Latest / Booked On Rock with Eric Senich / 50 Years Of Van Halen Unleashed [Episode 200]

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50 Years Of Van Halen Unleashed [Episode 200] · Booked On Rock with Eric Senich

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  We're totally booked rock and roll. I mean gotta leave you. You're reading
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  little hands this, It's time to rock and roll rock band roll up,
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  I totally booked. Hey guys, welcome back to book don Rock, the
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  podcast for those about to read and rock. You can find the podcast at
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  booked on rock dot com. Every episode of Booked on Rock is there in
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  both audio and video forms, and also all the listening platforms exclusive videos from
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  each episode or there blogs, links to all of the social media sites,
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  and you can get the latest rockbook releases all at booked on rock dot com.
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  Author Martin Popoff is back on the podcast. He is the author of
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  Vanhilen at fifty, to mark the band's fiftieth anniversary. Martin has curated fifty
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  significant milestones from the band's history, starting with their formation in nineteen seventy four
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  up through the passing of Edward Vanhilen in twenty twenty. It comes in a
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  hardcover with stunning and candid off stage for timeography, images of memorabilia including gig
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  posters, vinyl record sleeves, ticket stubs, advertisements, and a gatefold Van
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  Halen timeline. Added to the fifty milestones are sidebars throughout the book which cover
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  specialized topics including Edward's finger tapping technique, the album mark, and a whole
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  lot more. The book is available now at the Van Halen Store. That's
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  vanhlenstore dot com. I put together a playlist to Van Halen spending their entire
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  catalog, which you can find on the show notes page. Now, let's
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  talk to Martin pop Off. The book is Van Halen at fifty. The
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  author Martin pop Off. Martin, welcome back to the show. Yes,
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  thanks very much. Eric. That first milestone moment titled Sinner Swing. Van
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  Halen is born David Lee Roth with the brothers Edwin and Alex in Pasadena,
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  and they eventually bring in Michael Anthony. And there's a picture of an album
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  on that page, and it's an album by Cactus. And I know about
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  this for those who aren't so familiar with the Van Helen history, this is
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  an interesting story. So Edwarin and Alex they had some interesting influences growing up
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  and Cactus was one. What's interesting is the bands that the brothers are into
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  and the bands that and the artist that Dave was into. He's into R
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  and B, motown funk at an hour into straight ahead rock and rolling.
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  So here's my question. If that weren't the case, would Van Helen have
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  been as successful and stand out the way they did if not for that mix
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  of influences. Was it important to add Dave's musical tastes. That's an amazing
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  question, but I expect that from a Van Halen like you. Well,
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  I'm going deep on these. Yeah, we're gonna the surface questions. Yeah,
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  we're gonna avoid this. That's actually really cool because I guess Dave then
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  brings essentially the entertainment aspect and the fact that you have to please on record
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  and with the crowd and the cactus is. It's really interesting you bring that
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  up because Van Halen's basically coming up seventy three, seventy four. They don't
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  get an album till seventy eight, but they're they're essentially you know. The
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  funny thing is there's a parallel here with Iron Maiden and Metallica in that Iron
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  Maiden and Metallica were the first two bands on album that gave you covers that
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  you, as a metal fan wanted to hear, cool, obscure, excellent
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  covers, or they would what they would do sometimes is they would pick the
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  one or two heavy songs from a band that wasn't particularly heavy, or they
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  spotted the heaviness in the writing of a song and it was never heavy arranged
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  on the record, and they would give you that kind of thing. So
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  Van Halen is kind of interesting that way because Cactus and many of the other
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  things they did kind of give you the history of hard rock, with the
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  tacit explanation being there ain't much hard rock, and that's you know, when
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  we talk about the history of heavy metal, and I got a whole book
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  called Who Invented Heavy Metal? And you know, that's a long, long
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  story. But the funny part of the story is that in America, with
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  Van Halen being such an inherently American band, in America, there really was
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  a very scant history of heavy metal up until Montrose Montrose in seventy three,
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  Aerosmith Aerosmith in seventy three, Kiss New York Dolls, Ted Nugent going solo
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  in seventy five. But before that we kind of had Blue Cheer, MC
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  five Stooges. That's a whole different thing. That's like late sixties. But
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  in the early seventies, all we had was leftover warmed over British blues boom
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  bands like Cactus and Mountain, So you know, Van Halen are like DJs
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  on stage. They love music, right, they love presenting music that they
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  love. So also because of their American band, they mine for anything decent
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  from America to play for you live, like zz Top good quality, you
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  know, heavy complicated Zzy Top songs they would play as well. They'd also
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  play a little budgy, little black Sabbath. They kind of go all over
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  the place, you know, famously. I think it's just one Montrose song
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  that they played live, even though they get compared to Montrose all the time.
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  But yeah, it's interesting that the Cactus is there because basically these guys
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  are are coming up through that seventy three to seventy eight period as complete music
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  nerds. They know they have to entertain. So that's the Dave's side,
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  plus just the boogy hard rock side that you would get, you know,
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  covers that would be demanded to be played live. But they would also go
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  pretty obscure and pretty deep as well, so we know going into this these
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  guys are music scholars. You mentioned Blue Cheer Michael Anthony. In fact,
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  he got when Van Hill got inducted to the Rock and Hall of Fame,
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  and it was only him and Sammy that showed up. But Mike brings up
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  that in his speech that his sister showed him a Blue Cheer album and that's
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  what got him on into rock and roll. Blue Cheer, Yeah, and
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  you know Blue Cheer. I always say, excuse me, I always say
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  that Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath, The Origins of Heavy Metal February thirteenth,
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  nineteen seventy. But there's a whole prehistory. And when I did that Who
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  Invented Heavy Metal book, basically I was facebooking with some of the other day.
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  It's it's one hundred and twenty thousand words, it ends in nineteen seventy
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  one, and I don't think nineteen seven even starts for like one hundred and
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  sixty pages or something. So there is this prehistory, and if you're going
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  to go into the pre history, you're basically going to for full albums that
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  invented heavy metal. Everybody knew about Vincibus Eruptum, Vincibus eruptive. Yeah,
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  and you know it actually is a San Francisco album too, which is which
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  is interesting. So it's it's close by. It's a California album. But
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  besides that, there's basically Jimi Hendrix and Cream. And for full albums,
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  there's the first Blue Chair and then there's Outside Inside, which is doesn't get
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  enough credit. It's actually more modern than the first one, but it's the
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  same year. It's actually still nineteen sixty eight. And then you've got stug
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  just one sixty nine, you got Kickout the Jam sixty nine, and that's
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  it. That's it really for for the preambles, you know, the precursors
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  to a very modern, different, heavy, doomy. The Blues is taken
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  out of its statement in Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath, Kick Out the Jams.
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  MC five. We just lost with the last founding member of EMC five.
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  Oh, I don't know if it's the last. I think who's left.
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  We've lost now Rob Tyner, Wayne Kramer, and let's see bass player,
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  drummer Dennis Dennis is still around. I think, right, yeah,
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  Oh well, no, that's that's who just passed here, Sonic Smith.
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  So who is the last five guys? Hang on? But yeah they are,
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  and I've I've met, I've interviewed those guys, not Rob Tyner.
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  He goes way back, but yeah, kickout the Jams, super important,
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  pretty heavy album for nineteen sixty nine, right early sixty nine because it's New
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  Year's sixty eight that it gets recorded at the Grandy Ballroom, right, Yeah,
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  from Detroit, right MC five Yep. Jeene Simmons, Paul Stanley discovering
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  Van Halen. That's another milestone, one of the fifty milestone moments in the
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  book. Gene ends up producing a demo for the band, doesn't get them
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  signed. Ultimately, it's teaming up with Ted Templeman, who helps get the
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  band's live sound on tape, and they're signed to Warner Brothers. Have you
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  listened to that Jean Simmons demo and what do you think of it? Yes?
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  And yeah, and they are more of a pedestrian band at that point.
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  I would argue with you that they got their live sound on tape,
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  because I have some distinct opinions about that album, that first album. But
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  yeah, to me, what we get, what we see here is the
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  story of the music industry. Right. You could be great, you could
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  be hyped. But the funny thing with Van Halen is that is that they
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  almost they almost didn't hit the zeit well, they truly didn't hit the zeitgeist.
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  They were like signed despite because you know, people would complain about David
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  Lee Roth being a Jim Dandy warmed over Jim Dandy guy, and that that
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  stuff's over. Hard rock's over, looking like Jim Dandy is over. It's
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  all about the new wave now, you know. So Van Halen we're almost
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  seen as has beens a little bit. So you see you see that that
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  you know, people weren't chomping at the bit to get this band going.
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  I mean they're they're gonna fit in because there's gonna be a metal revival in
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  the UK with the new ave Bridge heavy metal. There's going to be a
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  big hair metal you know run from nineteen eighty three to about nineteen ninety two
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  that Van Halen's going to be a precursor of. But you know, they're
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  essentially making music in a hard rock wilderness to start out with sort of things
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  seventy eight and seventy nine are notoriously I remember growing up through those years it
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  felt like that was the first first time that you know, hard rock was
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  under siege as being like a sort of has been sort of music. Most
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  of our hard rock heroes we're breaking up or making lousy albums, or you
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  know, sometimes going poppy. You think of Darrenger and Stars and Moxie,
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  and you know Aerosmith going away, No More Deep, Purple Black Sabbath breaking
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  up and then reforming, kind of thing with Ronnie James. Deal. But
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  yeah, so Ted Templeman comes in, and you know the interesting thing about
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  that, it was a very belabored album, especially at the vocal end.
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  And I don't think it is their live sound. I think what you get
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  on that album is the most sober and conservative and meticulous recording those guys would
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  ever do. I don't think we get brown sound here. I think you
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  get their live sound starting on Van Halen two. Interesting. Interesting, So
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  you don't feel it's overproducer thing like that though. For Van Hellen, I
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  think it's amazingly beautifully, beautifully, perfectly, meticulously conservatively produced. There's no
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  odd tones on it anywhere. Everybody just sounds really, really good. It
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  just sounds like a super expensive, corporate, excellently excellently produced, molten exciting
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  album. But conservative. Yeah, I asked that question. I guess putting
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  that Gene Simmons demo up against what Templeman did, So I'm kind of going
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  off of that because the Gene Simmons one sounds sounds more polished to me.
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  It sounds a little bit more like a almost like a kiss record the way
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  it's produced, and then listening to what Templeman did, I think that's where
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  I'm It's polish, but it's modest, you know. And I think I
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  think with Ted, like you hear those stories about him having a piece together
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  the vocals and not having the other guys around and all that stuff, because
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  they probably fire him if they saw how hard was getting vocals out of him.
