant to happen, it’ll happen.”
Recent rumours suggest some kind of reunion has been discussed, following the death of Ronnie James Dio last year, which brought the career of alternative lineup Heaven and Hell to an end.
Osbourne says: “If it happens in one configuration, I suppose we’ll manage to go out. I don’t want to say too much because I don’t really know.”
The frontman, who’s currently touring new solo album Scream, said in January that Sabbath would be under a huge amount of pressure if they decided to make their first studio album since he left in 1980, commenting: “If it’s not extra, extra special, people are going to go, ‘We waited 30 years for this?’ But I’d love to do the ultimate Black Sabbath album.”
Monday, April 25, 2011
'Rio' soars on Easter weekend
Toon tops holiday frame with $26.8 mil
'Rio'
"Fast Five" bowed early in key markets. 
"African Cats" was expected to hold well on Sunday."Rio," which has cumed $81.3 million domestically, brought in an additional estimated $44.2 million in 67 overseas markets, lifting the international tally passed $200 million. Animated feature's worldwide cume is $286 million, making it 2011's best global performer after just three weeks.
While Fox's toon scored a narrow Stateside victory, Perry's newest pic debuted in line with what pre-weekend tracking had suggested, marking another strong start for the helmer and his fourth-best opener behind "Madea Goes to Jail," with $41 million in 2009, and "Madea's Family Reunion," which bowed to $30 million in 2006. Last year, Perry's "Why Did I Get Married Too?" debuted Easter weekend with $29.3 million, but that was in a more robust market.
Overall grosses this year were up 34% over the same frame in 2010, though it's not a fair comparison since that weekend wasn't a holiday.
Fox's adult-targeted swooner "Water for Elephants" opened well, scoring $17.5 million playing at 2,817 locations. Despite the presence of Robert Pattinson, lit adaptation played overwhelmingly to women over 25, who contributed 70% of the film's opening take.
Meanwhile, Disney's latest Earth Day-timed nature docu, "African Cats," from Disneynature, opened to a solid $6.4 million from 1,220. That's better than the Mouse's "Oceans," which bowed this weekend last year with $6.1 million.
Among the frame's top-holding repeat players, Universal's Easter-themed "Hop" was up 17% over last weekend with an estimated $12.5 million, bringing domestic cume passed $100 million. Overseas, "Hop" took in a projected $10.7 million for an international tally of $47.2 million.
The Weinstein Co.'s "Scream 4," with a cume of $31.2 million through Sunday, dropped a considerable 62% in its second outing, with an estimated $7.2 million for the weekend.
The frame's bottom holdover half, led by Sony's "Soul Surfer," all fell less than 30% -- mostly boosted by increased holiday traffic.
In the No. 7 spot, "Soul Surfer" tallied $5.6 million in its third outing, with a cume of $28.7 million; FilmDistrict's "Insidious," in its fourth frame, followed with $5.4 million, cuming $44.2 million. Kid-assassin thriller "Hanna," from Focus Features, was down 28% with $5.3 million, and Summit's "Source Code" dropped just 18% with $5.1 million. "Hanna" has cumed $31.7 million domestically; "Source Code," $44.7 million.
Easter demo derby
Lionsgate distrib topper David Spitz said "Happy Family" didn't play as young as Perry's previous Madea pic, "Madea Goes to Jail." That's mostly due to the market's recent malaise with under-25 auds as "Happy Family" scored 69% of its opening take from those over 25.
Pundits expect Sunday box office to be down overall, but family films like "Rio" and "African Cats" should fare fine. Traditionally, Perry pics have done exceptionally well on Easter Sunday because the helmer's following also is made up of family filmgoers. "We anticipate a solid Sunday based on his two previous titles," Spitz said.
As expected, "Happy Family" drew 81% of its opening from African-Americans, with strong turnouts in Baltimore, Dallas, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.
"Rio" and "Hop" both benefited as the majority (68%) of students were out of school on Friday, with many parents off work to spend time with the family. Last week's spring break-fueled mid-week perfs, as well as the holiday lead-in, were primary reasons why Fox and U, respectively, decided to launch their films during the B.O.'s early-to-mid April corridor.
Specialty holiday
Sony Pictures Classics launched a pair of specialty pics in limited release this weekend: Morgan Spurlock's Sundance docu "Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold" grossed an estimated $135,139 from 18 U.S. locations, while Oscar foreign-lingo candidate "Incendies" earned $54,582 at three domestic playdates.
"Greatest Movie," with a per-screen average of $7,506, did much better than Spurlock's "Freakonomics," which averaged just $1,595 from 20 debut theaters last year. "Incendies" similarly outmatched Sony Classic's Oscar-winning Danish pic "In a Better World," which bowed Stateside on April 1 with an opening per of $8,264 from a comparable four locations.
Gotham's Metropolitan Opera continued its fifth season of live transmissions Saturday, screening Richard Strauss' "Capriccio" for an estimated $2.09 million in North America. It was seen live on more than 750 screens, with an additional 300 in a total of 32 European and Latin American countries.
Contact Andrew Stewart at mailto:andrew.stewart@variety.com?subject='Rio' soars on Easter weekend
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Remaking "Great Gatsby" This Summer
(RTTNews) - Isla Fisher has been pegged for a role in a film rendition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic "The Great Gatsby." The Australian actress may star as Myrtle, who, in the book, is engaged in a lusty yet tragic affair with Tom Buchanan. The latter character was previously supposed to be played by Ben Affleck, but he has since stepped down from the role to direct "Argo."
"The Great Gatsby" takes place during the roaring 1920s when the American economy was on the up-and-up and Prohibition was in force.
Leonardo DiCaprio has agreed to play the film's lead (Jay Gatsby); Tobey Maguire will star as Nick Carraway, the novel's narrator. Carey Mulligan will play Gatsby's love interest, Daisy Buchanan.
Warner Bros. is producing and are looking to start filming sometime this summer. It will be directed by another Australian native, Baz Luhrmann.
Downing: I couldn’t work with Priest any longer
Friday, April 22nd, 2011
Guitarist reveals his departure was caused by breakdown in relationship as band hint they could reconsider plans to stop touring
Painkiller: Downing opted out after relations strained
KK Downing quit Judas Priest over a breakdown in the relationship between his bandmates and management, he has revealed.
And the metal gods have hinted that, now the guitarist has gone, they may reconsider plans to end their touring career.
He took his bandmates by surprise when he told them he was leaving in December, causing them to announce that their upcoming world tour would be their last. A day later they clarified their position, saying they’d continue to record, but their life on the road was coming to an end.
It seems Downing’s position may have been a large factor in the band’s decision-making process – and now he’s decided to leave without playing the Epitaph tour, there’s a chance the rest of Priest will keep touring.
Following the band’s statement about his departure, Downing says: “It is much regret that I will not be with you this summer. But there has been an ongoing breakdown in working relationship between myself, elements of the band, and the band’s management for some time.
“Therefore I have decided to step down rather than tour with negative sentiments. I feel it would be a deception to you, our cherished fans.”
He explains his decision was not motivated by ill-health, adding: “Please rest assured I’m okay, but thank you from the bottom of my heart for your concerns.
“I’d urge you to support the Priest – I have no doubt it will be a show not to be missed.”
Singer Rob Halford admits Downing’s move upset him. He tells Hard Rock: “He told us before Christmas. I thought it could be the end. Emotionally, for me, it’s been very difficult.
http://www.facebook.com/rockhardfr
“But it was his own decision, for the reasons he’s made public. He has his own life to live and we can’t force him to do anything he doesn’t wants to do.”
The frontman reveals they hoped he’d reconsider: “We kept the door open all this time in case he changed his mind. But the clock was ticking.”
Meanwhile, drummer Scott Travis has put a question-mark over Priest’s retirement from touring. He says: “It’s never an easy decision to replace any long-time member, but the fans want us to continue, we want to continue, and we have to go on. I think we’ll go on as long as we want to.”
The band will complete the Epitaph tour with Lauren Harris’ guitarist Richie Faulkner. Halford reveals: “KK can never be replaced, and we didn’t want any kind of copycat. Richie went to Glenn’s house to jam, and Glenn told us he was absolutely brilliant.”
Credited with introducing the leather-and-studs look to heavy metal, Judas Priest formed in 1969. They’ve seen a total of 15 members pass through the band, of which eight have been drummers, and of which Downing and bassist Ian Hill were the only two founding members still in residence. They’ve released 16 studio albums in their 42-year career and after the Epitaph tour they’ll start work on a new record, due out in 2012.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Steve Miller Band News!
We received some big news for Steve Miller Band fans. Not only is the band releasing a new album, but they are also hitting the road with the one and only Gregg Allman! Here is the official word:
The Steve Miller Band return with yet another new offering, Let Your Hair Down, which lands in stores April 19 on Miller's Space Cowboy Records in partnership with Roadrunner/Loud & Proud Records.
The band will kick off the album release with a Spring tour beginning April 19 featuring special guest Gregg Allman.
Prior to the album release and tour, The Steve Miller Band will celebrate the opening of the new Austin City Limits venue at The Moody Theater with a sold out gala concert event to benefit KRLU-TV, Austin PBS, on February 24, followed by the inaugural live taping on February 26.
Let Your Hair Down features the last recordings by harmonica virtuoso Norton Buffalo, Miller's "partner in harmony" for thirty-three years. Noted Pink Floyd album cover artist Storm Thorgerson, who also did the wonderfully whimsical cover to BINGO! returns to Let Your Hair Down with one of the great album covers of his career.
Let Your Hair Down features the last recordings by harmonica virtuoso Norton Buffalo, Miller's "partner in harmony" for thirty-three years. Noted Pink Floyd album cover artist Storm Thorgerson, who also did the wonderfully whimsical cover to BINGO! returns to Let Your Hair Down with one of the great album covers of his career.
February 23 House of Blues Dallas, TX
February 24 Austin City Limits Gala/Moody Theater Austin, TX - sold out!
February 25 House of Blues Houston, TX
February 26 Austin City Limits/Moody Theater Austin, TX
April 16 Allman Brothers' Wanee MusicFestival
Live Oak, FL
April 17 Tennessee Theater Knoxville, TN
April 19 North Charleston PAC North Charleston, SC *
April 20 Kota Booth Amphitheater Cary, NC *
April 22 LC Pavilion Columbus, OH *
April 23 Huntington Arena Toledo, OH *
April 26 Tower Theater Philadelphia, PA *
April 27 Kovalchick Complex Indiana, PA *
April 30 Musikfest Café - Arts Quest Center Bethlehem, PA
* featuring special guest Gregg Allman
Additional dates TBA
February 24 Austin City Limits Gala/Moody Theater Austin, TX - sold out!
