Van Halen

Hello, my name is Don, and I am a music snob. I will be sharing my opinions on various subjects with music being the main one, of course. Every once in a while, I will put out one of these blogs just to empty my head. So, they will be short most of the time. I will try to relate them to something current or local whenever possible. Since this is my first blog, I hope you will give me some room for improvement. Any suggestions or comments are welcome!

Van Dyke

There is a new Van Halen album this month. This is the first album they have recorded with David Lee Roth since 1983. While this reunion is not at the same excitement level for me as a reunion of the original Beatles, it is quite a bit higher than the level for a possible Color Me Badd reunion. I am not going to get into all the chatter about the songs being remakes of material they started writing decades ago. It is new to me. It is their music; they can put it out however they want. I wish them the best of luck, and I will probably get the new album. I would like to say it was because I thought they were still a great band, but it will probably be because it is on sale for five bucks. Without Michael Anthony, it is a tough sell. He made the whole sound with his vocals.

 

Why a reunion? Probably because they figured out that changing singers once and remaining successful was the exception that proves the rule. Usually, if you change singers and try to carry on, it does not go well. Just ask Motley Crue, they replaced Vince Neil with a singer for a few years, and it did not work out very well at all. Vince came back, and they made a mountain of money. They had two of their most successful tours without producing any new music worth listening to. They even landed a residency at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas. They had a crazy stage show, but… well, you can look on YouTube to see what I am getting at.

I think the whole reunion craze started with the Eagles and the trailer loads of cash they hauled in on their 1994-96 tour. Kiss had a reunion of the original members soon after, and toured the world in their 1976 makeup. Then, they put out an album nearly unparalleled in its awfulness and toured the world again, making millions. Fleetwood Mac had a reunion around the same time, so did Black Sabbath, The E street band, and many others. Roger Waters even had a reunion with Pink Floyd at the Live 8 concerts a few years back. I was sure I would never see that. It is a shame that they couldn’t have done something else together before Rick Wright passed away.

At the other end of the spectrum are the bands that continue with only one or two of the original members. Guns N’ Roses comes to mind. Kiss is doing this now, too. They say it is because the makeup is bigger than the band members. I guess it is bigger than the panda bears they sell with the makeup designs on them too. I guess when your band becomes a “brand” you gotta ride that horse until it drops.

It makes you wonder why bands split up in the first place. I look at it this way: Most bands start out as just a group of friends. In order to be successful, they spend almost all of their time together. A lot of bands have lived together in a house or apartment for years trying to make it in the music business. They are like a family. It’s all for one and one for all because the band is what is important. This can work for a while, even for many years, but eventually it begins to wear on you. Especially when alcohol, drugs and other substances like success come into the picture. At some point, people need space from each other. A band that is successful or trying to be does not provide much space, so things tend to get amplified and yesterday’s disagreements settled after a few beers and couple games of pool turn into today’s fistfights settled after an arrest or a management ultimatum. Someone quits the band or gets fired. The band is too big and probably owes too much money to the record company to stop, so a new member is brought in and they soldier on.

It is just like most families. The only difference is that you tend to move out of the house at some point after you become adults. Has anyone been in a confined space like an RV with their family when everyone was an adult? How did that go? Pretty well if you drove for three or fewer hours. If it was longer, I bet you were ready to leave the band when it was over or maybe fire a couple of members. The only problem is that you and I cannot plug DJ Ashba or Wolfgang Van Halen into the chairs around our Thanksgiving tables.

I think it was Joe Perry from Aerosmith who once told his drummer that they did not have to be friends to be in a band together. This may be a cold, heartless thing to say, but it is the truth.

Based on all of this, I will give this advice to those in bands today: Try not to spend all of your free time with your band mates. Find other interests, even a side band or doing solo music. Make every rehearsal and show a reunion, so you do not have to have one for the wrong reasons later. It has been said that if you love what you do, you will never work a day in your life. Unfortunately, this does not apply to the music industry. That is why very few bands survive anymore. I will get into that more in later blogs. For now, remember the two rules some very wise friends shared with me. One: Less is more. This applies to every facet of music except, of course, for volume. Two: Look for quality rather than quantity. This applies to music and just about everything else.

Don Van Dyke