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  Kind of thing, right, because he was always on the edge there.
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  But but you know, credit credit to Ted for getting him through,
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  and credit credit to Dave. You know, growing up and not seeing the
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  band live, but but you know, growing up in a small town in
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  British Columbia, Canada and just having the records, it never crossed our minds.
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  We had no idea that it might have been somewhat of a struggle for
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  Dave to sing. He sounded great, He sounded like he was leading that
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  band. He sounded like an authority, sounded like a wise old man with
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  those vocals because there because they're pretty masculine vocals that he comes up with,
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  right, Yeah, I love his vocals on those albums. Interesting point that
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  you bring up in the book about how when you first was first was exposed
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  to Van Halen, you viewed it from the point of view as a drummer,
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  so eruption. There's a lot of kids who were guitarists jaws dropped,
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  but you weren't really listening to that as much as you were listening to some
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  other things on that first album. You know, I can remember it like
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  it was yesterday over at Forrest Hoops House. The big Yamaha receiver one hundred
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  and fifty watts, a channel, beautiful ebony turntable receiver was Ebony Bo's nine
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  oh ones in his in his parents, you know, in the living room,
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  room, carpet, everywhere, and we played that album and we actually
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  approached it more as total heavy metal experts at fifteen years old, right,
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  so what we heard, I remember this is my impression of that record,
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  right. My impression of that record was there was some filler in like fuel
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  your love tonight, weren't crazy about running with the Devil or Jamie's crying weren't
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  crazy about getting a Kinks cover, weren't crazy about getting eruption, weren't crazy
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  about getting ice cream man. So all of a sudden, half the album
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  is not that great, but the other half sounded like as good as the
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  best European medal you can possibly imagine. To our ears, was basically Judas
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  Priests and Scorpions, like on Fire and yeah, on fire, you know
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  I'm the one I ain't talking about love. Basically, it reminded us a
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  little bit of Queen in that there ain't that many great songs on here,
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  but the ones that are heavy are heavier than anything out there. So it's
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  almost like, yeah, you want us to try this, We'll like,
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  we'll like slay all comers if you ask us to try this, and they
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  did so. It was literally like it was literally like hearing Scorpions Virgin Killer
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  mixed with with a Moxie album. There were some things that we thought were
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  as is kind of a little slow. Jamie's crying is a little poppy and
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  goofy. Run with the Devil's too slow. It's boring us to death.
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  We're fifteen years old, right, you know I don't need to hear you
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  really got me done by anybody, even though it's heavy here kind of cool
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  but but so yeah, so that that was the funny thing about it.
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  We just thought the metal on it was some of the best metal we had
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  ever heard. But we only liked half the album, you know in a
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  big way. Did you appreciate the other songs as the years would go on?
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  Look not particularly way, way more or anything, but yeah, I
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  mean years later you realize, Ah, running with the Devil, it's kind
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  of cool. They're taking the foot off the gas, They're they're creating a
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  mood or whatever. But it's still it still doesn't no, still still to
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  this day, it's the it's the absolute headbangers on that album that I love
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  the most. Let's revisit that thought on Dave and his vocals and how Templeaman
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  had to work hard and Dave had to work hard too. The first the
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  first plan was Casablanca Records. That was Gene Simmons. He had hoped that
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  they would get signed to Casablanca Records, but Billy Coyne was saying he suggested
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  that they replaced Dave and and of course they didn't. So and then it
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  was this there was the story that's been out there now quite a bit that
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  Ted Templeman Warner Brothers considered bringing in Sammy at the time because Ted worked with
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  Sammy and Montrose decided against it. So the big what if is what if
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  Sammy joins in seventy eight and not eighty five, How would things have panned
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  out? How would how would we be talking about Van Halen today if Sammy
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  did join the band, then, yeah, that's crazy. Who knows?
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  You know, Sammy was a was a good looking guy. His hair was
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  cool. He dressed a bit goofy, but they all did so beautiful teeth.
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  Maybe he'd not be Yeah, maybe he'd not be dressing so cool.
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  Maybe he'd be like one of the nerdiest looking guys in the band. But
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  if if they all got you know, a hold of him and a hold
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  of Mikey. Mikey didn't dress very cool either of the early days, right,
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  But uh, who knows? I mean, great voice, I'm not
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  crazy about his stage mannerisms back then, but we know Dave's an incredible showman.
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  He looked amazing, he sung great. He was just just a firecracker
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  up there, explosive front man. So yeah, it's great that we got
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  him, you know, And I just remember as a kid growing up thinking
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  he was just the coolest guy ever. And and I don't think I ever
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  really thought that Sammy Hager. I mean, already in nineteen seventy eight,
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  seventy nine, eighty, I had and knew all of those Sammy Hager albums,
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  you know, and to me, he was a little bit of a
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  like a heavier version of a Brian Adams or a proto night Ranger, kind
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  of in that poppy hard rock Heartland Russ Belt rock range, Midwest rock sort
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  of sound. Right, So we never thought he was super cool. So
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  if he would have come into the band, although you know Street Machine,
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  we you know, quite like that album coming up, But yeah, who
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  knows what would have happened. I have a feeling, you know, you
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  know, if I really had to think about it and give like a correct
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  answer, I would say they probably still would have been just fine, because
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  Sammy brings other things to the table. Okay, yeah, I My argument
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  is that it was perfect timing as to when Dave was there and when Sammy
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  was there. I think when Sammy joins, it's perfect time, especially when
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  you get into that era of rock big rock ballads, which Sammy would eventually
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  contribute to the band during his time, and I think that was huge in
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  the late eighties. That became a big thing. And so you got when
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  It's Love and I get this beloved dreams and those types of songs that you
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  know that that wouldn't have been the case if Dave was still there. I
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  mean, they still would have been huge with Dave, but I just feel
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  like if Sammy joined in the beginning, it would not have worked out as
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  well as it did as Dave being there when he was Sammy joining when he
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  joined m Yeah, so let's get into oh actually, before we move past
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  that first album, here's another what if. So what if you take I'd
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  love to do a maybe It's online, take Vanhalen one, all the songs
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  on Vanihalen won and strip those kick ass harmonies, right, the mic and
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  ed harmonies. What if you strip that from that album? How does that
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  change the course of vanhal In history? Because I think about that Montrose album
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  and how templament he always said, I wish if we just had one hit
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  single. Maybe that's what was missing from the Mantras album, is those harmonies.
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  What would happen if you didn't have those harmonies. That's a really interesting
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  point. I never really thought about that with the Montrose interesting experiment. Right
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  to listen to it with just with no harmonies whatsoever, Just listen. Yeah,
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  you are absolutely right, I mean I I yeah, I do think
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  that's a huge, huge part of that album. It's Beach Boys stuff.
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  Man. Yeah, it's like Beach Boys magic right there. And again,
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  just just like you know, as a metaphor for what I said about the
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  production, it's kind of the same thing with the harmonies. If you think
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  about it, they are the most conservative, ambitious, soberly, meticulously well
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  put together on the debut. Then you get moving forward, get moving forward,
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  you hear a little bit of that drunken looseness in it. You hear
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  a little less probably less tracks of them. They're there and they're they're great,
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  and we celebrate them, but they are they are no more cleaner and
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  more pristinely done than they are on the debut. The book done Rock Podcasts
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  will be back after this one. Are the sidebars in the book is interesting.
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  It's on Eddie's famous two hand tapping, and a lot has been written
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  about the origins who did it first. Who inspired you to try it himself.
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  But what I like in your book is your write up is is talking
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  about Ed's use of it. You know that when he inserts it like you
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  say, it's more of a syllable or word in his dictionary. Can you
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  talk about that in the different examples of how he would vary it up like
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  and jump or in mine own mind, because that speaks to his overall songwriting
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  skills in my opinion, and how he would use it to elevate a song
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  rather to be like, hey, look what I can do, which a
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  lot of the eighties guitars, Oh look how many? How fast I can
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  play? Yeah? Ed, Ed chose where to put it and how to
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  play it. Yeah, it's you know, it's a technique that had been
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  done a few times before. We hear the stories about a little bit of
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  Jimmy Page and a little bit of Billy Gibbons and Harvey Mandel and Steve Hackett
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  on record and even Brian May you know, and in nineteen seventy eight,
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  although this is the Judas Priest made two albums in nineteen seventy eight. But
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  you definitely hear a really good, solid, structured tapping on the second nineteen
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  seventy eight albums, So technically speaking, what would that be, something like
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  nine months later than the debut Van Halen album. But yeah, the point
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  is is that it doesn't matter who invented it, so to speak, it's
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  like who took the ball and ran with it and made it just part of
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  his lexicon, part of his vocabulary. So Eddie used it. Eddie used
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  it as as just something that spontaneously almost like came out of his mouth or
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  came out of his fingers. It was almost like second second nature. He
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  used it as as a bridging technique between riff sections or chordal things that he
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  did. He used it as a bridging technique between more conventional guitar soloing.
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  He could just he could just you know, slip in and out of that
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  all the time, effortlessly kind of thing. And he had various types of
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  tapping that he could do. So so he was basically the guy that said,
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  you know, I want to explore this way further than anybody else,
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  and yeah, and and you know he's he's absolutely the king of it.
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  And then it got picked up by other guys and it never quite sounded the
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  same because you put it together with everything else. And you know the quote
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  unquote brown sound, which I have some opinions on it as well, that
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  that he's just even when he does it, it just it just sounds so
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  uniquely him. Yeah, the other guitarists of that era who did some did
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  a great job. Vito Broad I always say he's my favorite of the Eddie
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  disciples, but a lot of times, and I'm not saying this about Vito,
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  I don't know this. Obviously, I wasn't there when these albums were
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  recorded. But it's almost like, hey, make sure we reach that quota
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  of your finger tapping. Let's get to make sure you get at least at
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  least at least a handful of songs on you. Like it's almost like it's
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  paint by numbers, like we got to get that in there because that's the
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  sound. Whereas Eddie, I don't think any of it was planned. It
• 23:04
  just came to him. Yeah. Yeah, Women and Children First nineteen eighty
• 23:10
  Fair Warning nineteen eighty one, two very interesting albums. The first two albums
• 23:15
  I always felt could be a double album, but I think you'd have a
• 23:17
  different opinion on that. Do you feel that way? I feel like,
• 23:21
  yeah, yeah. Stylistically, I just just never from the day I heard
• 23:25
  it, thought the second album sound anything like the first album. It just
• 23:27
  sounded so loose, and The Who, like, you know, I think
• 23:30
  that's when they start to me. I did a podcast episode of My History
• 23:34
  in five Songs thing where it's like, I can't remember the title, but
• 23:38
  the concept was bands that sound like separate personalities, all playing in different corners
• 23:45
  of the room, and The Who is a great example of that. You've
• 23:49
  got a very distinct drummer, you've got a very distinct guitarist, you've got
• 23:52
  a very distinct bass player. You've got two distinct singers you know doing and
• 23:57
  even their personalities are different. Dan Halen to me was like a unified machine
• 24:04
  on the first album, but on the second album they start sound like The
• 24:07
  Who to me, and you really sort of get that vibe. I think,
• 24:14
  I guess I'm disagreeing with you little because you think they go together.