February 25 House of Blues Houston, TX
February 26 Austin City Limits/Moody Theater Austin, TX
April 16 Allman Brothers' Wanee Music
April 17 Tennessee Theater Knoxville, TN
April 19 North Charleston PAC North Charleston, SC *
April 20 Kota Booth Amphitheater Cary, NC *
April 22 LC Pavilion Columbus, OH *
April 23 Huntington Arena Toledo, OH *
April 26 Tower Theater Philadelphia, PA *
April 27 Kovalchick Complex Indiana, PA *
April 30 Musikfest Café - Arts Quest Center Bethlehem, PA
* featuring special guest Gregg Allman
Additional dates TBA
GREG KIHN DELIVERS 3-DISC COLLECTION:
Greg Kihn is proud to announce the release of a three-disc, all digital anthology box set, entitled Kihnplete (Post Beserkley Records). Kihnplete is a fascinating retrospective of Greg Kihn's vast body of work from the post Beserkley Records era, 1985 to the present. What most Rock Fans don't know is Greg Kihn recorded and performed with some of the best musicians over his illustrious 35-year career. Before breaking big with his own solo career, Joe Satriani was the Greg Kihn Band's lead guitarist during the Post Beserkley Records era 1985 to 1987. Fans of Satch, as he's affectionately referred to, will find eleven incredibly rare, hard-to-find studio and live tracks featuring the guitar prodigy.
In addition, Greg has been the longest reigning #1 Classic Rock Radio morning man in San Jose for 16-years. As of January 2011, The Greg Kihn Morning Show began broadcasting out of downtown San Francisco on KFOX FM 102.1 San Francisco / 98.5 San Jose to the entire Bay Area region; the fourth largest radio market in the USA, reaching millions. Greg is quickly on the way to becoming the #1 morning man in the region on California's largest Classic Rock Super Station. KFOX now affords the celebrities visiting the City of San Francisco a massive audience in where they can promote their events and performances through live interviews with Greg.
Greg is the author of four novels and one book of short stories, all of which will become available digitally for Kindle and iPad in the very near future. Greg has a screenplay in development for a new cable series about how the mafia ran the music industry in New York City during the early 1960's, described as a cross between "The Sopranos-Meets Almost Famous". The complete press release can be viewed at: x.co/Kihnplete.
In addition, Greg has been the longest reigning #1 Classic Rock Radio morning man in San Jose for 16-years. As of January 2011, The Greg Kihn Morning Show began broadcasting out of downtown San Francisco on KFOX FM 102.1 San Francisco / 98.5 San Jose to the entire Bay Area region; the fourth largest radio market in the USA, reaching millions. Greg is quickly on the way to becoming the #1 morning man in the region on California's largest Classic Rock Super Station. KFOX now affords the celebrities visiting the City of San Francisco a massive audience in where they can promote their events and performances through live interviews with Greg.
Greg is the author of four novels and one book of short stories, all of which will become available digitally for Kindle and iPad in the very near future. Greg has a screenplay in development for a new cable series about how the mafia ran the music industry in New York City during the early 1960's, described as a cross between "The Sopranos-Meets Almost Famous". The complete press release can be viewed at: x.co/Kihnplete.
3 DOORS DOWN TO RELEASE TIME OF MY LIFE JULY 19:
American Rock Band 3 Doors Down have announced that their much anticipated 5th studio album, Time of My Life (Universal Republic), will be released July 19. Recorded in Los Angeles, with Grammy-nominated producer Howard Benson (Daughtry, Flyleaf, Hoobastank, Three Days Grace) this album shows a clear evolution in 3 Doors Down while maintaining their unmistakable hit-making sound.
“We went into the studio with a goal in mind: we wanted to make a record this time that could really take us up a couple of notches,” said front man Brad Arnold. This is evident from the albums first single, “When You're Young.” The track debuted at #1 on the iTunes Rock singles chart and is currently climbing the Active Rock, Mainstream Rock and Alternative charts. The video for the single premiered last week on AOL and can be viewed on the band's YouTube page. Fans heard a sneak peak of the fast-paced title track, “Time of My Life,” during NHL All Star Weekend where the song was used extensively in highlight reels. The band will play a handful of dates stateside before heading to Europe for a summer tour. For more information and tour dates check out www.3doorsdown.com.
Time Of My Life Track Listing: 1. Time Of My Life 2. When You're Young 3. Round and Round 4. Heaven 5. Race For The Sun 6. Back To Me 7. Every Time You Go 8. What's Left 9. On The Run 10. She Is Love 11. My Way 12. Believer.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Duff on Celeb Rehab: "I wouldn't have wanted to try & get sober in a public forum."
| Tuesday, 19 April 2011 | |
 Duff don't dig Celebrity Rehab! Duff McKagan is best known as the bassist and founding member of Guns N' Roses. He is also a founding member of Velvet Revolver. McKagan has sold more than 100 million records worldwide, won a Grammy and an American Music Award. In 1999 the musician formed Loaded, which saw him move front and center on guitar and lead vocals. On Tuesday, April 19 Loaded released its second album The Taking, and in an interview with Sterling Whitaker of Examminer . com to promote the record, McKagan also spoke of his disdain for Celebrity Rehab, the popular reality TV show that portrays celebrities undergoing treatment for various forms of addiction. McKagan's former Guns N' Roses band mate Steven Adler appeared on the show, and when asked if he found that exploitative, the musician answered, "Yes. Absolutely. And the same with [Alice in Chains bassist] Mike Starr. I cringe, I think it's the worst thing for so-called sobriety. 'Hold on, we're having a breakthrough . . .wait, we've gotta do makeup.' You know? "There's a reason it's anonymous, because if you fail, you're failing on camera," he noted. "You're failing after you've been on this rehab show." McKagan himself has gotten sober, and said that anonymity is crucial to success. "Somebody didn't just come up with it because it sounds good," he stated. "Anonymous, you don't have to succeed all the time. You can fail, and you can still come back and nobody's gonna judge you. I wouldn't have wanted to try and get sober in a public forum. I don't think it's right so . . . whatever. That's how I feel. It's not cool. " |
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Running with the Devil: A Lifetime of Van Halen
Tuesday, 19 April 2011
From SLAKE: The Los Angeles Quarterly:
By John Albert
The first time I hear Van Halen I am fourteen years old, riding in a car through the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. My friend Steve Darrow is riding shotgun while his dad steers the dusty old Volvo station wagon. Chris Darrow is in his forties and has long hair and a slightly drooping cowboy mustache. In the sixties and early seventies, as a member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and an obscure but influential group called the Kaleidoscope, he, along with Gram Parsons, Linda Ronstadt, and others, forged what became the classic California sound. His long-haired, Black Sabbath–loving son, Steve, sitting shotgun next to him, would go on to play in an early version of Guns N’ Roses. But on this particular night Chris is driving us and another friend named Peter home from a party thrown by a local ceramics artist. While the aging hippies and college professors sipped wine and purchased meticulously decorated casserole plates, my friends and I hiked into a nearby orange grove to smoke pot in the moonlight. And as the car heads home along Baseline Boulevard, passing the silhouttes of orange groves and vineyards, the three of us are still incredibly stoned and no one is talking much.
Someone turns on the radio. It’s tuned to KROQ, a small, independent station that has little in common with the corporate behemoth it would become. In 1978, the station broadcasts a strange mix of surreal sketch comedy and new music across the Southland. A show called The Hollywood Night Shift riffs on “barbecue bat burgers” and “downhill screen-door races.” Meanwhile, the station’s present-day last man standing, Rodney Bingenheimer, who morning goons Kevin and Bean use as a prop for their moronic shtick, introduces punk music to kids across Southern California. By this time, my friends and I have already fallen under the sway of the raw, new sounds emerging from a ripped, torn, and safety-pin-adorned England.
As we cruise along Baseline, I have no idea what’s on the radio. I stare out the window into a passing darkness with hazy, Mexican-weed-induced tunnel vision. Then, suddenly, this extraordinary sound from the car’s stereo snaps me back. Steve reaches over and turns up the volume. It’s guitar playing, but not like anything we have heard before. Until this very moment, the reigning guitar heroes have been English, amateur warlocks, such as Jimmy Page and Ritchie Blackmore, playing sped-up, bastardized versions of American blues. But this is faster and weirder. Toward the one-minute mark, the playing veers into completely uncharted territory, and the final forty-two seconds sound like Gypsy jazz legend Django Reinhardt on CIA acid.
It is a style of playing that will so dramatically alter the musical landscape that thirty years later it will sound normal, even rote. But in 1978, this burst of unabashed virtuosity and noise, something we’ll later learn is appropriately called “Eruption,” earns unexpected respect from three punk rock children and one middle-aged country rock musician. As the whole thing reaches a frenzied crescendo of undulating distortion, the four of us start to laugh.
Until, that is, the distortion immediately segues to a revamped version of the Kinks’ classic “You Really Got Me,” rumbling through the car’s little speakers. This is not hard rock as we know it—no highpitched, operatic wailing about sorcery or Viking lore. With no visual reference to go on, it seems to have as much in common with early punk as with bands such as Led Zeppelin and Rush—except, of course, for the crazy, outer-space guitar solo. In retrospect, this makes perfect sense. Before it became one of the biggest bands in the world, Van Halen routinely played on bills with prepunk bands like the Runaways, the Mumps, and the Dogs.
When the song ends, Steve’s dad, who may or may not be stoned as well, just nods his head and says, “Far out.”
***
It is the soundtrack to a world that doesn’t exist anymore. I know because that world is where I come from.
Van Halen had been playing the suburbs east of Los Angeles for several years before we heard them on the radio that night. In fact, the previous year, Peter’s diminutive, science-teacher mom, who when speaking tended to coo pleasantly like a pigeon, unwittingly supplied Van Halen with several bottles of bourbon and tequila. The occasion was the band’s appearance at a show on the local college radio station hosted by Peter’s older, but still underage, brother and some of his friends. Following seventies rock etiquette, they felt it only proper to provide the band with alcohol and other recreational substances.
I remember this because my friends and I had been coerced into distributing fliers announcing the band’s appearance on the show. Most of our peers glanced at the crudely rendered image of a young David Lee Roth flaunting his soon-to-be legendary chest pelt and bulging package and simply tossed the fliers away. A lot of those same kids would, several years later, pay large sums of money to see the band headline the massive Forum in Inglewood.
In the years leading up to their record deal and worldwide fame, the Internet was still science fiction and the only video game widely available, Pong, mimicked pingpong only without the riveting excitement and health benefits. As a result, kids were primarily focused on two things, rock music and getting wasted. Days were spent under the sun and smog, getting high, playing sports, skateboarding in empty swimming pools and on downhill streets. Weekend nights were devoted almost entirely to massive backyard parties. And Van Halen ruled the backyard party scene in and around the San Gabriel Valley.
Unsuspecting parents would leave town and hundreds of kids would descend on a designated home like tanned, stoned locusts. Down the block from my parents’ house was a large, ramshackle manor known as the Resort. Sunburned British drunks lived there, and their kids were a wild and eccentric brood bearing names such as Yo-Yo, Kiddy, Sissy, Lad, and Mims.
Parties at the Resort were notorious. I remember watching a formally attired adult couple slow their car in front of the Resort as a party raged inside. Some longhaired kids staggered into the street, walked onto the hood of the couple’s car and then its roof, howling like wolves. My preteen friends and I finally mustered the courage to venture inside one of the parties. There, we discovered a maze of hedonistic delights: the dining-room table lined with cocaine, a cracked door revealing a nubile high school girl having sex, people jumping from second-story windows into the pool, fights and noisy drag races in the street out front. Throughout the beautifully raucous affair, a young rock ’n’ roll band named China White stood precariously close to the swimming pool playing with all the swagger of the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden.