• 24:15
  But you know, when I hear the absolute shambling looseness of how they come
• 24:22
  into the album with the intro to You're No Good, that just shows something
• 24:26
  so different to me. It's like incredibly casual compared to anything on the debut
• 24:30
  right, and then to me that sort of sets the mood, and I
• 24:34
  feel that's kind of the deal as we go forward, because da you think
• 24:38
  of a song like d o A Right, really simple, but it's all
• 24:42
  about the performance of that simple song. Just the weirdness of these players is
• 24:48
  starting to come out. You know, Alex is not weird at all on
• 24:52
  the debut album, but he's starting to even sound weird on the second album.
• 24:56
  And I do think the harmonies you hear them, they sound human,
• 25:00
  though they sound less like a machine, you know, women in love and
• 25:03
  stuff like that. Right, you're starting to hear two three distinct voices.
• 25:08
  It sounds like a bunch of high school kids, where on the debut it
• 25:12
  just sounds super professional. Yeah, always found that interesting, the choice of
• 25:18
  a lead track on Van Hillen two being Youre No Good, not a hard
• 25:21
  rocker, but instead that dark, ominous opening with the baseline from Mikey.
• 25:26
  I thought that was interesting. Now, Women and Children first, fair Warning.
• 25:32
  Most hardcore Van Helen fans will say fair Warning is the best, or
• 25:36
  certainly they would pick it over Women and Children first. Putting those two up
• 25:41
  against each other, which one would you choose? Yeah, It's so funny
• 25:45
  when you get a bunch of Van Halen fans together, how hard it is
• 25:48
  to pick a favorite album by this band, right, I mean everybody there
• 25:51
  are literally one, two, three, four five clear choices, and I
• 25:56
  often hear fifty one fifty from time to time as well. Right, But
• 26:02
  I find these records completely well, pretty much different from each other. There's
• 26:07
  one way they're similar. I think the way that they're similar is that this
• 26:11
  is now an eccentric band who will try anything. They'll they'll give you whatever
• 26:17
  kind of song. It can be very off the wall, so you get
• 26:19
  some off the wall songs on both albums. But I think I think Women
• 26:23
  and Children First is their noisiest, most chaotic, most who like most casual
• 26:30
  album. It's just just to it sounds like anarchy to me. You think
• 26:34
  a torah torah or loss of control, especially right everybody wants some. I
• 26:38
  mean there's so much just raw performance madness on that album. Yet Fair Warning
• 26:45
  is considered one where they worked on pretty hard to get everything right, and
• 26:49
  it sounds like it and it's it's again more professional and more tight and more
• 26:53
  conservatively produced, and that's the one that's considered the one that Eddie spent the
• 26:57
  most time on hours kind of thing. So I find those records completely different
• 27:03
  from each other except for the fact that they are They are weird people and
• 27:08
  they will write some weird songs along the way. Such an interesting time in
• 27:12
  Van hilln History nighte Didy Twos diver Down included a handful of cover songs.
• 27:18
  It's been panned by many because of that, fair or unfairs diver Down overlooked.
• 27:22
  Yeah, it's it's fair, you know. And Eddie, you know,
• 27:26
  it's credit to him for complaining about it and hating the idea of doing
• 27:30
  so many covers because you know, he was a musician, he's a writer,
• 27:33
  he's a creative person, right, so that that really bummed him out.
• 27:37
  No, it's it's not overlooked. I think it it gets its just
• 27:41
  due because it's short, just like all of them. So that's that's an
• 27:45
  annoying thing about it as well. I don't think the covers are particularly well
• 27:51
  done. I think Dancing in the Street is done in a very novel way.
• 27:53
  But I don't think where of All the Good Times Gone is so great?
• 27:56
  Pretty Woman's okay, I mean it's Van Hale and I at least,
• 28:00
  and you know, I don't think Hang Them High is a particularly amazing Van
• 28:07
  Halen's song. So when you get down to the very few originals, I've
• 28:11
  still got complaints. Little Guitars to me is a masterpiece. I love that
• 28:15
  song to death. It's one of my favorite songs they ever did. But
• 28:18
  yeah, you got big bad boys, sweet William now and happy Trails and
• 28:23
  just a lot of goofball goofing around, right, which is fine in the
• 28:27
  CD age if you're gonna give us a seventy minute album, But at twenty
• 28:33
  nine or thirty or whatever it is, it's like, No, I listened
• 28:37
  to the stripped down Hang Them High where you hear just Alex's drums. That's
• 28:41
  a great performance by al on drums on that song. Yeah, what's your
• 28:45
  opinion of Alex on drums during the day e in the Sami era he got
• 28:51
  better with time? Yeah, I would agree with that. It's kind of
• 28:55
  cool, cool idea. So one thing, you're right, I mean,
• 29:00
  he gets I think he gets more Alex like and he becomes more unique over
• 29:03
  time. But the thing I love a lot of things about about Alex's drummer,
• 29:08
  But what I love and what I tend to argue with people is that
• 29:12
  I think he's almost equally as much of the brown sound as Eddie is,
• 29:18
  right. I Mean people just talk about the effects and the guitars and the
• 29:22
  fingers and the tone and all that that that's supposed to be the brown sound.
• 29:25
  I think the brown sound is Alex and Eddie combined. I don't think
• 29:29
  there's anything brown sound about the bass or the vocals. But what I love
• 29:36
  about Alex is, yeah, he gets he gets more interesting and unique and
• 29:41
  obscure over time, but I think he gets more brown sound over time.
• 29:45
  So I think I love the production on fifty one fifty, and I think
• 29:51
  it's pretty cool on OU eight one too. But my favorite production of all
• 29:53
  of Van Halen's stuff is It's about Time and up for Breakfast When you get
• 29:59
  up into the those are so crushing and heavy and incredibly brown sound. And
• 30:04
  I think Eddie's Eddie's playing bass on both of those, pretty sure, but
• 30:10
  uh but yeah, I I just love those two songs. And also they're
• 30:12
  they're like down wound, you know, weird casual who like songs as well.
• 30:18
  They're they're like what I call underwritten songs, right or undercooked, but
• 30:22
  the performances are so incredible on it. That's that's one of the great magical
• 30:26
  things about Van Hill And is the performances, right, because the songwriting often
• 30:32
  isn't really there. Everybody Wants Some is barely written, Fools is barely written.
• 30:38
  You know, these da is barely written. So so, but what
• 30:44
  takes them over the top is Eddie and Alex and the backing vocals and Dave
• 30:49
  as a vocal you know, all of those guys working together take songs over
• 30:53
  the top, right. But yeah, I love Alex as a drummer.
• 30:56
  I love the double bass work, the double sound that he picts, the
• 31:02
  snare stuff, the the the constant shimmering, shining symbols all over the place
• 31:08
  when he does that thing. What he's doing during Eddie's solos I just find
• 31:12
  fascinating nowadays, I listened to I'd really tune. If you tune into what
• 31:18
  he's doing during Eddie solos, you're blown away by what he's doing. It's
• 31:22
  yeah, they they talked about it. Alan Ed talked about in an interview
• 31:26
  maybe ten years ago or so, just how there's that interplay between the two
• 31:30
  whenever Ed goes into the solo. You know, it just popped into my
• 31:33
  head. Is uh it's called in and Out right, there's a song called
• 31:37
  in and Out, In and Out from Unlawful Colonel Knowledge. So when he's
• 31:40
  doing that solo, the drums going on in the background are just thundering and
• 31:45
  bottom like, they're just so cool. And he's doing these you know,
• 31:48
  these big bass drum drops and that and what he does with the symbols,
• 31:52
  so yeah, he just he can fall into just just one of the most
• 31:55
  magnificent grooves that you can imagine. You mentioned I remember one time we talked
• 31:59
  about van Halen and you mentioned why can't this be loved not only being a
• 32:02
  just a great pop song, but a very it's a smart song musically smart,
• 32:07
  And I would say, like jump is that example too? Again,
• 32:08
  listen to what I was doing during the solo in there, and you're just
• 32:13
  you're hearing things that it's just not your standard straight ahead pop rock song.
• 32:16
  It's they're doing some things in there that are intricate and hey, preaching to
• 32:22
  the choir here, so exactly. You know, I really do not like
• 32:29
  most Van Halen ballads, and I don't think they are smart with the chord
• 32:31
  changes, they're modeling their hair metally. Don't like them at all, But
• 32:37
  why can't this be loved? Is just the perfect example of how to write
• 32:40
  a pop ballad, I think, and make it smart and accessible at the
• 32:44
  same time. Please everybody, right, Please the music nerds, you know,
• 32:46
  the clerk at the record store, and please the girls kind of thing.
• 32:52
  It's just so cool the way that the chords shift around, and it's
• 32:55
  up tempo and it's got buoyant, joyous drums on it. Stuff. But
• 33:00
  they can they can write a lot of crap too, like when love walks
• 33:02
  in, like those chords listening to it's just so much. It's just basically,
• 33:07
  you know, Diane Warren, Marty Free Fredrickson, Mark Hudson, Aerosmith,
• 33:14
  cheap trick the flame type stuff. I don't can's a good job of
• 33:16
  it for a lot of those can't stop loving you as one of those too,
• 33:20
  where like they even said to Eddie, we need to hit Okay,
• 33:22
  here you go, here's your here's your hit. Yeah yeah, I hear
• 33:24
  it. Yeah yeah. So we know how huge Nights in eighty four was
• 33:29
  and still is. Jump number one, Panamah for teacher. I'll wait all
• 33:31
  big singles. Yeah, I love Jump, but there are fins that were
• 33:35
  turned off by it, especially the ones who were older from from from the
• 33:39
  beginning, who were there when there were no keyboards. What was your initial
• 33:44
  reaction when you first heard Jump? It's funny, Yeah, that's a great
• 33:46
  question, because I remember hearing it either as an advanced single or didn't have
• 33:52
  the album yet, and I heard it on the radio something like that.
• 33:57
  Were you Were you a journalist at that time? Okay, no, that's
• 34:00
  literally that's nineteen eighty four, and I didn't start till ninety three, Okay,
• 34:06
  so long time later. So basically what I remember is that being an
• 34:14
  angry young metal head, it was shocking, but I liked it. I
• 34:19
  thought it was daring and creative, and I was just taken up by the
• 34:22
  enthusiasm of it, the joyous drumming in it, just the I thought they
• 34:29
  might as well. Jump line just went a little over the top. It
• 34:31
  was two on the nose about being giddy, but didn't really mind that keyboardiness
• 34:38
  to it. And then there was the guitar solo. The funny thing about
• 34:44
  that album is that I grew up for years kind of complaining about it.
• 34:49
  Again, still mad about the making short albums and it was such a hit
• 34:53
  album and everybody loved it, and I just remember being into heavier stuff and
• 34:59
  blah blah blah. But now when I go back, see when I when
• 35:01
  I have to pick a favorite van Halen album, I'm like, your typical
• 35:06
  you know, we're van Halen fans are notorious for being big complainers and belly
• 35:09
  acres about everything. No, really, absolutely, I say that sarcastically.
• 35:19
  But the funny thing is, I find myself falling into that that, you
• 35:24
  know, that domain when I try to pick my favorite van Halen album,
• 35:29
  because all I can think about is the things I don't like about everything,
• 35:34
  right. But but the weird thing that that happens is from time to time
• 35:37
  I've called nineteen eighty four in recent years my favorite van Halen album because Jump
• 35:44
  is great. Panama I never liked. To me, that is the epitome
• 35:49
  of the underwritten, undercook van Halen song. I just find it dull and
• 35:52
  casual. It sounds like a jam to me, right, Yeah, yet
• 35:55
  it's one of their biggest Yeah, it's interesting. I love drop Dead Legs,
• 36:00
  uh. I like top Jimmy a lot, Hot for Teacher, I
• 36:02
  was never crazy about, because that's when That's another complaint I have about van
• 36:07
  Halen is when they try the ott fast songs. There there's a there's an
• 36:15
  inhaling helium vibe about them, where where Eddie gets small and quiet and goes,
• 36:22
  you know, and get up is like that as well. So when
• 36:25
  they do these, you know, they never sound heavy. They went their
• 36:30
  fastest songs do not sound heavy, right, Other bands do fast songs heavier,
• 36:35
  So something about Hot for Teacher just seem too casual to tweet. But
• 36:40
  then the entire rest of the side are some of my favorite van Halen songs.
• 36:44
  I love all wait. Girl Gone Bad is absolutely tough for me,
• 36:49
  always always pain, and House of Pain's great. So when I look at
• 36:52
  that and I go, all right, they give us four songs plus plus
• 36:57
  nineteen eighty four intro, And I look at all four, all eight songs
• 37:01
  for on each side, and I'm going, I really quite like six of
• 37:06
  these, and that's that's almost like a better hit rate than most van Halen
• 37:09
  albums for me. So I love it, and and again I think,
• 37:15
  I think this is the uh, this is probably the greatest chemistry they ever
• 37:20
  had between those four players. Playing off of each other in a jazz like
• 37:24
  way. I think this is just the best, the best of those guys
• 37:29
  firing on all six, especially on something like Girl Got Dad, The book
• 37:34
  Done. Rock Podcasts will be back. After this, you get into the
• 37:38
  breakup of the original lineup. So I still wonder if Dave quit for good
• 37:44
  in his mind, because I feel like he he had to have assumed that
• 37:47
  the band wouldn't need him back by the end of the eighties. Like,
• 37:50
  I feel like that was in the back of his mind, So he don't
• 37:52
  I'm gonna leave do my thing, but what are they gonna do without me?
• 37:55
  So, yeah, what do you think about that? Do you think
• 37:59
  he really quit with the intention of quitting for good or did you think you
• 38:01
  think he was coming back? Yeah, there's a whole there's a whole little
• 38:05
  chapter, because there's like fifty chapters right there, all milestones. There's a
• 38:07
  whole breakdown of that whole timeline of what went on there and the communication going
• 38:13
  back and forth and messing up. And it almost reminds me a little bit
• 38:16
  of this the Kendrick Kendrick Lamar Drake beef that's going on right where it's like
• 38:24
  misfirings of little insinuations and subliminal messages back and forth. And was that a
• 38:31
  dig you know that kind of thing, And yeah, he obviously was.
• 38:36
  He had a massive ego and he's going off and he's doing this goofy covers
• 38:40
  EP, which is pretty embarrassing, and I don't think anybody liked it.
• 38:45
  So yeah, I don't know. I mean, getting Semi in is such.
• 38:49
  I mean, that's who they got in. I mean at one point,
• 38:52
  I guess this is later, but they almost got a female singer in,
• 38:55
  right, which Pattie Smith quite bizarre, right, Yeah, I think
• 39:00
  they checked out somebody did They said, check Jordan, you're right, Yeah,
• 39:05
  but uh but yeah, I don't know. It's it's such a weird
• 39:08
  thing getting this guy in that had had a he was a midside that that's
• 39:14
  kind of the guy you would you would as a fan want to bring in.
• 39:17
  You want to bring someone in who's of a certain stature. And and
• 39:21
  Sammy was, you know, he's making platinum, gold albums at that point,
• 39:23
  you know, he was. He was a fair bit of a star,
• 39:25
  right, and he had certain pockets like Saint Louis where he'd be a
• 39:30
  headliner and a hockey barn and stuff like that. Right, So although he
• 39:34
  would tell you he was just as successful as Van Halen, he would tell
• 39:37
  you that yeah, yeah, rights, and he'd say, you know,
• 39:43
  his his version of Van Hale, and he'd he'd be careful to site the
• 39:46
  number one albums and all that stuff, when when you know, conveniently forgetting
• 39:51
  that there's two Diamond albums of the previous era. Right, Yeah, that's
• 39:55
  all. I love Sammy. I love both Dave and Sammy, So this
• 39:59
  is interesting. I saw an article from Matthew Wilkining on Ultimate Classic Rock headline,
• 40:04
  did David Lee Roth help write songs for Van Halen's fifty one fifty?
• 40:07
  And I pulled some of the article here because I find this really interesting because
• 40:12
  I know good Enough and Summer Nights were written for Dave, but they quote
• 40:16
  Dave from a nineteen ninety three Howard Certain interview where Dave says, quote,
• 40:20
  I wrote half of those melodies on fifty one to fifty the album. Half
• 40:24
  of those vocal moves and everything were already done on little demo tapes. What
• 40:30
  do you make of that? I've never heard anybody referred to as vocal moves,
• 40:34
  But that's only Dave could come up with something like that. But yeah,
• 40:37
  I is there something out there with Dave's vocals on it? You know?
• 40:42
  Is it that that would be amazing to listen to? Well, first
• 40:45
  off, let's say that that album is notorious for having underwritten, undercooked songs
• 40:52
  like good Enough is barely there, Best of Both Worlds is barely there.
• 40:55
  Summer Nights it's pretty cool, but in some respect it's barely there. There's
• 41:00
  barely any good lyrics, and there's not a lot of good vocal melodies.
• 41:06
  There's just a lot of Sammy jamming vocal jamming. Right, So whatever Dave
• 41:12
  said he wrote, you know, and when he says I wrote those melodies,
• 41:15
  of course he's definitely referring to vocal melodies. And it is not an
• 41:20
  album of ambitious vocal melodies as far as I can remember, I'm playing the
• 41:23
  songs in my head as we're as we're talking here, And do you really
• 41:28
  think Sammy's gonna come in and ape Dave's vocal melodies number one? Number one?
• 41:37
  Like I say, they're barely there, and I don't think there were
• 41:39
  many because Dave. Dave is a wild man too. Dave and Sammy are
• 41:43
  both wild man or or put it this way, Dave's more of a wild
• 41:47
  man when it comes to live, but on that album, Sammy's a wild
• 41:51
  man, like he's He's just all over the place, just goofing around.
• 41:53
  Right. So that really always did kind of bother me and bothered Eddie,
• 41:58
  It bothered the band, and I think it was was part of the rift
• 42:01
  between those guys, is like sam come on, man, put in some
• 42:05
  hours, put on put in some work on this stuff, right, which
• 42:07
  he would do from time to time, you know, right now, songs
• 42:10
  like that he would do. There's just some you know, and then he
• 42:13
  had his moments where you're just thinking, what, yeah, did you how
• 42:15
  much time did you put into the lyrics? Yeah? Yeah, But this
• 42:19
  song like good enough when that breakdown where Sammy's you know, hey waitress,
• 42:22
  come here man, you know that's that you could see was written for Dave.
• 42:25
  You know, that's that breakdown part where Dave would do his spoken word
• 42:30
  thing saying something funny or hey, you know I love the way the line
• 42:32
  goes up the back of your socket. That was the moment. I think
• 42:36
  that song to me is the most Dave. Yeah, but I think that's
• 42:39
  in Sammy's nature too. And Sammy is a smart guy too. He would
• 42:44
  have it in the back of his mind to act a little bit like Dave,
• 42:47
  right, Yeah, and you know he's coming into this situation. He's
• 42:51
  on top of the world, right. His his solo career, no pun
• 42:52
  intended, and yeah, his solo career was in great shape at that point.
• 42:58
  I know that whole story because I I, you know, ghost wrote
• 43:00
  with helped you know, interviewed and then basically wrote with Bill Church his biography,
• 43:07
  right, and I know that whole story of Farmade and what went on
• 43:09
  went down there. Yeah, crazy, Yeah, I love those the two
• 43:13
  or with the two to three albums Sammy had out before joining Van Hill and
• 43:16
  Standing Hampton. Uh the away, Uh, I'm joining a blank three lock
• 43:22
  Box three lock Box is there? Yeah, yeah, and you know they're
• 43:27
  very three lock Box and Standing Hampton are so similar to me in that they
• 43:31
  are absolutely in that Midwest rock heavy John Mellencamp heavy Brian Adams sort of zone.
• 43:37
  Right. There's there's no thinking like a heavy metal person there. It's
• 43:42
  just like I'm gonna walk a little on the wild side and inject a little
• 43:45
  guitar into these songs, but there's some great songs on there, and uh
• 43:50
  yeah, you you hear that that side of Sammy, that talented side of
• 43:53
  Sammy as a as a great Heartland rock writer, right, amazing vocalist.