While Van Halen played the huge outdoor parties and lucrative high school dances, China White was the band of choice in my immediate neighborhood. The group was composed of young heroin addicts who wore cowboy hats and played Southern rock. Somehow, it was a style that made perfect sense in the slowed-down, drugged-out seventies suburbs. Besides a few performances at the Resort, the band’s highest-profile gigs were at the palatial hillside estate of a local ice cream fortune heir. The band’s leader, John Dooley, now lives in Bangkok, where he teaches music and plays in a rhythm and blues revue.
“Those were some epic fucking parties,” Dooley says when I reach him by phone in Bangkok. “We had a big stage on the tennis courts and the pool house was our backstage area. We invited 500 fellow students, charged a cover, and then got all my older brother’s biker buddies to bounce and run screen for the cops. There would be close to a thousand kids there and we would be getting high and fucking chicks in the pool house between sets. I remember we left with our guitar cases stuffed with cash.”
But it was with his next band, Mac Pinch, that Dooley’s path began to cross regularly with Van Halen’s as the two bands shared bills both locally and in Hollywood. “I was always really impressed by Eddie Van Halen and their bass player [Michael Anthony]. They definitely stood out musically, especially Eddie,” Dooley says. “Their singer, Roth, was like the guy we had—by no means a great singer, but really loud and worked the crowd well. They used to have a party van with the Van Halen logo painted on the sides, and Roth was always out there in that van. He was kind of obnoxious, but he had a real knack with the ladies. He would bring them out to that van one after another. I had more than my share, but Roth did better than his band and ours combined. We used to play this biker bar in Downey with them called the Downey Outhouse, where they served popcorn in bedpans and beer in urinals.
“It got pretty competitive between the bands, and one time our roadie unplugged Van Halen during a show at the Pasadena Civic.”
During these years, roughly 1974 to 1976, Van Halen surpassed all rivals, including San Fernando Valley stars Quiet Riot, to emerge as the premier hard-rock act in Los Angeles. Besides a willingness to play nearly anywhere at any time—the band once played an early-morning breakfast concert at my high school a few years before I attended—the band’s rise seemed due, largely, to two distinct qualities. One was the playing of Eddie Van Halen, who had perfected the innovative method of using the fingers of his picking hand to pound the guitar’s fret board, creating a lightning-fast, quasiclassical style that quickly became the talk of Southland musicians. Van Halen reportedly became so guarded about this technique that he began to play solos with his back to the audience.
And while the teenage boys came to marvel at Eddie’s technical virtuosity, the girls flocked to see the band’s flamboyant lead singer. David Lee Roth would take the stage shirtless, wearing skin-tight spandex pants or fur-lined assless chaps, none of which dampened his enthusiasm for jumping into the air and doing karate kicks and splits. Visually, Roth resembled a stoner superhero with his wild, long blond hair, muscular physique and exaggerated party bravado. But what set him apart from so many aspiring front men of the time, was that, unbeknownst to his mostly blond-haired, blue-eyed audience, Roth was Jewish. And though his father was a wealthy ophthalmologist, young Roth went to public schools and ended up attending primarily black John Muir High in Pasadena. As a result, he was able to merge an over-the-top, borscht-belt-like showmanship with the booty-shaking sex appeal of his Funkadelicized classmates. It was a combination that made Roth a near perfect rock star for those hedonistic times.
While Van Halen’s star rose, my friend Dooley and Mac Pinch were on a different trajectory. Instead of showcasing alongside their one-time rivals at Hollywood clubs such as the Starwood and the Whisky, the drug-addled young cowboys started booking USO tours and playing military bases to support their various nonmusical habits. When Van Halen finally had its big breakthrough and signed to Warner Bros. Records, Mac Pinch was off playing to halls of drunken Marines.
“Those were serious smack days for me,” Dooley reflects. “Eventually it all caught up to me and I had to come back home and do some jail time, and that was the end of the band.” (We don’t discuss how Dooley stole my parents’ television set.) I ask him if he has regrets after seeing his former rivals go on to such massive success.
“Do I think we should have tried harder? That maybe it could have been us?” he offers. “Sure. But we had a lot of fun playing those parties. I have some great memories. It was a pretty awesome time to be young and playing in a rock ’n’ roll band.”
***
Two years after first hearing Van Halen on the car radio, the world around me seems a dramatically different place. My once-long hair is now short and jagged and I’m wearing studded wristbands with a spider-shaped earring punched through an infected hole in my ear. In suburbs across Southern California, punk rockers have swelled from a besieged minority to an increasingly aggressive subculture. There are pervasive hostilities between the heavy-metal-loving “stoners” and the new punks. Both sides instigate violence. By now, I have been expelled from the local high school for truancy and am enrolled in something called Claremont Collegiate Academy. Despite its snooty name, the place is filled with kids who have failed at the local high schools. My classmates are mainly longhaired drug users, agitated Iranian immigrants, and kids with assorted behavioral disorders. The principal will eventually be arrested on child porn charges.
During one lunch break, I stroll out into the school parking lot and am greeted by the pounding, tribal drums of Van Halen’s latest single, “Everybody Wants Some,” blasting from the open doors of a huge four-wheel-drive truck. Two very attractive teenage girls stand on the truck’s roof, dancing to the music. Both are outfitted in tight, shimmering spandex pants, halter tops, and moon boots. They bump their perfectly shaped asses together and sing along with David Lee Roth: “Everybody wants some/I want some too/Everybody wants some, baby, how ’bout you.” As I walk by, a girl with feathered blond hair points at me and sneers, seductively, singing, “Everybody wants some, baby, how ’bout you?”
I do.
A week later, I end up ditching school with the monster truck’s down-jacket-wearing owner and the two dancing girls. We drive into the nearby mountains to sip Southern Comfort and smoke pot. The girls tell me that Van Halen singer David Lee Roth is a “super fox” and they both desperately want to fuck him. On the drive home, I’m in the truck’s back seat making out with the blond girl. Her lip gloss tastes like raspberry candy. I caress her nipples through her shirt and eventually slip a finger between her legs, which seems like a monumental achievement. I stop when I realize she has fallen asleep in my arms. A few days later, she pulls me into an unoccupied darkroom between classes and we fondle one another for a few seconds. After several more brief flirtations, the pull of our opposing camps is just too much and we eventually stop talking. A year later, I run into her at a local hamburger stand, where she works behind the counter. She hands me my food and waves me off before I can pay.
***
I’m an eighteen-year-old in the basement of a Hollywood nightclub called the Cathay De Grande. Slumped in an empty booth, my eyes are closed and my head rests on the table. Fifteen minutes earlier, I injected heroin inside the cramped restroom with the sound man. It is a Monday night and a local blues outfit called Top Jimmy and he Rhythm Pigs are on the small stage. They are fronted by a white-trash blues legend, Top Jimmy, and play the club every Monday night. The place is nearly empty. The Rhythm Pigs are cool, but like most in attendance, I am really here to score drugs. This accomplished, I nod off, lost in some distant dream world as the band plays their hearts out just a few feet away.
When I eventually drift back to reality, something odd catches my ear. Instead of Top Jimmy’s throaty voice, someone lets loose with an exaggerated, arena-rock scream. Perplexed, I lift my head and focus on the small stage. There, sandwiched between the band’s rotund bass player and slovenly guitar player, Carlos Guitarlos, is none other than David Lee Roth, holding the microphone and striking a majestic rock pose. It’s surreal seeing one of the most successful singers in the world standing in this dilapidated basement club alongside a bunch of musicians teetering on the brink of homelessness and liver failure.
“Whoa-bop-ditty-doobie-do-bop, oh yeah, baby!” Roth yells out, putting his arm around an inebriated Top Jimmy. As bleary-eyed Jimmy leans in and begins to sing, Roth watches him with a beaming smile, clapping his hands and laughing in exaggerated-but-sincere appreciation. “Top-motherfucking Jimmy!” he yells out, as if addressing a sold-out arena instead of several stunned junkies and alcoholics. The reaction from the sparse crowd is indifference bordering on hostility. There is nothing less cool in the Hollywood underground than a seemingly happy millionaire rock star. But Top Jimmy is smiling with his arm around Roth. And a few years later, when Van Halen releases its multiplatinum-selling record 1984, the album features a track called “Top Jimmy.”
“Top Jimmy cooks, Top Jimmy swings, Top Jimmy—he’s the king,” Roth sings in tribute to his friend, who would eventually die of liver failure.
***
The next two decades are a creative dark age for Van Halen. After years of ego-fueled turmoil from all sides, David Lee Roth leaves the band to pursue a doomed solo career. An entirely unremarkable singer named Sammy Hagar replaces him and Van Halen becomes one of the most boring bands in existence. Roth recedes from the limelight, studying martial arts and making an ill-fated stab as a radio deejay.
Eddie’s excessive drinking begins to take a toll. One night in 1993 at the height of the grunge years, a drunken Eddie appears backstage for a Nirvana concert at the Forum. He reportedly begs Kurt Cobain to let him join the band on stage, explaining, “I’m all washed up; you are what’s happening now.” He also, for unexplained reasons, supposedly sniffs Cobain’s deodorant before calling Nirvana’s half-black rhythm guitarist Pat Smear a “Mexican” and a “Raji.” Needless to say, he is not allowed on stage.
In the following years, news of Van Halen is sporadic, largely unsubstantiated, and generally not positive. One story has Eddie sitting in with guitarless rap-rock buttheads Limp Bizkit. When they are slow to return his prized equipment, Eddie supposedly goes back with automatic weapons. An acquaintance of mine who sells rare guitars does some business with Eddie and subsequently receives lonely, rambling, late-night phone calls from him. An old friend who is now a teacher hosts a day for his students to bring in their grandparents. One student inexplicably brings in Eddie Van Halen. He stays for hours, politely talking to the kids about his Dutch heritage and childhood music studies.
During this time, Roth is arrested in a New York City park for purchasing weed. And when a meth-addled man attempts a wee-hours break-in at the singer’s Pasadena mansion, the intruder is surprised to find “Diamond Dave” wide awake and at the ready. Some accounts have Roth training a gun on the intruder while others have the lifelong martial-arts enthusiast, resplendent in silk pajamas, subduing the man with a lightening-fast nunchuck demonstration.
But as the years pass, “important” bands like Nirvana feel increasingly dated while the celebratory party anthems of Roth-era Van Halen continue to dominate the airwaves. Their songs are played repeatedly every day on multiple stations throughout the civilized world. And after several well-publicized misfires including an aborted reunion and a stint with a much-maligned singer named Gary Cherone, Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth finally find their way back to each other in 2007. The group announces it will be hitting the road, though original bassist Michael Anthony is to be replaced by Eddie’s sixteen-year-old son, Wolfgang, who reportedly suggested the tour and persuaded his dad to reconcile with Roth. What ensues is the band’s highest-grossing tour to date.
I catch Van Halen’s show at the gleaming new Staples Center in downtown L.A., anticipating a heartfelt homecoming. Instead, I get a slick and entertaining professional rock show. There are no missteps, but little if anything seems spontaneous. Then, leading into the song “Ice Cream Man,” Roth stops and delivers a monologue. I later learn from watching videos online that it’s pretty much the same speech in every city. Still, it has particular significance in Los Angeles, mere miles from where it all started. “The suburbs, I come from the suburbs,” Roth says to the cheering crowd. “You know, where they tear out the trees and name streets after them. I live on Orange Grove—there’s no orange grove there; it’s just me. In fact, most of us in the band come from the suburbs and we used to play the backyard parties there. … I remember it like it was yesterday.”
***
Not long ago, I’m at my parents’ house in those very suburbs, visiting with my dad, who is slowly dying, his body wasting away. After leaving his house, I stop for gas. As I stand at the pump, a tall, disheveled man approaches me. He begins to ask for spare change, then stops and stares at me. After a moment, he says my name. I look back blankly and he awkwardly introduces himself. It turns out that we grew up together. The once-handsome and talented athlete has been drinking hard and using cocaine, and his life has unraveled in dramatic fashion. The last I’d heard, he was living behind a local bar in an abandoned camper shell but was asked to leave for having too many guests and making too much noise. I ask how he is and he just shakes his head. I take out my wallet and offer a twenty, which he refuses. I insist, and he eventually palms the bill and slides it into a pocket. After some strained small talk, he asks for a ride to a friend’s apartment. I reluctantly agree.
The two of us drive through the streets of our shared childhood in awkward silence. The orange groves have long since turned into a sprawl of tract housing and circuitous dead ends, both literal and figurative. I turn on the radio, scan stations, and eventually stop on Van Halen’s 1978 classic “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love.” I turn up the volume. After a few seconds, the propulsive guitar riff fades down and David Lee Roth begins to talk.
“I been to the edge, an’ there I stood an’ looked down/You know I lost a lot of friends there, baby, I got no time to mess around.”
The music builds in intensity before exploding into a powerful, defiant chorus: “Ain’t talkin’ ’bout love, my love is rotten to the core/Ain’t talkin’ ’bout love, just like I told you before, before, before/Hey hey hey!” By this time, my old friend is singing along and pumping his fist in the air. His eyes are moist from either alcohol, sadness, or both. The song finishes just as we pull in front of a dilapidated apartment complex, and he climbs out. He hesitates and looks in at me.
“Hey man, remember those crazy parties back in the day?” I nod and force a smile. Those were some good fucking times,” he says, reaching in and slapping my shoulder affectionately before disappearing into the darkness.
By John Albert
The first time I hear Van Halen I am fourteen years old, riding in a car through the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. My friend Steve Darrow is riding shotgun while his dad steers the dusty old Volvo station wagon. Chris Darrow is in his forties and has long hair and a slightly drooping cowboy mustache. In the sixties and early seventies, as a member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and an obscure but influential group called the Kaleidoscope, he, along with Gram Parsons, Linda Ronstadt, and others, forged what became the classic California sound. His long-haired, Black Sabbath–loving son, Steve, sitting shotgun next to him, would go on to play in an early version of Guns N’ Roses. But on this particular night Chris is driving us and another friend named Peter home from a party thrown by a local ceramics artist. While the aging hippies and college professors sipped wine and purchased meticulously decorated casserole plates, my friends and I hiked into a nearby orange grove to smoke pot in the moonlight. And as the car heads home along Baseline Boulevard, passing the silhouttes of orange groves and vineyards, the three of us are still incredibly stoned and no one is talking much.
Someone turns on the radio. It’s tuned to KROQ, a small, independent station that has little in common with the corporate behemoth it would become. In 1978, the station broadcasts a strange mix of surreal sketch comedy and new music across the Southland. A show called The Hollywood Night Shift riffs on “barbecue bat burgers” and “downhill screen-door races.” Meanwhile, the station’s present-day last man standing, Rodney Bingenheimer, who morning goons Kevin and Bean use as a prop for their moronic shtick, introduces punk music to kids across Southern California. By this time, my friends and I have already fallen under the sway of the raw, new sounds emerging from a ripped, torn, and safety-pin-adorned England.
As we cruise along Baseline, I have no idea what’s on the radio. I stare out the window into a passing darkness with hazy, Mexican-weed-induced tunnel vision. Then, suddenly, this extraordinary sound from the car’s stereo snaps me back. Steve reaches over and turns up the volume. It’s guitar playing, but not like anything we have heard before. Until this very moment, the reigning guitar heroes have been English, amateur warlocks, such as Jimmy Page and Ritchie Blackmore, playing sped-up, bastardized versions of American blues. But this is faster and weirder. Toward the one-minute mark, the playing veers into completely uncharted territory, and the final forty-two seconds sound like Gypsy jazz legend Django Reinhardt on CIA acid.
It is a style of playing that will so dramatically alter the musical landscape that thirty years later it will sound normal, even rote. But in 1978, this burst of unabashed virtuosity and noise, something we’ll later learn is appropriately called “Eruption,” earns unexpected respect from three punk rock children and one middle-aged country rock musician. As the whole thing reaches a frenzied crescendo of undulating distortion, the four of us start to laugh.
Until, that is, the distortion immediately segues to a revamped version of the Kinks’ classic “You Really Got Me,” rumbling through the car’s little speakers. This is not hard rock as we know it—no highpitched, operatic wailing about sorcery or Viking lore. With no visual reference to go on, it seems to have as much in common with early punk as with bands such as Led Zeppelin and Rush—except, of course, for the crazy, outer-space guitar solo. In retrospect, this makes perfect sense. Before it became one of the biggest bands in the world, Van Halen routinely played on bills with prepunk bands like the Runaways, the Mumps, and the Dogs.
When the song ends, Steve’s dad, who may or may not be stoned as well, just nods his head and says, “Far out.”
***
It is the soundtrack to a world that doesn’t exist anymore. I know because that world is where I come from.
Van Halen had been playing the suburbs east of Los Angeles for several years before we heard them on the radio that night. In fact, the previous year, Peter’s diminutive, science-teacher mom, who when speaking tended to coo pleasantly like a pigeon, unwittingly supplied Van Halen with several bottles of bourbon and tequila. The occasion was the band’s appearance at a show on the local college radio station hosted by Peter’s older, but still underage, brother and some of his friends. Following seventies rock etiquette, they felt it only proper to provide the band with alcohol and other recreational substances.
I remember this because my friends and I had been coerced into distributing fliers announcing the band’s appearance on the show. Most of our peers glanced at the crudely rendered image of a young David Lee Roth flaunting his soon-to-be legendary chest pelt and bulging package and simply tossed the fliers away. A lot of those same kids would, several years later, pay large sums of money to see the band headline the massive Forum in Inglewood.
In the years leading up to their record deal and worldwide fame, the Internet was still science fiction and the only video game widely available, Pong, mimicked pingpong only without the riveting excitement and health benefits. As a result, kids were primarily focused on two things, rock music and getting wasted. Days were spent under the sun and smog, getting high, playing sports, skateboarding in empty swimming pools and on downhill streets. Weekend nights were devoted almost entirely to massive backyard parties. And Van Halen ruled the backyard party scene in and around the San Gabriel Valley.
Unsuspecting parents would leave town and hundreds of kids would descend on a designated home like tanned, stoned locusts. Down the block from my parents’ house was a large, ramshackle manor known as the Resort. Sunburned British drunks lived there, and their kids were a wild and eccentric brood bearing names such as Yo-Yo, Kiddy, Sissy, Lad, and Mims.
Parties at the Resort were notorious. I remember watching a formally attired adult couple slow their car in front of the Resort as a party raged inside. Some longhaired kids staggered into the street, walked onto the hood of the couple’s car and then its roof, howling like wolves. My preteen friends and I finally mustered the courage to venture inside one of the parties. There, we discovered a maze of hedonistic delights: the dining-room table lined with cocaine, a cracked door revealing a nubile high school girl having sex, people jumping from second-story windows into the pool, fights and noisy drag races in the street out front. Throughout the beautifully raucous affair, a young rock ’n’ roll band named China White stood precariously close to the swimming pool playing with all the swagger of the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden.
While Van Halen played the huge outdoor parties and lucrative high school dances, China White was the band of choice in my immediate neighborhood. The group was composed of young heroin addicts who wore cowboy hats and played Southern rock. Somehow, it was a style that made perfect sense in the slowed-down, drugged-out seventies suburbs. Besides a few performances at the Resort, the band’s highest-profile gigs were at the palatial hillside estate of a local ice cream fortune heir. The band’s leader, John Dooley, now lives in Bangkok, where he teaches music and plays in a rhythm and blues revue.
“Those were some epic fucking parties,” Dooley says when I reach him by phone in Bangkok. “We had a big stage on the tennis courts and the pool house was our backstage area. We invited 500 fellow students, charged a cover, and then got all my older brother’s biker buddies to bounce and run screen for the cops. There would be close to a thousand kids there and we would be getting high and fucking chicks in the pool house between sets. I remember we left with our guitar cases stuffed with cash.”
But it was with his next band, Mac Pinch, that Dooley’s path began to cross regularly with Van Halen’s as the two bands shared bills both locally and in Hollywood. “I was always really impressed by Eddie Van Halen and their bass player [Michael Anthony]. They definitely stood out musically, especially Eddie,” Dooley says. “Their singer, Roth, was like the guy we had—by no means a great singer, but really loud and worked the crowd well. They used to have a party van with the Van Halen logo painted on the sides, and Roth was always out there in that van. He was kind of obnoxious, but he had a real knack with the ladies. He would bring them out to that van one after another. I had more than my share, but Roth did better than his band and ours combined. We used to play this biker bar in Downey with them called the Downey Outhouse, where they served popcorn in bedpans and beer in urinals.
“It got pretty competitive between the bands, and one time our roadie unplugged Van Halen during a show at the Pasadena Civic.”
During these years, roughly 1974 to 1976, Van Halen surpassed all rivals, including San Fernando Valley stars Quiet Riot, to emerge as the premier hard-rock act in Los Angeles. Besides a willingness to play nearly anywhere at any time—the band once played an early-morning breakfast concert at my high school a few years before I attended—the band’s rise seemed due, largely, to two distinct qualities. One was the playing of Eddie Van Halen, who had perfected the innovative method of using the fingers of his picking hand to pound the guitar’s fret board, creating a lightning-fast, quasiclassical style that quickly became the talk of Southland musicians. Van Halen reportedly became so guarded about this technique that he began to play solos with his back to the audience.
And while the teenage boys came to marvel at Eddie’s technical virtuosity, the girls flocked to see the band’s flamboyant lead singer. David Lee Roth would take the stage shirtless, wearing skin-tight spandex pants or fur-lined assless chaps, none of which dampened his enthusiasm for jumping into the air and doing karate kicks and splits. Visually, Roth resembled a stoner superhero with his wild, long blond hair, muscular physique and exaggerated party bravado. But what set him apart from so many aspiring front men of the time, was that, unbeknownst to his mostly blond-haired, blue-eyed audience, Roth was Jewish. And though his father was a wealthy ophthalmologist, young Roth went to public schools and ended up attending primarily black John Muir High in Pasadena. As a result, he was able to merge an over-the-top, borscht-belt-like showmanship with the booty-shaking sex appeal of his Funkadelicized classmates. It was a combination that made Roth a near perfect rock star for those hedonistic times.
While Van Halen’s star rose, my friend Dooley and Mac Pinch were on a different trajectory. Instead of showcasing alongside their one-time rivals at Hollywood clubs such as the Starwood and the Whisky, the drug-addled young cowboys started booking USO tours and playing military bases to support their various nonmusical habits. When Van Halen finally had its big breakthrough and signed to Warner Bros. Records, Mac Pinch was off playing to halls of drunken Marines.