• 44:00
  Just add a little bit more from that story from Matthew Wilkining. They also
• 44:04
  have a quote from Dave. This is from his book. It had been
• 44:07
  easier for them to put a new album together because I had worked with Edward
• 44:09
  on half of that album already. They brought in a new singer, went
• 44:13
  right to all those old tapes and started with that as their go point,
• 44:16
  so it was much easier for them to reconstruct. All right, Well that
• 44:21
  okay? I mean I think about Oh You Ate one two, and it
• 44:25
  does sound like an album where they start from scratch, right, I mean,
• 44:29
  those songs don't sound like anything that ed had already pre planned. Eat
• 44:35
  Thy Neighbor was another song that's in the Van Hill Encyclopedia. They list Eat
• 44:38
  Thy Neighbor as an unfinished, unreleased original song. Let's See It also notes
• 44:45
  that there's rumored to be an alternative version of fifty and fifty Summer Nights with
• 44:50
  Roth written lyrics, and states that Eddie had just begun to write dreams when
• 44:54
  when Roth left the band. Yeah, okay, good Here's what Hey says
• 45:00
  in his book. They had what became Summer Nights and what became good Enough.
• 45:04
  We started playing and the engineer Don Landy recorded everything we did. I
• 45:07
  made up the first line on the spot Summer Nights in my radio. I
• 45:09
  just it just popped into my head the first time I heard that riff.
• 45:12
  The rest of the song, I just scattered my way through. He did
• 45:15
  the same with good Enough. Well, yeah, maybe someday if they opened
• 45:20
  those vaults. How many times wove we said that, maybe someday. I
• 45:24
  found it interesting. In the chapter in fifty one to fifty from your book
• 45:27
  Hitting Number One, the band's first album to go number one, you talk
• 45:30
  about how other bands from the Old Guard like Kiss, Judas Priest, ACDC
• 45:35
  Scorpions couldn't match the success of Vane Hill and with Sammy. So that leads
• 45:38
  to something I've been thinking about recently. Did Sammy come along at just the
• 45:43
  right time? I brought this up earlier, you know, with the bad
• 45:45
  with the ballads and the big power ballads that that's Van Hill was huge with
• 45:50
  the power ballads. What do you think about Sammy joining when he did?
• 45:53
  Yeah, so he's coming in as a superstar. But you're right, I
• 45:55
  mean, Dave wasn't gonna write those kinds of songs. Maybe the band would
• 45:59
  have ever come up with those kinds of songs, uh, and and Dave
• 46:02
  would have would have felt embarrassed writing them. But they had this new thing
• 46:07
  in their toolbox. You know. It's it's almost like, you know,
• 46:13
  it's it's super hard to replace your singer, and often it's it doesn't work.
• 46:19
  But sometimes, you know, the one silver lining of that with a
• 46:22
  big band is that it could be a really incredible story. Right. So
• 46:25
  you know Ronnie James Deal coming into Black Sabbath was a big story. People
• 46:30
  were excited about it, right, and so yeah he comes in. This
• 46:35
  is uh, this is uh. Three years into the hair metal thing,
• 46:39
  it's starting to codify. There's starting to be more rules about it. MTV
• 46:45
  is even more powerful. MTV has been going for five years. The power
• 46:50
  ballads a big thing. The big massive video is a big thing. So
• 46:53
  yeah, they dive in and and do all that. You know, Van
• 46:58
  Halen, when you can compare them to all the seventies bands, they're just
• 47:01
  they just came in. Everything they did was it was weird timing. It's
• 47:07
  just odd having the saviors of heavy metal show up in nineteen seventy eight and
• 47:12
  basically a hair hair metal band show up in nineteen seventy eight, five years
• 47:15
  before hair metal. And they'll have five albums out before hair metal starts,
• 47:20
  right, you know. Motley Crue even comes in a little early, right,
• 47:23
  So so there, and they're American and they're from that town, so
• 47:30
  they're they're perfectly poised to do okay when when this happens. But you're right,
• 47:35
  I guess I get it. I guess it is a you know,
• 47:37
  a case of perfect timing. Yeah. Martin Popoff is the author of Van
• 47:42
  Heilen at fifty. You can grab a copy at the Vane Helen Store Vanhilenstore
• 47:45
  dot com. Also make sure you visit Martin's website Martin Popoff dot com.
• 47:51
  Lots of good stuff there. One part of this book is one that'll get
• 47:54
  some debates fired up. And your rankings on the Van Hilen album covers.
• 48:00
  And I was happy to see fifty one fifty towards the top at number three
• 48:02
  because I've always loved that cover, although I've heard some people say they hated
• 48:05
  it. So I've heard people criticize that one nobody criticized criticizes the nineteen eighty
• 48:09
  four's album cover. That's a beauty and that's your number one Tokyo Dome Live
• 48:14
  and concert at the bottom. So I'm curious as to how you went about
• 48:16
  ranking these, Like, is this just an instant vibe thing? Are you
• 48:20
  looking for certain things in a good album cover that helps you come up with
• 48:22
  the ranking? My god, yeah, van Halen. I always you know,
• 48:25
  if someone says, oh, who makes the worst album covers? Like
• 48:29
  instantly to mind pop bands like ACDC, def Leopard, Foreigner, Van Halen,
• 48:35
  right, and we know it's I don't know if it's right from the
• 48:38
  beginning or whenever this started, but it became Alex's domain. Basically he's kind
• 48:45
  of running that show. Yeah. I just I just think in most cases
• 48:47
  they come up with pretty pretty crappy album covers. There's a little humor there,
• 48:52
  you know. And an odd way to look at it, though,
• 48:57
  is that you think of band name like the Police and the Cars, right,
• 49:02
  horrible horrible band names, but the legend that those bands spun became so
• 49:08
  big that you don't think of cars or police anymore. You think of you
• 49:13
  know, they they take over the name kind of thing, right, So
• 49:17
  Van Halen album covers they become iconic because how massively massively huge this band is.
• 49:25
  So, you know, something weird like Van Halen two or Women and
• 49:30
  Children first with an inset little picture and I never liked that picture because I
• 49:36
  think Eddie looks like he has mutton chops. And you always reminded me of
• 49:39
  the guy from the Groundhogs Tony m on that album cover. Right, I
• 49:45
  got two framed, right, I got fifteen fifty and two framed in my
• 49:49
  office here. Yeah yeah, and uh yeah two two just drove us nuts.
• 49:52
  You just look logo, Yeah, like what is this? Right?
• 49:55
  So, but but you think there's something about there's something showing like uh,
• 50:04
  star status or confidence or we're not like other people. We can just do
• 50:08
  what we want. We don't have to do a fancy album cover. The
• 50:12
  music will speak for itself kind of thing, right, But then then you
• 50:16
  think, you know, are they being visionary in that In future days album
• 50:22
  covers will will shrink to five by five and then they'll shrink to a little
• 50:24
  thumbnail on Spotify or whatever, right, so so you know they're there.
• 50:30
  It turned out to be kind of a good idea to have these these really
• 50:32
  simple album covers. But yeah, black and white photography and uh you know,
• 50:37
  but yeah, you think of Tokyo Dome Live. I I can't remember
• 50:42
  the way I I phrased it there, but it's like, what is the
• 50:45
  name of this album? Is it? Van Halen Live, Tokyo Live,
• 50:50
  Jam, Tokyo Live in Tokyo, dash where we go? Nicole and I
• 50:57
  just read it. The assembly of the parts looks like a five minute job
• 51:00
  by some kid with only a casual relationship with a PC's provided stock graphics program.
• 51:05
  And good luck giving the record a name. It's title buried somewhere within
• 51:08
  the consecutive reading all caps and horrible, horrible of font VH Live Nhill in
• 51:15
  Tokyo Dome VH and concert sixteen. Really it is the very at the bottom
• 51:19
  sixteen. What what if they you know here, I boy, my what
• 51:22
  ifs? What if they had like a storm Thorgerson, you know, did
• 51:25
  all those Pink Floyd album covers or who's the guy who's the guy that did
• 51:30
  all the the Asia covers and oh yeah, Roger Dean, Roger Dean,
• 51:36
  Yeah, you know, it's that's a really interesting question because I find,
• 51:39
  uh, to me, the biggest example of what I'm about to say is
• 51:44
  a CDC Back in Black, where the music on that record is such a
• 51:49
  party and yet the cover is so dour and dark and doomy. Right,
• 51:53
  it's like the biggest incongruity between you know, what's on the record. So
• 51:59
  yeah, with then, hey, you would you would probably if they had
• 52:01
  meticulous, really cool, studied, expensive looking album covers, you would probably
• 52:07
  you know, uh, consider the music enclosed slightly more ambitious as well,
• 52:14
  maybe add another five hundred thousand sales if they had a Yeah, A good
• 52:17
  point, because in those days, that's that's what would lead to you buying
• 52:21
  an album. A lot of times, you don't know. Yeah, they
• 52:23
  say that and it's a theory and it makes sense. But but we know,
• 52:27
  we know so many amazing, amazing albums that that have gold, that
• 52:31
  have gone diamond and double diamond that had terrible album covers. So I wonder
• 52:36
  if in practice it really doesn't make much difference, right Yeah, Yeah,
• 52:39
  so oh you went two. You're a fan of that album, right,
• 52:43
  Mine? All Mine is when you've talked about I'm not a huge fan of
• 52:45
  that album, I love Mine all Mind. To me, that's a masterpiece.
• 52:50
  That's the best song on it, but the rest of it is is
• 52:52
  still pretty lazy. Van Haal and I think they really pick it up with
• 52:54
  fourign Lawful Cardinal maw Okay, yeah, but I love that you love Mine
• 52:58
  all Mind because that I can can't get enough of that song. And and
• 53:01
  when they did it live on the Balance tour, they did a great job
• 53:04
  within on the big video screens and surfer dude, you know, because it
• 53:07
  is kind of like a surfer tune. And and credit to Sammy on the
• 53:12
  lyrics. You got to give him, got to give him that on the
• 53:15
  lyrics, right, And but he even he admits on I think it's a
• 53:21
  if You Naturally Wired, or there's one of the songs where he just he
• 53:25
  just he regrets the lyrics. He just slapped him on there. It was
• 53:29
  like source of infections. So that's the one. I think, Yeah,
• 53:31
  I think I think that's the one. But so he admits it. Yeah,
• 53:37
  there's there's a yeah, and it's again they're still making fairly short albums.