“Those were serious smack days for me,” Dooley reflects. “Eventually it all caught up to me and I had to come back home and do some jail time, and that was the end of the band.” (We don’t discuss how Dooley stole my parents’ television set.) I ask him if he has regrets after seeing his former rivals go on to such massive success.
“Do I think we should have tried harder? That maybe it could have been us?” he offers. “Sure. But we had a lot of fun playing those parties. I have some great memories. It was a pretty awesome time to be young and playing in a rock ’n’ roll band.”
***
Two years after first hearing Van Halen on the car radio, the world around me seems a dramatically different place. My once-long hair is now short and jagged and I’m wearing studded wristbands with a spider-shaped earring punched through an infected hole in my ear. In suburbs across Southern California, punk rockers have swelled from a besieged minority to an increasingly aggressive subculture. There are pervasive hostilities between the heavy-metal-loving “stoners” and the new punks. Both sides instigate violence. By now, I have been expelled from the local high school for truancy and am enrolled in something called Claremont Collegiate Academy. Despite its snooty name, the place is filled with kids who have failed at the local high schools. My classmates are mainly longhaired drug users, agitated Iranian immigrants, and kids with assorted behavioral disorders. The principal will eventually be arrested on child porn charges.
During one lunch break, I stroll out into the school parking lot and am greeted by the pounding, tribal drums of Van Halen’s latest single, “Everybody Wants Some,” blasting from the open doors of a huge four-wheel-drive truck. Two very attractive teenage girls stand on the truck’s roof, dancing to the music. Both are outfitted in tight, shimmering spandex pants, halter tops, and moon boots. They bump their perfectly shaped asses together and sing along with David Lee Roth: “Everybody wants some/I want some too/Everybody wants some, baby, how ’bout you.” As I walk by, a girl with feathered blond hair points at me and sneers, seductively, singing, “Everybody wants some, baby, how ’bout you?”
I do.
A week later, I end up ditching school with the monster truck’s down-jacket-wearing owner and the two dancing girls. We drive into the nearby mountains to sip Southern Comfort and smoke pot. The girls tell me that Van Halen singer David Lee Roth is a “super fox” and they both desperately want to fuck him. On the drive home, I’m in the truck’s back seat making out with the blond girl. Her lip gloss tastes like raspberry candy. I caress her nipples through her shirt and eventually slip a finger between her legs, which seems like a monumental achievement. I stop when I realize she has fallen asleep in my arms. A few days later, she pulls me into an unoccupied darkroom between classes and we fondle one another for a few seconds. After several more brief flirtations, the pull of our opposing camps is just too much and we eventually stop talking. A year later, I run into her at a local hamburger stand, where she works behind the counter. She hands me my food and waves me off before I can pay.
***
I’m an eighteen-year-old in the basement of a Hollywood nightclub called the Cathay De Grande. Slumped in an empty booth, my eyes are closed and my head rests on the table. Fifteen minutes earlier, I injected heroin inside the cramped restroom with the sound man. It is a Monday night and a local blues outfit called Top Jimmy and he Rhythm Pigs are on the small stage. They are fronted by a white-trash blues legend, Top Jimmy, and play the club every Monday night. The place is nearly empty. The Rhythm Pigs are cool, but like most in attendance, I am really here to score drugs. This accomplished, I nod off, lost in some distant dream world as the band plays their hearts out just a few feet away.
When I eventually drift back to reality, something odd catches my ear. Instead of Top Jimmy’s throaty voice, someone lets loose with an exaggerated, arena-rock scream. Perplexed, I lift my head and focus on the small stage. There, sandwiched between the band’s rotund bass player and slovenly guitar player, Carlos Guitarlos, is none other than David Lee Roth, holding the microphone and striking a majestic rock pose. It’s surreal seeing one of the most successful singers in the world standing in this dilapidated basement club alongside a bunch of musicians teetering on the brink of homelessness and liver failure.
“Whoa-bop-ditty-doobie-do-bop, oh yeah, baby!” Roth yells out, putting his arm around an inebriated Top Jimmy. As bleary-eyed Jimmy leans in and begins to sing, Roth watches him with a beaming smile, clapping his hands and laughing in exaggerated-but-sincere appreciation. “Top-motherfucking Jimmy!” he yells out, as if addressing a sold-out arena instead of several stunned junkies and alcoholics. The reaction from the sparse crowd is indifference bordering on hostility. There is nothing less cool in the Hollywood underground than a seemingly happy millionaire rock star. But Top Jimmy is smiling with his arm around Roth. And a few years later, when Van Halen releases its multiplatinum-selling record 1984, the album features a track called “Top Jimmy.”
“Top Jimmy cooks, Top Jimmy swings, Top Jimmy—he’s the king,” Roth sings in tribute to his friend, who would eventually die of liver failure.
***
The next two decades are a creative dark age for Van Halen. After years of ego-fueled turmoil from all sides, David Lee Roth leaves the band to pursue a doomed solo career. An entirely unremarkable singer named Sammy Hagar replaces him and Van Halen becomes one of the most boring bands in existence. Roth recedes from the limelight, studying martial arts and making an ill-fated stab as a radio deejay.
Eddie’s excessive drinking begins to take a toll. One night in 1993 at the height of the grunge years, a drunken Eddie appears backstage for a Nirvana concert at the Forum. He reportedly begs Kurt Cobain to let him join the band on stage, explaining, “I’m all washed up; you are what’s happening now.” He also, for unexplained reasons, supposedly sniffs Cobain’s deodorant before calling Nirvana’s half-black rhythm guitarist Pat Smear a “Mexican” and a “Raji.” Needless to say, he is not allowed on stage.
In the following years, news of Van Halen is sporadic, largely unsubstantiated, and generally not positive. One story has Eddie sitting in with guitarless rap-rock buttheads Limp Bizkit. When they are slow to return his prized equipment, Eddie supposedly goes back with automatic weapons. An acquaintance of mine who sells rare guitars does some business with Eddie and subsequently receives lonely, rambling, late-night phone calls from him. An old friend who is now a teacher hosts a day for his students to bring in their grandparents. One student inexplicably brings in Eddie Van Halen. He stays for hours, politely talking to the kids about his Dutch heritage and childhood music studies.
During this time, Roth is arrested in a New York City park for purchasing weed. And when a meth-addled man attempts a wee-hours break-in at the singer’s Pasadena mansion, the intruder is surprised to find “Diamond Dave” wide awake and at the ready. Some accounts have Roth training a gun on the intruder while others have the lifelong martial-arts enthusiast, resplendent in silk pajamas, subduing the man with a lightening-fast nunchuck demonstration.
But as the years pass, “important” bands like Nirvana feel increasingly dated while the celebratory party anthems of Roth-era Van Halen continue to dominate the airwaves. Their songs are played repeatedly every day on multiple stations throughout the civilized world. And after several well-publicized misfires including an aborted reunion and a stint with a much-maligned singer named Gary Cherone, Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth finally find their way back to each other in 2007. The group announces it will be hitting the road, though original bassist Michael Anthony is to be replaced by Eddie’s sixteen-year-old son, Wolfgang, who reportedly suggested the tour and persuaded his dad to reconcile with Roth. What ensues is the band’s highest-grossing tour to date.
I catch Van Halen’s show at the gleaming new Staples Center in downtown L.A., anticipating a heartfelt homecoming. Instead, I get a slick and entertaining professional rock show. There are no missteps, but little if anything seems spontaneous. Then, leading into the song “Ice Cream Man,” Roth stops and delivers a monologue. I later learn from watching videos online that it’s pretty much the same speech in every city. Still, it has particular significance in Los Angeles, mere miles from where it all started. “The suburbs, I come from the suburbs,” Roth says to the cheering crowd. “You know, where they tear out the trees and name streets after them. I live on Orange Grove—there’s no orange grove there; it’s just me. In fact, most of us in the band come from the suburbs and we used to play the backyard parties there. … I remember it like it was yesterday.”
***
Not long ago, I’m at my parents’ house in those very suburbs, visiting with my dad, who is slowly dying, his body wasting away. After leaving his house, I stop for gas. As I stand at the pump, a tall, disheveled man approaches me. He begins to ask for spare change, then stops and stares at me. After a moment, he says my name. I look back blankly and he awkwardly introduces himself. It turns out that we grew up together. The once-handsome and talented athlete has been drinking hard and using cocaine, and his life has unraveled in dramatic fashion. The last I’d heard, he was living behind a local bar in an abandoned camper shell but was asked to leave for having too many guests and making too much noise. I ask how he is and he just shakes his head. I take out my wallet and offer a twenty, which he refuses. I insist, and he eventually palms the bill and slides it into a pocket. After some strained small talk, he asks for a ride to a friend’s apartment. I reluctantly agree.
The two of us drive through the streets of our shared childhood in awkward silence. The orange groves have long since turned into a sprawl of tract housing and circuitous dead ends, both literal and figurative. I turn on the radio, scan stations, and eventually stop on Van Halen’s 1978 classic “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love.” I turn up the volume. After a few seconds, the propulsive guitar riff fades down and David Lee Roth begins to talk.
“I been to the edge, an’ there I stood an’ looked down/You know I lost a lot of friends there, baby, I got no time to mess around.”
The music builds in intensity before exploding into a powerful, defiant chorus: “Ain’t talkin’ ’bout love, my love is rotten to the core/Ain’t talkin’ ’bout love, just like I told you before, before, before/Hey hey hey!” By this time, my old friend is singing along and pumping his fist in the air. His eyes are moist from either alcohol, sadness, or both. The song finishes just as we pull in front of a dilapidated apartment complex, and he climbs out. He hesitates and looks in at me.
“Hey man, remember those crazy parties back in the day?” I nod and force a smile. Those were some good fucking times,” he says, reaching in and slapping my shoulder affectionately before disappearing into the darkness.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM TO RELEASE NEW ALBUM IN THE FALL 2011
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Fleetwood Mac frontman Lindsey Buckingham has finished work on his third solo album in six years, a project he expects to release in September and promote with a tour.
The album, "Seeds We Sow," will also be his first outside the Warner Bros. family. Buckingham told Reuters that he was unhappy with its handling of his solo projects, and he was now considering teaming up with a new label or going the DIY route with an independent promotion team.
Fleetwood Mac is also a free agent after more than 40 years at Warner Bros., Buckingham said. The Anglo-American rock icons last released an album in 2003 and were the ninth biggest touring act in 2009 with U.S. ticket sales of $55 million, according to Pollstar.
Buckingham, 61, said Fleetwood Mac will continue to tour and record. Given classic-rock audiences' disdain for hearing new music in concert, he said he enjoys the creative challenge of giving old favorites a new sheen on stage.
Despite a busy family life, Buckingham has also been on a creative tear in his solo career, releasing albums in 2006 and 2008, and touring to promote both of them. Before then, he had not released a solo album since 1992's "Out of the Cradle."
Coincidentally, he said "Seeds We Sow" will be similar in tone to "Out of the Cradle," which received a rapturous critical response but was a relatively poor seller.
ANOTHER STONES COVER
The title track opens the album. "I don't think anyone's gonna take that for a radio song because it's just voice and acoustic guitar and there's a lot of that on the record," he said. "It runs the gamut. There's some lead playing, there's a little bit of everything on there."
As he did on 2006's "Under the Skin," he covers an obscure Rolling Stones song, this time "She Smiled Sweetly" from the band's 1967 album "Between the Buttons." He previously reworked their 1966 tune "I Am Waiting."
Buckingham said he was a fan of the Stones' experimental recordings with original leader Brian Jones, an ill-fated virtuoso with whom he shares a musical versatility.
He recorded "Seeds We Sow" at his home studio in Los Angeles, playing most of the instruments and mixing it himself while fulfilling his obligations as the married father of three preteens.
While there is no theme to the album, his late-in-life domesticity inevitably means songs "get filtered through looking at the world a little differently, perhaps a little more philosophically."
Buckingham will take a break from laying the groundwork for the album when he appears at the annual ASCAP "I Create Music" Expo for musicians and songwriters in Hollywood on April 29. His Q&A with pop singer Sara Bareilles will follow the presentation of the performing rights group's Golden Note Award for career achievement.
"Maybe I'll take a guitar and a little amp and do a little picking on stage," he said.
But he warned attendees not to ask him technical questions related to publishing and licensing. And maybe not to tax him too much with tips for songwriting.
"I don't really think of myself so much as a writer as a stylist, someone who came into writing from the back door and has found it through a certain very specific and personal means. It's all about what you do with the style. Hopefully I'll have something good to say. We'll see."
The album, "Seeds We Sow," will also be his first outside the Warner Bros. family. Buckingham told Reuters that he was unhappy with its handling of his solo projects, and he was now considering teaming up with a new label or going the DIY route with an independent promotion team.
Fleetwood Mac is also a free agent after more than 40 years at Warner Bros., Buckingham said. The Anglo-American rock icons last released an album in 2003 and were the ninth biggest touring act in 2009 with U.S. ticket sales of $55 million, according to Pollstar.
Buckingham, 61, said Fleetwood Mac will continue to tour and record. Given classic-rock audiences' disdain for hearing new music in concert, he said he enjoys the creative challenge of giving old favorites a new sheen on stage.
Despite a busy family life, Buckingham has also been on a creative tear in his solo career, releasing albums in 2006 and 2008, and touring to promote both of them. Before then, he had not released a solo album since 1992's "Out of the Cradle."
Coincidentally, he said "Seeds We Sow" will be similar in tone to "Out of the Cradle," which received a rapturous critical response but was a relatively poor seller.
ANOTHER STONES COVER
The title track opens the album. "I don't think anyone's gonna take that for a radio song because it's just voice and acoustic guitar and there's a lot of that on the record," he said. "It runs the gamut. There's some lead playing, there's a little bit of everything on there."
As he did on 2006's "Under the Skin," he covers an obscure Rolling Stones song, this time "She Smiled Sweetly" from the band's 1967 album "Between the Buttons." He previously reworked their 1966 tune "I Am Waiting."
Buckingham said he was a fan of the Stones' experimental recordings with original leader Brian Jones, an ill-fated virtuoso with whom he shares a musical versatility.
He recorded "Seeds We Sow" at his home studio in Los Angeles, playing most of the instruments and mixing it himself while fulfilling his obligations as the married father of three preteens.
While there is no theme to the album, his late-in-life domesticity inevitably means songs "get filtered through looking at the world a little differently, perhaps a little more philosophically."
Buckingham will take a break from laying the groundwork for the album when he appears at the annual ASCAP "I Create Music" Expo for musicians and songwriters in Hollywood on April 29. His Q&A with pop singer Sara Bareilles will follow the presentation of the performing rights group's Golden Note Award for career achievement.
"Maybe I'll take a guitar and a little amp and do a little picking on stage," he said.
But he warned attendees not to ask him technical questions related to publishing and licensing. And maybe not to tax him too much with tips for songwriting.
"I don't really think of myself so much as a writer as a stylist, someone who came into writing from the back door and has found it through a certain very specific and personal means. It's all about what you do with the style. Hopefully I'll have something good to say. We'll see."
Friday, April 15, 2011
Top Ten Guitar Solos by Eddie Van Halen
Friday, 15 April 2011
From KennerMcquaid.blogspot.com:
Eddie Van Halen was exactly what the rock ‘n roll doctor ordered to cure the Saturday Night Fever sweeping the nation during the late Seventies. When Van Halen was unleashed upon the unsuspecting masses in 1978, rock guitar playing was changed overnight. The threat that rock would become an afterthought in the face of a changing mainstream was temporarily thwarted. The only downside was the creation of a pool of guitar players who, throughout the Eighties, used Eddie’s techniques as tricks rather than as a natural method to create music. Even the incredibly gifted Randy Rhoads, who along with Ozzy Osbourne kept rock relevant despite the advent of disco and dance music, admitted that it pained him to incorporate Eddie Van Halen’s licks into his live solos just because ‘it impresses the kids.’
It’s nearly impossible to narrow down a list ten guitar solos by a rock legend with an extensive catalog of material. It’s naturally a subjective endeavor; the only advantage I claim is the insight provided by my 23 years of playing experience and countless hours spent fruitlessly trying to imitate The Master before giving up and establishing my own style.
Eddie took two approaches to soloing during his career. One was to try first, second, third (or even more) takes for solos on the studio albums. Later, he told Bud Scoppa during a lengthy interview for Guitar World prior to the release of OU812 that different takes would sometimes be spliced together to form one solo. “Sometimes I’ll do three solos,” said Van Halen, “and I’ll go, ‘I like the beginning of that one, I like the end of that one, I like the middle of that one.’ Whatever sounds good. Ain’t no fuckin’ rules. And I ain’t proud. I don’t give a fuck if it’s in one take or not. Whatever gets me off!”
I have no problem with the splicing method. After all, Eddie played all the solos himself. And nothing can hold-up the recording process like a guitar player who is anal retentive over his solos. It’s sometimes easy for a guitar player to tell when Eddie appeared to do something off-the-cuff, like on ‘Sinner’s Swing!’ Other times, it’s impossible to tell unless Eddie could recall himself during an interview. Like many guitar players, Eddie would often forget how to play some of his own songs after they would lie dormant for a while. He once admitted to having to go to a store to buy his own albums prior to a tour so that he could re-learn the material. He also admitted that he couldn’t play covers to save his life. What was a detriment in his early days, though, brought him great success when the band finally broke through, in large part, because Eddie Van Halen only knew how to be himself.
1. ‘Eruption’ (1978): Eddie Van Halen could have thrown his guitar into a dumpster after recording this one minute and forty-two seconds of guitar wizardry and still been a guitar hero for life. Though most well-known as the track on which Eddie unveiled his patented two-handed tapping technique to the world, to focus on that aspect alone is an oversimplification. Everything about the track- the tone, the use of the tremolo bar, the blinding speed and precision- set EVH apart from his late-Seventies contemporaries. The distortion coming out of the amplifiers makes the guitar work scream, which became known to guitar gurus as the infamous ‘brown sound.’ Although Eddie himself toyed with his amplifiers and guitars despite having no formal training in electronics, anyone who has studied guitar for a number of years knows that 99% of a guitarist’s tone comes from one thing and one thing alone: your own hands. (Eddie once relayed a story about how a suspicious Ted Nugent once plugged into Eddie’s rig before a show and, to Mr. Nugent’s surprise, he discovered that his tone still sounded exactly like Ted Nugent.) Eddie was never one who relied much on effects. This track was probably recorded with a classic MXR phase 90 pedal and an Echoplex for delay. The ultimate triumph of ‘Eruption,’ however, is simply how musical it sounds. Try grabbing an acoustic guitar and playing the blinding licks in the upper register down an octave at half speed- you’ll realize that Eddie wasn’t using his ability to play at unheard-of speeds to cover-up a lack of musical vocabulary.
2. ‘Beat It’ (1982): Eddie’s reputation was so well known even before the release of Van Halen’s 1984 that legendary producer Quincy Jones called upon him to provide a guitar solo for the opening track of what would become the best-selling album of all time worldwide, Michael Jackson’s Thriller. With the rhythm tracks already laid down by studio session veteran and Toto guitarist Steve Lukather, Eddie walked into the studio and winged two solos in front of The Gloved One himself. He estimated during an interview with Joe Bosso in the February 1990 issue of Guitar World that the entire project took 20 minutes. Ironically, it is this solo more than any other provides the best example of Eddie’s downright nasty distorted guitar tone. The artificial harmonics generated at 2:52- and at 3:06 especially- howl as if the amplifiers were possessed by demons. To an untrained ear, it sounds ‘cool.’ To the trained ear, there comes a realization that such tones are not possible in lesser hands during this time period- or even now. (An artificial harmonic is generated by shifting the pick attack to pinch the guitar string with the pick and thumbnail simultaneously, and they aren’t always easy to generate properly. Eddie’s use of them seems to be innate and is uncanny.) The use of wide intervals and two-handed tapping gives the solo a sense of urgency that the track demands. The ‘thank you’ letter that Quincy Jones wrote to Eddie afterward was signed, ‘The Fucking Asshole’ because Eddie began cursing at Jones during his initial phone call, thinking it was a prank because of a bad connection.
3. ‘Spanish Fly’ (1979): If anyone had attributed Eddie’s guitar pyrotechnics on the first album to studio effects rather than raw talent, these critics were silenced by this solo acoustic guitar track on Van Halen’s sophomore effort, Van Halen II. Eddie picks furiously and precisely on a much less forgiving instrument equipped with nylon strings, even providing a sample of his two-handed tapping technique established the prior year. (Eddie used to turn his back to the audience while playing clubs in L.A. to hide his experimentation with this form from other musicians.) Eddie explained the development of this track to Bud Scoppa in the July 1988 issue of Guitar World: “It’s sort of a funny thing how that happened. I think it was New Year’s Eve in ’78 or ’79. We were over at [producer] Ted Templeman’s house, Alex and I, and [Ted] had this acoustic guitar sittin’ in the corner. I started dickin’ around on it, y’know, I had half a heat going…[T]ed walks in and he goes, ‘Wow, you can play acoustic guitar?’ I looked at him like, ‘What’s the difference? It’s got six strings- it’s a fucking guitar!’ So I ended up coming up with ‘Spanish Fly’”
4. ‘Mean Street’ (1981): Fair Warning, the worst-selling album of the David Lee Roth era, contains some of Eddie Van Halen’s best guitar work. This opening track is a veritable textbook of Eddie’s tone, technique and approach to both soloing and riffing. The fade-in is a distorted take on a bass player’s slap and pop technique executed on guitar, before giving way to some quickly-executed hammer-on riffs and dive-bombed feedback that squeals from the speakers. The opening riff is the best example of Eddie’s ‘brown sound’ this side of ‘Panama.’ The solo goes by in a flash, but is highlighted with harmonics on the opening bend and musical use of the whammy bar that would simply come off as some bad-sounding tricks in the hands of imitators.
5. ‘Jump’ (1984): Though the phrase ‘in the pocket’ is overused, it is the best description for the guitar solo in this song. Only 18 seconds in length, Eddie begins by bending into a key change and exiting with a fast phrase on the return to the song’s original key. In between is a flurry of notes that are musical and memorable despite their speed. Eddie’s keyboard solo that follows sounds every bit as unique as his own guitar playing. Roth, with whom the tune is most associated, was initially against recording the song because he felt that no one wanted to hear Eddie Van Halen playing keyboards. The single reached #1 in the U.S. and Canada and was certified gold by the RIAA.