• 53:42
  I think I I I can't remember how long it is, but it's
• 53:44
  not it's not crazy long, it's not crazy heavy. It's uh, yes,
• 53:49
  it's very casual. But I think I think they you know, I
• 53:52
  I I always consider for unlawful cardinal knowledge. One of my podcast episodes was
• 53:57
  called go to Vancouver and Try Harder, Uh, where all the bands,
• 54:00
  like when grunge was coming in, it was really creative and cool and heavy,
• 54:04
  and it's like, wow, this is really these guys are making some
• 54:06
  good music here. Most of the hair metal bands decided like we we got
• 54:10
  to really step up and do a a a Doctor feel Good or a Kiss
• 54:17
  Revenge or you know, mister big albums or love hate albums or use your
• 54:22
  illusion albums, where Uh and Van Halen did kind of the same thing.
• 54:28
  You know, there's not there's not the the Vancouver component in the in the
• 54:31
  way that Scorpions or White Snake or bon Jove, you know, go Bruce
• 54:35
  Fairburn and all that kind of stuff. But what they did is they made
• 54:37
  a long album, a heavy album, an ambitious album. Sammy's working hard
• 54:42
  on it. It's got huge bottom end. To me, it's not a
• 54:45
  brown sound album. Particularly. I think I think it's more of a traditional
• 54:50
  conservative, sober production, just a good quality, muscular production job. But
• 54:55
  they're but the but it loses some of the uh the the who like looseness
• 55:00
  and casualness of the last few albums. I always say Judgment Day is my
• 55:05
  favorite deep track from that album. Here's a standout song for me, and
• 55:09
  right now is that because it wasn't a huge hit when it was released on
• 55:15
  the radio, but then it gets into heavy rotation. MTV wins the award
• 55:20
  for Best Video and all these years later it gets more airplay than songs that
• 55:28
  were bigger hits. Then poundk Ake, Top of the World went around.
• 55:30
  Right, has that ever happened before? Since a video? Actually, which
• 55:35
  song you talk about? Right right now? I'm sorry, right now?
• 55:38
  That's interesting to me. The video itself helped to give the song, which
• 55:45
  wasn't a huge hit at the time, staying power. It's to this day
• 55:49
  now still played. Yeah, that's the power of video. And this is
• 55:52
  van Halen doing something socially conscious which wasn't you know, particularly associated with them,
• 55:59
  and you know it's it's moving away from the standard hair metal tropes of
• 56:05
  you know, live performance, black and white, slow throw your hair and
• 56:08
  the sweat flies, you know, reaching out to shake, you know,
• 56:13
  someone's hand in the crowd and all all those things, right it it was
• 56:15
  it was just an artful video to an artful song. Uh. It was
• 56:21
  a daring, oddly arranged song. It was a ballad but it was up
• 56:24
  tempo, but it was political, so that was really cool about it.
• 56:30
  But yeah, it's uh, you know, video video helped bands in various
• 56:34
  ways, and in this case, uh, you know, there was a
• 56:37
  lot of talk about the video because it made the song even more socially conscious.
• 56:39
  It it really galvanized, uh, you know, underscored. Uh,
• 56:45
  it's its identity as that. Yeah. You do mention dave solo albums in
• 56:50
  the book, which I think it's a smart move because it is part of
• 56:54
  Van hill In history. It's like it's always in the discussion of Dave's solo
• 56:58
  work, especially those first two albums, Eat Him and Smile on Skyscraper.
• 57:01
  It's like Van Halen fans couldn't help but put it up against what Van Haleen
• 57:07
  was doing with Sammy was. Yeah, well, Dave's output there in the
• 57:10
  in the early years, solo work Eat Him and Smile. You're a fan
• 57:14
  of Skyscraper. Yeah, it's I'm not a huge fan of either of them,
• 57:19
  but I love Heena off of the second one, and I love sort
• 57:23
  of the aesthetic of Skyscraper. I you know, obviously what he was doing
• 57:30
  was very amusing because it was essentially van Halen on cocaine or van Halen on
• 57:36
  steroids, right, I mean everything about it, the visuals, the speeds,
• 57:39
  the drummer, the guitarist, every everything had it. You know,
• 57:44
  the bass player. He literally was saying, I'm gonna build I'm gonna build
• 57:50
  a robot to replace each of these guys and bring them into this band,
• 57:53
  and we're going to be the wild you know, the wild six million dollar
• 57:59
  man version of van Halen. Right, But no, I don't think it
• 58:01
  worked very well. He had the same problem as van Halen did when it
• 58:06
  came to the Ott songs, the fast songs and them not sounding heavy.
• 58:10
  No. I I think all the way back to Ted Nugent Light My Way
• 58:14
  on Free for All when I think of songs like that, right yeah,
• 58:17
  or no, turn it up, sorry, turn it up, not like
• 58:20
  My Way, turn it up, turn and up, turn it loud?
• 58:22
  And hell did it it? Did it? You know? It's it's a
• 58:23
  speed metal song, but it sounds like a pop song, right, And
• 58:28
  so Van Halen's heavy speed metal songs were like that too, and so we're
• 58:31
  David Lee roths So, but I liked I liked the aesthetic of the second
• 58:36
  one. The second one was so kind of airy and atmospheric and not heavy
• 58:42
  and up in that helium zone all the time. You know, the gaps
• 58:46
  weren't filled in, it had no bottom end. It's very weird. It
• 58:51
  was it had personality, and where the first one didn't have personality. It
• 58:54
  was like, yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna make this commercial, weird version
• 58:58
  of Van Halen the book Down Rock Podcast. We'll be back after this,
• 59:04
  after that last album with Sammy ninety five's balanced Obviously, things were never the
• 59:07
  same. Van Helen three from ninety eight Gary Sharon didn't work. The failed
• 59:10
  attempt at reuniting with David ninety six that came before Van Haalen three, Eddie
• 59:16
  diagnosed with cancer and on one his substance abuse struggles get worse dark Time,
• 59:21
  which led to that Sammy Hagar David the roths Tor in two thousand and two,
• 59:24
  and that's in your book and the guys figured if Ed's not going to
• 59:29
  do anything, we will, And it's one of the fifty milestone moments in
• 59:32
  the book. While Dave went Vanhilln heavy on the set list, Sammy didn't.
• 59:37
  He mixed in VH songs with his solo stuff, which I didn't think
• 59:40
  it was a good move. What are your thoughts on that tour and Sammy's
• 59:43
  setlist. You're not a big concert guy, I know that, but look
• 59:45
  you got it from you know, would you have put together that set list
• 59:51
  if you're Sammy on that particular tour. That's Sammy, you know, uh,
• 59:54
  marking his territory saying I'm a legitimate artist on my own song are as
• 1:00:00
  big as the Van Halen songs, right, And the fact of the matter
• 1:00:04
  is most of Dave's songs have more legendary status than the Sammy songs anyways,
• 1:00:08
  So you've got you know, if you want to make a hierarchy, it's
• 1:00:13
  like Dave songs are the iconic songs. Sam songs are the next layer down
• 1:00:17
  Sam's Van Halen songs. But then but then Sam has a pretty creditable lower
• 1:00:22
  tier, that third tier that he can bring some of those songs into it.
• 1:00:27
  So it's basically him saying, you know, I'm more than Van Halen.
• 1:00:30
  I'm the mature guy. I'm the adult in the room here. I
• 1:00:35
  have a career outside of this. I don't need to be doing this.
• 1:00:37
  Look, look, listen to my songs from my solo career kind of thing.
• 1:00:40
  But yeah, that was that just played out the way that you thought
• 1:00:44
  it would play out, right, And you know, it's two it's two
• 1:00:49
  egos going up against each other. But Sammy's a sensible guy as well,
• 1:00:53
  right, So Sammy's got the ego and he's also got the passive aggressiveness,
• 1:01:00
  right, And that's just fire throwing, you know, that's just gasoline thrown
• 1:01:04
  on the flame of these two egos going up. And Dave's Dave's crazy essentially
• 1:01:09
  in terms of like his demands and his his ego and the bodyguards and all
• 1:01:13
  that stuff. And then Sammy would take shots at that. It's really funny,
• 1:01:16
  right, but sam knocking on the door diamond, he called him diamond
• 1:01:22
  knocking a diamond, you coming out funny? Yeah, And then of course
• 1:01:27
  Dave, Dave probably would have done a better job had he had you know,
• 1:01:31
  more famous players in his band, too, right, Like like bring
• 1:01:35
  bring your iconic lineup from the from eat Him and Smile or something. Right,
• 1:01:38
  you're talking about the passive aggressive. When they were coming through Connecticut and
• 1:01:44
  the station radio station I was working at, I was gonna interview Sammy.
• 1:01:46
  It's like yes, and uh. I came in that morning program directions.
• 1:01:52
  Sammy's not doing it, and I thought he's pulling my legs. Get out
• 1:01:55
  of here. I mean, no, he's not. I said, why
• 1:01:59
  he said? The manager told me that Sammy's tired of Dave not doing any
• 1:02:02
  of the interviews, so he's gonna stick it to Dave and he's gonna he's
• 1:02:05
  not gonna do any more interviews. I'm like, oh, great, thanks.
• 1:02:10
  So I never got to talk to Sammy on that. That was at
• 1:02:13
  the That was towards the end. That was like right before I think they
• 1:02:15
  were going to do the Connecticut would have been right, maybe only a handful
• 1:02:19
  show was left at the time. Those two guys, man, those two
• 1:02:22
  guys, Hey, you know, I don't I don't want to breeze over
• 1:02:24
  Van Hillen three because I think it's fascinating that. And you were on John
• 1:02:28
  Lambro's podcast at least once or if not twice or more. Uh, that's
• 1:02:32
  the Hustle podcast and Mike Post was on, and he told John Lamoreau that,
• 1:02:38
  as far as it sounded, Mike Post is saying that ed played all
• 1:02:42
  the drums on Van Hillen three like that, that that Alex was going through
• 1:02:45
  a difficult divorce, was drinking again. Edie wasn't happy with with Alex's performance,
• 1:02:52
  and he went to Mike Post and said, Mike, I don't know
• 1:02:53
  what to do here. I love Al, he's my brother, but he's
• 1:02:57
  he's not cutting it. And Mike Post said, don't worry, I'll take
• 1:03:01
  care of it. I don't know. Did you have you heard this too?
• 1:03:02
  I mean I I because yeah. So he calls Al and he says,
• 1:03:08
  Al, let's meet. So he purposely meets Al outside, not inside.