6. ‘Runnin’ With The Devil’ (1978): Eddie proves that less is more with his solo work on this track. With a strong sound, strong riff and strong vocals provided by Roth, there was no need for EVH to overdo it here. What matters is that Eddie made every note count, to the point that a person bordering on tone deafness could hum every note of both brief lead breaks.
7. ‘So Is This Love?’ (1981): The blues-based solo on the lead break, infected with a touch of EVH flair, is another example where playing less means more. It fits perfectly within the song, as does the lead during the outro.
8. ‘Mine All Mine’ (1988): A synth and keyboard-driven semi-rocker would seem like an odd place for Eddie to drop-in with a driving, screaming distorted solo, but he does just that. The solo begins with wailing whammy bar work before giving way to some downright melodic guitar riffage at 2:45.
9. ‘I’ll Wait’ (1984): Eddie’s solo on this synthesizer-based mid-tempo track brings a necessary bit of attitude to the song. Using what sounds to be a neck pick-up (although some of Eddie’s guitars weren’t even equipped with one), he bends and struts through the solo section to create a memorable lead break that relies on finesse rather than speed.
10. ‘Romeo Delight’ (1980): This outright rocker from Women and Children First contains a scorching, phased lead break that takes no prisoners, makes no apologies, and yet still manages to sound smooth.
BONUS TRACK: 11. ‘Judgment Day’ (1991): Eddie took his own two-handed tapping technique to a new level on this rocker from For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. Proving that he wanted to extend his rule from the Guitar Throne beyond the Eighties, Eddie employed a four-fingered attack on the strings that was first explored by Joe Satriani on his 1987 landmark guitar instrumental album, Surfing with the Alien. Eddie worked his way up the neck using two fingers from his fretting hand for two strings and two fingers from his pick hand to hammer-on to two additional strings- but, unlike Satriani, did it with a blazingly distorted tone from his amplifiers. (The risk with this technique at high volumes is that other strings and overtones will ring out sympathetically even if the technique is executed with precision.) Satriani explored a similarly challenging but different concept when he hammered-on arpeggios for ‘The Mystical Potato Head Groove Thing’ with his fret hand while muting the open strings with his pick hand on his Flying in a Blue Dream release.
Honorable Mentions: ‘Girl Gone Bad,’ ‘Right Now,’ ‘When It’s Love,’ ‘Unchained,’ ‘Light Up the Sky,’ ‘A.F.U. (Naturally Wired),’ ‘Sinner’s Swing!’
Eddie Van Halen was exactly what the rock ‘n roll doctor ordered to cure the Saturday Night Fever sweeping the nation during the late Seventies. When Van Halen was unleashed upon the unsuspecting masses in 1978, rock guitar playing was changed overnight. The threat that rock would become an afterthought in the face of a changing mainstream was temporarily thwarted. The only downside was the creation of a pool of guitar players who, throughout the Eighties, used Eddie’s techniques as tricks rather than as a natural method to create music. Even the incredibly gifted Randy Rhoads, who along with Ozzy Osbourne kept rock relevant despite the advent of disco and dance music, admitted that it pained him to incorporate Eddie Van Halen’s licks into his live solos just because ‘it impresses the kids.’
It’s nearly impossible to narrow down a list ten guitar solos by a rock legend with an extensive catalog of material. It’s naturally a subjective endeavor; the only advantage I claim is the insight provided by my 23 years of playing experience and countless hours spent fruitlessly trying to imitate The Master before giving up and establishing my own style.
Eddie took two approaches to soloing during his career. One was to try first, second, third (or even more) takes for solos on the studio albums. Later, he told Bud Scoppa during a lengthy interview for Guitar World prior to the release of OU812 that different takes would sometimes be spliced together to form one solo. “Sometimes I’ll do three solos,” said Van Halen, “and I’ll go, ‘I like the beginning of that one, I like the end of that one, I like the middle of that one.’ Whatever sounds good. Ain’t no fuckin’ rules. And I ain’t proud. I don’t give a fuck if it’s in one take or not. Whatever gets me off!”
I have no problem with the splicing method. After all, Eddie played all the solos himself. And nothing can hold-up the recording process like a guitar player who is anal retentive over his solos. It’s sometimes easy for a guitar player to tell when Eddie appeared to do something off-the-cuff, like on ‘Sinner’s Swing!’ Other times, it’s impossible to tell unless Eddie could recall himself during an interview. Like many guitar players, Eddie would often forget how to play some of his own songs after they would lie dormant for a while. He once admitted to having to go to a store to buy his own albums prior to a tour so that he could re-learn the material. He also admitted that he couldn’t play covers to save his life. What was a detriment in his early days, though, brought him great success when the band finally broke through, in large part, because Eddie Van Halen only knew how to be himself.
1. ‘Eruption’ (1978): Eddie Van Halen could have thrown his guitar into a dumpster after recording this one minute and forty-two seconds of guitar wizardry and still been a guitar hero for life. Though most well-known as the track on which Eddie unveiled his patented two-handed tapping technique to the world, to focus on that aspect alone is an oversimplification. Everything about the track- the tone, the use of the tremolo bar, the blinding speed and precision- set EVH apart from his late-Seventies contemporaries. The distortion coming out of the amplifiers makes the guitar work scream, which became known to guitar gurus as the infamous ‘brown sound.’ Although Eddie himself toyed with his amplifiers and guitars despite having no formal training in electronics, anyone who has studied guitar for a number of years knows that 99% of a guitarist’s tone comes from one thing and one thing alone: your own hands. (Eddie once relayed a story about how a suspicious Ted Nugent once plugged into Eddie’s rig before a show and, to Mr. Nugent’s surprise, he discovered that his tone still sounded exactly like Ted Nugent.) Eddie was never one who relied much on effects. This track was probably recorded with a classic MXR phase 90 pedal and an Echoplex for delay. The ultimate triumph of ‘Eruption,’ however, is simply how musical it sounds. Try grabbing an acoustic guitar and playing the blinding licks in the upper register down an octave at half speed- you’ll realize that Eddie wasn’t using his ability to play at unheard-of speeds to cover-up a lack of musical vocabulary.
2. ‘Beat It’ (1982): Eddie’s reputation was so well known even before the release of Van Halen’s 1984 that legendary producer Quincy Jones called upon him to provide a guitar solo for the opening track of what would become the best-selling album of all time worldwide, Michael Jackson’s Thriller. With the rhythm tracks already laid down by studio session veteran and Toto guitarist Steve Lukather, Eddie walked into the studio and winged two solos in front of The Gloved One himself. He estimated during an interview with Joe Bosso in the February 1990 issue of Guitar World that the entire project took 20 minutes. Ironically, it is this solo more than any other provides the best example of Eddie’s downright nasty distorted guitar tone. The artificial harmonics generated at 2:52- and at 3:06 especially- howl as if the amplifiers were possessed by demons. To an untrained ear, it sounds ‘cool.’ To the trained ear, there comes a realization that such tones are not possible in lesser hands during this time period- or even now. (An artificial harmonic is generated by shifting the pick attack to pinch the guitar string with the pick and thumbnail simultaneously, and they aren’t always easy to generate properly. Eddie’s use of them seems to be innate and is uncanny.) The use of wide intervals and two-handed tapping gives the solo a sense of urgency that the track demands. The ‘thank you’ letter that Quincy Jones wrote to Eddie afterward was signed, ‘The Fucking Asshole’ because Eddie began cursing at Jones during his initial phone call, thinking it was a prank because of a bad connection.
3. ‘Spanish Fly’ (1979): If anyone had attributed Eddie’s guitar pyrotechnics on the first album to studio effects rather than raw talent, these critics were silenced by this solo acoustic guitar track on Van Halen’s sophomore effort, Van Halen II. Eddie picks furiously and precisely on a much less forgiving instrument equipped with nylon strings, even providing a sample of his two-handed tapping technique established the prior year. (Eddie used to turn his back to the audience while playing clubs in L.A. to hide his experimentation with this form from other musicians.) Eddie explained the development of this track to Bud Scoppa in the July 1988 issue of Guitar World: “It’s sort of a funny thing how that happened. I think it was New Year’s Eve in ’78 or ’79. We were over at [producer] Ted Templeman’s house, Alex and I, and [Ted] had this acoustic guitar sittin’ in the corner. I started dickin’ around on it, y’know, I had half a heat going…[T]ed walks in and he goes, ‘Wow, you can play acoustic guitar?’ I looked at him like, ‘What’s the difference? It’s got six strings- it’s a fucking guitar!’ So I ended up coming up with ‘Spanish Fly’”
4. ‘Mean Street’ (1981): Fair Warning, the worst-selling album of the David Lee Roth era, contains some of Eddie Van Halen’s best guitar work. This opening track is a veritable textbook of Eddie’s tone, technique and approach to both soloing and riffing. The fade-in is a distorted take on a bass player’s slap and pop technique executed on guitar, before giving way to some quickly-executed hammer-on riffs and dive-bombed feedback that squeals from the speakers. The opening riff is the best example of Eddie’s ‘brown sound’ this side of ‘Panama.’ The solo goes by in a flash, but is highlighted with harmonics on the opening bend and musical use of the whammy bar that would simply come off as some bad-sounding tricks in the hands of imitators.
5. ‘Jump’ (1984): Though the phrase ‘in the pocket’ is overused, it is the best description for the guitar solo in this song. Only 18 seconds in length, Eddie begins by bending into a key change and exiting with a fast phrase on the return to the song’s original key. In between is a flurry of notes that are musical and memorable despite their speed. Eddie’s keyboard solo that follows sounds every bit as unique as his own guitar playing. Roth, with whom the tune is most associated, was initially against recording the song because he felt that no one wanted to hear Eddie Van Halen playing keyboards. The single reached #1 in the U.S. and Canada and was certified gold by the RIAA.
6. ‘Runnin’ With The Devil’ (1978): Eddie proves that less is more with his solo work on this track. With a strong sound, strong riff and strong vocals provided by Roth, there was no need for EVH to overdo it here. What matters is that Eddie made every note count, to the point that a person bordering on tone deafness could hum every note of both brief lead breaks.
7. ‘So Is This Love?’ (1981): The blues-based solo on the lead break, infected with a touch of EVH flair, is another example where playing less means more. It fits perfectly within the song, as does the lead during the outro.
8. ‘Mine All Mine’ (1988): A synth and keyboard-driven semi-rocker would seem like an odd place for Eddie to drop-in with a driving, screaming distorted solo, but he does just that. The solo begins with wailing whammy bar work before giving way to some downright melodic guitar riffage at 2:45.
9. ‘I’ll Wait’ (1984): Eddie’s solo on this synthesizer-based mid-tempo track brings a necessary bit of attitude to the song. Using what sounds to be a neck pick-up (although some of Eddie’s guitars weren’t even equipped with one), he bends and struts through the solo section to create a memorable lead break that relies on finesse rather than speed.
10. ‘Romeo Delight’ (1980): This outright rocker from Women and Children First contains a scorching, phased lead break that takes no prisoners, makes no apologies, and yet still manages to sound smooth.