• 1:03:13
  I don't know. I guess maybe he was afraid Alex would have bound
• 1:03:15
  him off all the walls if he told him, you're not playing drums on
• 1:03:17
  this album. But he basically said that to Alex, like, look,
• 1:03:21
  this is your little brother. He's sober, he wants to make this album,
• 1:03:23
  this is his thing. Let him play drums right now. You're not
• 1:03:27
  You're not cutting it. And Alex said, Okay, that's pretty mind blowing.
• 1:03:31
  I don't think that. I don't think Mike plays any bass on that
• 1:03:35
  album. I think, uh, and you don't hear his You don't hear
• 1:03:38
  his his backing vocals either. And and Mike post said, look, my
• 1:03:44
  job on that and that album. I was just there to oversee things.
• 1:03:47
  This was ed Ed's thing Ed was and he confirmed Mike posted that Mike went
• 1:03:52
  to Gary Shoran and said, sing it this way. I want you to
• 1:03:57
  sing this, Sing it this way, sing it that way. Do that.
• 1:04:00
  That's what everybody suspected because it sounded like Eric was not really in his
• 1:04:04
  in his comfort zone there. It sounded like he was doing exactly whatever he
• 1:04:08
  wanted him to do. So what do you think of that? Forty Yeah,
• 1:04:13
  yeah, that's that's a situation where they bring in a singer exactly the
• 1:04:15
  same way that they brought in Sammy Hagor. You bring in somebody with stature
• 1:04:19
  already who's who's respected in the industry. But it didn't work because number one,
• 1:04:26
  everybody's very cognizant of the East Coast versus West Coast vibe. Gary's a
• 1:04:30
  very different person. He doesn't doesn't really fit into that whole thing. He
• 1:04:34
  was already kind of a more thoughtful, in intellectual type lyricist a little bit,
• 1:04:43
  or at least as a person, he was that way. And you
• 1:04:45
  can definitely hear. You know, we all we we all heard when we
• 1:04:47
  heard that album, we thought, al he's sounding you know, he's trying
• 1:04:50
  to sound like Sammy by putting in a little more vocal fry into his voice
• 1:04:56
  and trying trying to act like the the frat boy kind of thing a little
• 1:05:00
  bit, right. So yeah, it's, uh, it didn't seem like
• 1:05:03
  a and you know this all happens because, uh because they're both managed by
• 1:05:06
  Ray Daniels out of Toronto, where I am right right that whole situation.
• 1:05:11
  So they're getting put together for that reason. So I mean it's it seemed
• 1:05:15
  like an exciting thing on paper, but uh, yeah, I I never
• 1:05:18
  liked this. You know, as deep fans, you you do know,
• 1:05:23
  uh, you you want your band to seem like a gang. And uh,
• 1:05:28
  you know, when you when you're grabbing a guy from a completely different
• 1:05:30
  country or continent and stuff, you know they're not living together and and all
• 1:05:34
  that. You know, this lead singer, it's an important thing, Uh,
• 1:05:39
  you know, Ripper Owen's coming into Priest. It's just like this guy's
• 1:05:42
  from Ohio. Like it just it bothers you, right, these these moves
• 1:05:45
  right, So yeah, it it just never it just never felt right.
• 1:05:49
  Yeah. Mike Post, by the way, the producer of Inhill and three
• 1:05:51
  for those who may not be where he was, and he was brought in
• 1:05:55
  because he wasn't a guy who drank into drugs, so and he wanted him
• 1:05:58
  to produce because of that. You want a guy who's going to influence him.
• 1:06:01
  Interesting stuff from that interview. Sammy did come back in four for that
• 1:06:06
  tour to support a double best of with the three new songs couple you mentioned,
• 1:06:11
  but he was out soon after and then we get Dave back for that
• 1:06:15
  seven tour. Wolfy on bass. One of the milestone moments in the book
• 1:06:17
  twenty twelve is a different kind of truth. You call it quote the shocking
• 1:06:20
  last album. What's more shocking to you the fact that they actually were able
• 1:06:26
  to complete it or that it was so damn good. Yeah, that's that
• 1:06:31
  was really shocking because you don't expect you know, these guys are massive superstars.
• 1:06:38
  They've been that way for a long time. They've done a lot of
• 1:06:41
  music that wasn't particularly heavy over the years. They're from California. You've got
• 1:06:45
  a lot of people yapping in their ear. It's a lot of different people
• 1:06:48
  that don't uh, not a lot of people yeah, yeppen in there.
• 1:06:51
  I guess they could put out whatever they want. I suppose, but you
• 1:06:55
  know, guys pulling in different directions expect There are some situations where this has
• 1:07:03
  happened, where you got a really heavy album out of a band. But
• 1:07:06
  in this case, you didn't expect Eddie to be such a metalhead, right.
• 1:07:11
  You didn't expect and to be this much of a heavy guy. Right,
• 1:07:15
  Even if Eddie was going to have, you know, complete control over
• 1:07:17
  the vision of it, there was no There's no reason not to think it
• 1:07:23
  would be keyboardy and there'd be some pop and you'd do some experimentation, there'd
• 1:07:27
  be some atmospheric stuff like like Gone three. But no, we got it,
• 1:07:31
  got a really headbang an album, and we got an album that was
• 1:07:35
  recorded like a heavy metal album. It wasn't particularly brown sound, it was
• 1:07:40
  enough brown sound, but it was heavy enough where the guitars were so upfront
• 1:07:44
  and correct bottom end on the drums and all that stuff that it just sounded.
• 1:07:47
  It sounded a little conservative, right. Basically, you take the debut,
• 1:07:51
  you take for unlawful carnal knowledge, you take different kind of truth.
• 1:07:56
  Though. I think those are the three most conservative albums they had from a
• 1:08:00
  production standpoint. So it was super heavy. Yeah, I don't know,
• 1:08:03
  I don't know. I mean, am I surprised that they could get together
• 1:08:06
  and finish it? I don't. I don't know about that. I'm I'm
• 1:08:09
  almost more surprised that these guys can't get together and get it get it out
• 1:08:13
  finished. It's like, what else do you got to do there? There
• 1:08:15
  should be more music, you would think, right, But uh, yeah,
• 1:08:19
  I was surprised how heavy it was, you know, I I like
• 1:08:23
  it quite a lot. It might the blue might have come off a little
• 1:08:26
  bit. I notice, I've always liked it a lot more than a lot
• 1:08:29
  of people. There's a lot of people that don't like it a lot,
• 1:08:30
  which I'm which I'm surprised. I thought everybody would have loved it because it
• 1:08:34
  was just so heavy and uncompromising. Right. But on a few of the
• 1:08:39
  songs you can hear that they are from the seventies. What's a trouble,
• 1:08:45
  Big trouble is that. Oh, that's the trouble with Never, Trouble with
• 1:08:49
  Never, And there's another one. I got the track listing in front of
• 1:08:53
  me here, I'll tell you which ones. And John Shanks, the producer,
• 1:08:57
  we should mention too. He's the one who produce. So let's see
• 1:09:00
  track listing. Tattoos. She's the woman, you and your blues, China
• 1:09:01
  Town, He's the woman definitely China, Blood and Fire, bullet Head,
• 1:09:08
  as is Honey Baby Sweety, all the trouble with Never, Yeah, trouble
• 1:09:12
  with Never, out of space, stay frosty, Big River, Big River
• 1:09:16
  definitely sounds like it's old, right, so some of them sound like a
• 1:09:20
  little bit of that of that bar band from from seventy five or whatever.
• 1:09:26
  And then the you know, the other thing that is a little bit annoying
• 1:09:30
  about it is Dave is really over the top with his davisms, right,
• 1:09:33
  He's like way into his shtick his personality on here, Like he's just wise
• 1:09:39
  cracking, throwing out one liners all over the place right here tonight. He
• 1:09:44
  puts into blood and Fire. Yeah, but yeah, I think I think
• 1:09:48
  it's uh, there's a lot of explosive playing from Day, from Eddie and
• 1:09:54
  from Alex. A lot of great Drummond on there as well. It's long,
• 1:09:57
  it's ambitious, there's a lot of prising, interesting music on it,
• 1:10:00
  but it's all in a heavy zone, right. They're surprising heavy, you
• 1:10:04
  know, creative music, but it's all heavy metal kind of thing. So
• 1:10:09
  that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool about it that this would be the last
• 1:10:12
  album. It was totally unexpected. Gonna wind down with a question at each
• 1:10:15
  passing. But just first I did get a chance to see this behind the
• 1:10:21
  music MTV Behind the music on Wolfgang. It's an emotional watch. Have you
• 1:10:26
  seen it? No, I haven't seen it yet. I've heard good things
• 1:10:29
  about it. Oh, but answer it answers a lot of questions as to
• 1:10:31
  something that you had mentioned, is how they couldn't get together, how they
• 1:10:34
  couldn't make things happen for so long, because after Van Hillen three there was
• 1:10:38
  very little activity. And really, really the primary reason is is Ed was
• 1:10:42
  getting deeper into his substance abuse problems to the point where he just didn't care.
• 1:10:48
  And it was Wolfe that really saved them, and it was Wolfiy that
• 1:10:51
  brought him back out. We wouldn't even have had a different kind of truth
• 1:10:55
  or those tours without Wolfgang. And Wolfgang addresses the fact that a lot of
• 1:10:59
  the Vanhill and diehards were criticizing him, saying, you didn't get the only
• 1:11:01
  the only reason you got this job is because your dad, and you're never
• 1:11:04
  You're never gonna be as good as your dad, on and on and on
• 1:11:08
  and on. He heard it, and his comment was, look, I
• 1:11:11
  get it, you guys wanted Mikey there my but my job was to keep
• 1:11:16
  my dad alive. That was the only reason that Eddie came back. And
• 1:11:26
  like Valerie Burtnelli says, she says, I have never seen another human being
• 1:11:30
  love another human being the way he loved Wolfgang. And you could see it.
• 1:11:34
  I mean you could, like you know, you've been following Eddie for
• 1:11:39
  for a long time. That smile on his face when he played guitar was
• 1:11:42
  real. But then like when he's with Wolfgang, it's a difference, but
• 1:11:45
  it's like it's like he was just glowing. It was like he he he
• 1:11:48
  saved his He actually saved him because he probably Eddie would have been gone in
• 1:11:53
  O seven. He said, it went from alcohol to alcohol and drugs,
• 1:11:57
  like they were giving him drugs when he was in these rehab places. So
• 1:11:59
  he was combat the two and now it was like eyes are black, vacant,
• 1:12:03
  nobody's nobody's behind there, like who who is this? You know?