BONUS TRACK: 11. ‘Judgment Day’ (1991): Eddie took his own two-handed tapping technique to a new level on this rocker from For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. Proving that he wanted to extend his rule from the Guitar Throne beyond the Eighties, Eddie employed a four-fingered attack on the strings that was first explored by Joe Satriani on his 1987 landmark guitar instrumental album, Surfing with the Alien. Eddie worked his way up the neck using two fingers from his fretting hand for two strings and two fingers from his pick hand to hammer-on to two additional strings- but, unlike Satriani, did it with a blazingly distorted tone from his amplifiers. (The risk with this technique at high volumes is that other strings and overtones will ring out sympathetically even if the technique is executed with precision.) Satriani explored a similarly challenging but different concept when he hammered-on arpeggios for ‘The Mystical Potato Head Groove Thing’ with his fret hand while muting the open strings with his pick hand on his Flying in a Blue Dream release.
Honorable Mentions: ‘Girl Gone Bad,’ ‘Right Now,’ ‘When It’s Love,’ ‘Unchained,’ ‘Light Up the Sky,’ ‘A.F.U. (Naturally Wired),’ ‘Sinner’s Swing!’
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Brian Grazer To Produce 24; Confirms 2012 Release
4/13/2011 6:25 PM ET
(RTTNews) - Brian Grazer has confirmed his production role for the forthcoming big-screen rendition of "24." Imagine Entertainment, the production company owned by Grazer and Ron Howard, produced the series when it aired on Fox from 2001 to 2010.
The "Frost/Nixon" producer recently hit Twitter to make the announcement: "Got off the phone Kiefer [Sutherland] yesterday and we are very excited about producing the 24 movie for next year." The 2012 release date had been previously announced by Sutherland during a guest appearance on "The View" last month. At that time, he described the film as "the little engine that could."
The series won several Emmy Awards, including a best actor win in 2006. However, the film version has been subject to several setbacks, such as script re-writes and scheduling difficulties.
by RTT Staff Writer
Charlie Sheen says he may be reunited with "Two and a Half Men."
Getty Images
In an interview with a Boston radio station Tuesday, Sheen said there have been discussions about bringing him back to the hit CBS sitcom he was fired from last month.
Sheen put the chances of him returning at "85 percent." He didn't offer details in the Sports Hub 98.5 WBZ-FM interview, saying he'd been asked not to divulge anything.
CBS declined to comment, and series producer Warner Bros. Television didn't immediately return a call for comment.
The actor also said his profits from the show's rich syndication deals are being withheld and that's part of his $100 million lawsuit against Warner and the show's executive producer.
Sheen was in Boston for his nationwide road show that has drawn mixed audience reaction.
Foo Fighters set to end Adele's run at the top of UK albums chart
Band on course to end Adele's 11 week reign at chart summit
The band's seventh album 'Wasting Light' is currently selling 50% faster than Adele's '21' in the midweek charts.
The latest compilation from Glee, 'Glee The Music: Volume 5' is presently at Number Three, while Katy B's 'On A Mission' is placed at Number Five.
In the singles chart, last week's Number Two 'Party Rock Anthem' from LMFAO is on course to top the chart, pushing Jennifer Lopez and Pitbull's 'On The Floor' down to Number Two.
Check NME this Sunday from 7pm (BST) for the full chart rundown.
Foo Fighters are on the cover of the new issue of NME, which is on UK newsstands or available digitally.
Photo: Dean Chalkley/NME
Foo Fighters are to set to end Adele's run of 11 weeks at the top of the album chart on Sunday (April 17). The band's seventh album 'Wasting Light' is currently selling 50% faster than Adele's '21' in the midweek charts.
The latest compilation from Glee, 'Glee The Music: Volume 5' is presently at Number Three, while Katy B's 'On A Mission' is placed at Number Five.
In the singles chart, last week's Number Two 'Party Rock Anthem' from LMFAO is on course to top the chart, pushing Jennifer Lopez and Pitbull's 'On The Floor' down to Number Two.
Check NME this Sunday from 7pm (BST) for the full chart rundown.
Foo Fighters are on the cover of the new issue of NME, which is on UK newsstands or available digitally.
BRET MICHAELS Announces Super Cruise!
"Can’t Guarantee The Weather, But I Can Guarantee You’ll Have The Time Of Your Life”
Rock Hard
Posted on Wednesday, April 13, 2011 at 02:28:07 EST POISON frontman BRET MICHAELS has announced the Bret Michaels Super Cruise, due to launch November 10th - 14th in Cozumel, Mexico. Complete details can be found at the event's official website, found here. Cabins can be booked now at this location.
Michaels: “I’ll be on board the entire time playing two full concerts. I’ll be bartending and most importantly hanging with the fans. Can’t guarantee the weather but I can guarantee you’ll have the time of your life.”
Check out the official facebook page and for Twitter updates.
South Bend Tribune's Tom Conway recently issued the following report:
Less than a year ago, Bret Michaels was rushed to the hospital, where doctors discovered the Poison singer had suffered a brain hemorrhage that nearly killed him.
"It was totally life-changing, as you might expect," Michaels says. "The doctors said, 'If you have children, you need to bring them down.' Those are words you never want to hear. It transcends scary. It's really the deepest, most wrenching kind of fear."
"When I got out of the hospital, I feel like a lot of people expected me to sit at home and wait for the sky to fall, and that's not me," he says. "If anything, the experience said to me, 'Life is short and life is fragile, so you better go live it.' ... Rock androll has been my life. It has truly been my savior. So for me, getting back on tour probably saved me, at least on a mental/spiritual level. If I sat around the house letting the world pass me by, my soul would have deteriorated. There would have been nothing left of me."
Michaels claims an accident at the 2009 Tony Awards show caused the brain hemorrhage. He declined comment on the lawsuit he filed last month against CBS and the show's producers.
"That's for the lawyers right now," he says. "It's pretty complicated and I'm not one to spill my legal life out to the world."
After his solo concert tour, Michaels will reunite with his Poison bandmates this summer for a co-headlining tour with fellow glam metal band MÖTLEY CRÜE. Poison - with more than 25 million albums sold worldwide and such hits as 'Every Rose Has Its Thorn' and 'Nothin' But A Good Time' - is celebrating 25 years in the music business this year. Michaels says it doesn't surprise him that they are still together.
"I think I did imagine a lifelong career with them," he says. "Life is about loyalty to me. You stick together. I'm still amazed by Poison and by what we've done together in our career so far. We turned nothing into something. And we never faked it."
Michaels says the members of Poison - C.C. DeVille, Bobby Dall and Rikki Rockett - don't have any plans to record any new music, but they are releasing a double CD retrospective of their greatest hits, Double Dose Of Poison: Ultimate Hits, next month.
"As far as writing all-new material, I'm not sure when that will happen," Michaels says. "But I'm sure that it will one day. I love writing music and I love those guys as though they're my brothers. When the time is right and the inspiration hits, I'm sure we'll all find ourselves back in the studio together."
Read the full report at this location.
Michaels: “I’ll be on board the entire time playing two full concerts. I’ll be bartending and most importantly hanging with the fans. Can’t guarantee the weather but I can guarantee you’ll have the time of your life.”
Check out the official facebook page and for Twitter updates.
South Bend Tribune's Tom Conway recently issued the following report:
Less than a year ago, Bret Michaels was rushed to the hospital, where doctors discovered the Poison singer had suffered a brain hemorrhage that nearly killed him.
"It was totally life-changing, as you might expect," Michaels says. "The doctors said, 'If you have children, you need to bring them down.' Those are words you never want to hear. It transcends scary. It's really the deepest, most wrenching kind of fear."
"When I got out of the hospital, I feel like a lot of people expected me to sit at home and wait for the sky to fall, and that's not me," he says. "If anything, the experience said to me, 'Life is short and life is fragile, so you better go live it.' ... Rock and
Michaels claims an accident at the 2009 Tony Awards show caused the brain hemorrhage. He declined comment on the lawsuit he filed last month against CBS and the show's producers.
"That's for the lawyers right now," he says. "It's pretty complicated and I'm not one to spill my legal life out to the world."
After his solo concert tour, Michaels will reunite with his Poison bandmates this summer for a co-headlining tour with fellow glam metal band MÖTLEY CRÜE. Poison - with more than 25 million albums sold worldwide and such hits as 'Every Rose Has Its Thorn' and 'Nothin' But A Good Time' - is celebrating 25 years in the music business this year. Michaels says it doesn't surprise him that they are still together.
"I think I did imagine a lifelong career with them," he says. "Life is about loyalty to me. You stick together. I'm still amazed by Poison and by what we've done together in our career so far. We turned nothing into something. And we never faked it."
Michaels says the members of Poison - C.C. DeVille, Bobby Dall and Rikki Rockett - don't have any plans to record any new music, but they are releasing a double CD retrospective of their greatest hits, Double Dose Of Poison: Ultimate Hits, next month.
"As far as writing all-new material, I'm not sure when that will happen," Michaels says. "But I'm sure that it will one day. I love writing music and I love those guys as though they're my brothers. When the time is right and the inspiration hits, I'm sure we'll all find ourselves back in the studio together."
Read the full report at this location.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Popular Posts
-
6/18/2011 1:36 PM ET (RTTNews) - Adele once again reigns supreme at Billboard this week. The British singer took...
-
06/03/2011 . Puddle of Mudd are releasing an album of covers of songs that have inspired them. That album, called re:(...
-
Michael Wright | 05.16.2011 With their farewell tour kicking off in just a few weeks, Judas Priest have been rehearsing intensively—a job ma...
-
Due to the usual lack of information flowing, Van Halen fans went all kinds of crazy this week at the mere sight of a tweet from Eddie Tr...
-
Today's Day in Rock Black Sabbath's Geezer Butler Arrested After Bar Fight Black Sabbath bass player Geezer Butler was rep...
-
Ultimate Classic Rock ( www.ultimateclassicrock.com ) is now featuring recent interviews with Journey's Jonathan Cain and Night Rang...
-
Today's Full Report B2K Singer Denies Owning Illegal Weed Shop (TMZ) The B2K singer who could be hit for nearly $2 million in fines and ...
-
August 18, 2011 by Roger Scales Filed under 80s Guy For The Modern Eye , Daily Music News , Reviews 3 Comme...
Popular Posts
-
Today's Rock News! Def Leppard Confirm Reason For Phil Collen Leaving Tour(hennemusic) Def Leppard confirmed it was a "family ...
-
Today's Day in Rock Stories Black Sabbath Legend Wants To Team Up With Rob Halford A legendary heavy metal guitarist may be teami...
-
Today's Day in Rock Stories Rock Legend Tom Petty Confirmed Dead At 66(hennemusic) Management confirmed Tom Petty died Monday at th...
-
Today's Day in Rock Stories Paul Stanley Explains KISS Farewell Tour Move KISS sparked speculation that they may be planning to ...
-
Slash Surprised By Guns N' Roses Reunion Slash says that he was surprised that Guns N' Roses were actually able to reunite...
-
Today's Day in Rock Stories Guns N' Roses Reunion Is Really Lame Says Def Leppard Guitarist 2016 In Review Def Leppard guitaris...
-
Today's Day in Rock Stories Guns N' Roses And Pearl Jam Supergroup Share New Song(Radio.com) The Levee Walkers are a new rock ...
-
Today's Day in Rock Stories AC/DC's Brian Johnson To Receive Walk Of Fame Honor AC/DC frontman Brian Johnson is set to be tha...