• 1:12:09
  It was he wasn't even and Wolfgang gave him the ultimatum, like enough enough
• 1:12:13
  for this bullshit, you know, like he said, Eddie was trashing the
• 1:12:15
  hotel room and he just went in there. He's like, are you Are
• 1:12:17
  you done? So? Can we talk now? This is ridiculous stop And
• 1:12:24
  sure enough Eddie came and he came around because a Wolfgang went to went and
• 1:12:28
  got sober and like, oh what do you say? Maybe it was oh
• 1:12:30
  seven yeah, and never looked back. I thought that was it was.
• 1:12:33
  It really is a it's a tear jerker man at the end. He gets
• 1:12:38
  into the very last days and how he struggled. And I would recommend seeing
• 1:12:43
  it if you can. It's on MTV now. Yeah, and I'll tell
• 1:12:47
  you that crazy what if you know I've never said this, I mean I
• 1:12:51
  I often, I often, you know, everybody and I even said it
• 1:12:56
  a Wolfgang too, you know. Everybody wants him to go into the tapes
• 1:13:00
  and build, build Frankenstein together a whole bunch more van Halen. They had
• 1:13:04
  footage of him in that documentary and right behind him or all the tapes in
• 1:13:08
  fifty and fifty. I'm I was saying to somebody, I'm like, you
• 1:13:10
  see that wall behind there? Yeah? Yeah, he obviously has his his
• 1:13:15
  you know, problems and riffs, even with the van Halen singers and stuff.
• 1:13:18
  But you know, you want to talk about a real what if these
• 1:13:21
  bands that we were talking yesterday about Bleister Culton, how Richie Castellano. Castellano,
• 1:13:29
  Yeah, could be the guy to take that band forward because he because
• 1:13:33
  he like sings a third of the new album and writes the most of the
• 1:13:36
  stuff. And album, by the way, it's great Simple Remains, not
• 1:13:40
  ghost ghosts, that's the whole different thing. But Symbol Remains is a great,
• 1:13:44
  you know, well received comeback album. But you could all you could
• 1:13:46
  almost see van Halen lasting for another ten or twenty years with with Wolfgang subtly
• 1:13:54
  coming in there and taking things over and then becoming a lead singer one day,
• 1:13:59
  right and all these he's super talented. God, he's incredibly talented,
• 1:14:02
  right, bass player, guitars, writer, everything, singer, so so
• 1:14:06
  you know, yeah, obviously people want to want to drag him down or
• 1:14:11
  whatever, but yeah, he's he's the kind of guy that that almost could
• 1:14:16
  have like carried the brand forward. He could I suppose he suppose he is
• 1:14:21
  anyways, but you know, the singer's you know, the voice is is
• 1:14:27
  a part of the human body, and it's gonna age, and we're gonna
• 1:14:29
  lose Samy and we're gonna lose Dave. But over time it's like, you
• 1:14:32
  know, you know, if someone was a manager was sitting there with the
• 1:14:35
  puppet strings, Let's build the perfect band so Van Heal can go another three
• 1:14:40
  hundred years, and how do we do that? Right? Well, the
• 1:14:43
  first step is is Wolfgang and oh here comes Mark Tremoney. You know,
• 1:14:47
  at this point, you know or whatever, right, you know, something
• 1:14:50
  happens that, you know, one by one their replaced. Sammy's on an
• 1:14:55
  album, Samy's on another album, then Sammy's gone. Now Wolfgang's the singer
• 1:14:58
  blah blah blah. Right, so it's it's pretty interesting. And now Alex
• 1:15:01
  maybe could have gone a little a little while longer too, right. Yeah,
• 1:15:06
  Well, final question moment number fifty the book passing of King Edward October
• 1:15:11
  sixth, twenty twenty. Mozart, Beethoven around the seventeen hundreds and eighteen hundreds,
• 1:15:15
  and people still talk about them today in high regard. It's hard for
• 1:15:19
  me to be objective on this. So I asked you, what do you
• 1:15:21
  think, what will people be saying about Edward van Halen one hundred years from
• 1:15:27
  now, two hundred years from now? Was he this era's Mozart or Beethoven?
• 1:15:31
  Absolutely, they will still be talking about them. They're still talking about
• 1:15:34
  them now, you know. I think when it comes to guitar heroes,
• 1:15:42
  as time goes on and people are going, what's the guitar and what's what's
• 1:15:45
  a guitar hero? And what was the seventies sixties, no one can remember
• 1:15:48
  that far back, And as radio playlists get paired back further and further and
• 1:15:54
  further, I think already we're almost left with the only guitar hero. There's
• 1:16:00
  two of them. There's Jimmy Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen. It's the only
• 1:16:02
  two that are, you know, on the on the list of two.
• 1:16:05
  Put it that way, you know, and and I think he's gonna always
• 1:16:10
  be remembered that way because you can essentially they got all these great songs,
• 1:16:16
  but all these great songs, there's all this amazing guitar in there as well.
• 1:16:20
  He's probably I would say, yeah, actually, I've never really thought
• 1:16:26
  about this, but he might even be the guitarist with the most personality ever
• 1:16:31
  on the guitar. Because we know there's a lot of guitar players we love
• 1:16:38
  who we say don't have a sound at all, And then there's a lot
• 1:16:42
  of guitar players we love that are in the middle that have something of a
• 1:16:45
  sound, like we know that part of their toolbox and they do this,
• 1:16:48
  and they do this, but but often they're doing things that are sort of
• 1:16:51
  normal, or they're doing things that are are rooted to a tradition. So
• 1:17:01
  you know, you gotta you gotta be into guitar to realize what's cool about
• 1:17:05
  Michael Shanker or Randy Rhodes or even Angus Angus Young or Brian May. Right,
• 1:17:13
  you gotta be into guitar to hear it, right, And Jimmy Hendrix
• 1:17:17
  is more of a guitar hero because of the story, right, But Eddie
• 1:17:23
  van Halen, you hear a few of the different things in his toolbox and
• 1:17:28
  it's like, oh, that's totally You can be a layman and understand and
• 1:17:32
  and like he could be, he could be your uh, your your entry
• 1:17:36
  into the idea of you know what, you know, what is it like
• 1:17:41
  to be a guitar hero or what is it like to study guitar or follow
• 1:17:44
  guitar? I yeah, I never really thought about that before, but I
• 1:17:47
  think he might be literally the most uh, the guitarist with the most personality
• 1:17:54
  coming through his fingers onto the guitar. And I think the tool that he
• 1:17:58
  had and I think that he would be happy to be remembered more as a
• 1:18:01
  songwriter than a guitarist per se. I think he took pride in his songwriting
• 1:18:10
  and the tool that he had was he could take much of the Van Hilen
• 1:18:14
  audience. I would say, are like myself not a musician when you can.
• 1:18:19
  Of course, he was going to appeal to the musicians the technical side
• 1:18:23
  of things, but the non musicians could feel something as strongly as a musician
• 1:18:28
  could feel when they heard him play. Is what I think. I think
• 1:18:32
  speaks volume. So why they have so many fans? Yeah, you know,
• 1:18:36
  it's funny you bring up songwriter because I because I have mixed feelings about
• 1:18:40
  that, Like number one. You know, sadly, the super deep fan
• 1:18:45
  almost thinks of him more as a guy with a soldering iron more than anything,
• 1:18:48
  right, you know, like working on his bench, just jamming recording
• 1:18:54
  things were never going to hear, so they didn't put out enough music number
• 1:18:57
  one. But the neat thing about being a songwriter van Halen, or the
• 1:19:00
  idea of songwriting and van Halen, is that songs fell out of that because
• 1:19:09
  they weren't so steadfast. A song like Okay, this song is built around
• 1:19:15
  this riff, right, It's it's built around guitar chatter and guitar bubbliness and
• 1:19:21
  guitar chords and guitars drifting in and out of the riff the way people sometimes
• 1:19:27
  complain a little bit about Richie blackmore right. So that's the neat thing.
• 1:19:32
  Basically, guitars. They're doing a whole pile of things. But there's a
• 1:19:36
  large amount of serving the song that goes on even in the guitar. So
• 1:19:41
  he's he's a jack of all trades on that thing. Right. But yeah,
• 1:19:45
  you do not think of this band and start rattling off all the great
• 1:19:49
  ed Eddie van Halen riffs of all time, you just think of him as
• 1:19:55
  just this, this total musician, a true mozart, a true creative force.
• 1:20:00
  This is my tool and I'm going to use it in a lot of
• 1:20:02
  crazy, innovative, interesting ways. And just one of the things I'm gonna
• 1:20:06
  do is you're going to hear some riffs. Van Halen at fifty You can
• 1:20:12
  get it at the Van Allen store, Vanhillnstore dot com. Release date is
• 1:20:15
  May the twenty eighth, and by the time we put this episode up,
• 1:20:18
  it should be out by now. Also Martin popoff dot com. So yeah,
• 1:20:24
  Martin, what can we find on your website? Along with Vanhilline at
• 1:20:27
  fifty. Well, I've done one hundred and twenty books, and you know,
• 1:20:30
  I'd say one hundred of them are in print or ninety of them.
• 1:20:33
  And the other recent ones, I've been doing these panel books, assemble panels
• 1:20:39
  of experts and go through every studio album. So we've got a recent one
• 1:20:42
  on Robert Planner, recent one on Thin Lizzie. I got the The Led
• 1:20:46
  Zeppelin, A visual biography is new as well, so we've been doing a
• 1:20:48
  lot of those timelines. I saw that hardcover books, that's a new one,
• 1:20:51
  The Zeppelin Visual Biography. Yeah as well, Queen Live is coming.
• 1:20:57
  That's a timeline with quotes, but more based on the live experience. And
• 1:21:01
  yeah, ACDC it if you like this format and the beautiful layouts that this
• 1:21:06
  company does. My ACDC at fifty and my Kiss at fifty are really similar.
• 1:21:11
  And I believe that your Van Halen Visual Biography, which was out here
• 1:21:17
  it is. You can get vanill and Visual Biography is now at the Van
• 1:21:21
  Halen store. People can grab a copy there, the hardcover which came out
• 1:21:27
  two three years ago originally, And I remember we talked about that book two
• 1:21:30
  three years ago. Yeah, very cool. All right, all right,
• 1:21:33
  Martin, thanks as always, thank you for the great work that you do,
• 1:21:38
  and looking forward to having you back on for another one of your many
• 1:21:43
  amazing books. Wicked love talking with you. That's it. It's in the books.