February 10, 2018 — There’s a saying: be careful what you wish for. The conclusion to that sentence is you might just get it. If you think about it, the implication of the conclusion is that the what you wish for-part is not going to turn out like what you thought.
Today: the 40th anniversary of Van Halen, the record. We call it Van Halen I now, only because there was something that came after, but then… then there was just Van Halen. I have trouble separating one memory out, making an anniversary out of one thing; my mind, so warning to you all, this article is subject to a great risk that it will wander.
Right now, I’m picturing the video from that Trans-Siberian Christmas song I like, the one featuring the little girl where she opens a trunk and takes out a large sand-filled hour glass, then tips it over to start a fantasy. Time goes forward from olden days to her present day, with flashes of images representing each time frane. Everyone’s 1978 was different, different based on our respective age then, our respective place in our life. We’re all looking back, but for this part of the story, my hour glass is going to go forward, go forward with images like the current events in that video I’m thinking of where one already knows what took place.
2015. I saw both Van Halen shows at the Hollywood Bowl. Both were radically different experiences, and following this article’s subtheme of be careful what you wish for, each turned out different than what I expected. The first was in far-away seats, the seats a present from my young friend. I asked another of my young friends to go with me. I think my accompanying friend was 28 or 29 then, a coworker I was with constantly during the day in those times, and he wasn’t that familiar with Van Halen. He had heard Jump, he thought, but other than that, nothing. At first he said no, but then, the day of, he came to me and said if I had nobody for that extra ticket, he wanted to go. It was his first actual rock concert.
We got there after the opening act, and found our seats, high up in the middle, and slightly Wolf’s side, of the venue. There were people all around, partying like crazy. You can bring food into the Bowl, so people spread out blankets and act like they’re in their back yard. Almost everyone back there (the cheap seats, you know) were real fans, likely real musicians too, lots and lots of long hair. There were people dancing everywhere. One guy, who appeared to be by himself, danced in the aisle the entire time. Everyone was singing. My friend’s reaction was my gauge of how good the show was. Every time David Lee Roth told a story, my friend said “the guy still has it”. Seeing as Van Halen is mine, I was really happy to hear my friend say that. The real test of the effect of the show though wasn’t the show itself; it was the walk back to my truck after the show.
We parked really far away, a factor of being late getting there. Walking back to the parking garage, we walked south on Highland Avenue towards Hollywood Boulevard, passing many sellers of things, these really good bacon-wrapped hotdogs (I refrained because I never venture towards pork when I’m with someone of the Jewish persuasion, which my friend is), and lots of sellers of bootleg shirts. People were clumping together in little groups as we walked. In this, we started shopping (okay, not “we” so much as me) with this guy with long blonde hair, a small-ish man. Mind you, I was wearing a dress, one I had worn to work, but changed up a bit for the concert. Still, it wasn’t as rock as it probably should have been to match this guy. Nevertheless, it turned out that guy and I had similar taste in t-shirts, looking at and rejecting all that we saw. He turned left and bought this really cute baseball shirt, then showed it to me. Turns out, it was the last of that style. He asked around for another one, long enough that his girlfriend got mad. She said something like why you two just go share clothes? Now, normally, I’m not one to get a fella in trouble with his lady, but I blame Van Halen for this one; we just got worse. We offered to trade the dress for the t-shirt. We weren’t much different in size, so it could have worked, but the girlfriend shut that down, not that was going to actually happen, of course; it is me. My friend and I then bought a couple different shirts and headed to the car. The entire time, he asked questions about what it was like back when. His words “in the free love days.” He said his experience that night was amazing, that everyone was so free, that it was so fun, that he had never felt anything like this. I said that’s Van Halen, that’s what Van Halen does to you. It makes you invincible. It makes you free.
1978. It wasn’t exactly the free love days for me. I couldn’t legally drive when this record we are celebrating came out. But I was invincible. I was free. My hour glass, on freeze-frame, would show my surroundings, a large public high school, the band hall, the parking lot where we would all play songs, the radio next to the window in my pink room; less everything, everywhere, less buildings, less cars, less flash, a lot more land. I remember land. Horses even, cuddling with my dog, and planning routines for my twirling. What I knew of Van Halen was what they played on the radio. You Really Got Me, Jamie’s Cryin’. Honestly, I couldn’t stand Jamie’s Cryin’. I didn’t have that moment of sitting with a record at some friend’s house, discovering the wonders of Eruption. My memory, and who knows if it’s accurate, was that I heard Van Halen I and Van Halen II together – a study of music with other music kids in the band hall parking lot. By then, the rock radio of Dallas had played Van Halen enough that I was familiar with many of the songs; it was the deep cuts I liked the most. Those have character. They tell the stories. Those stirred something deep inside me that I didn’t understand. For me though it was more. I used Van Halen to dance. Somehow it would create a mood in me that could translate to a good flow. I can’t explain it any better. I used it when I wanted to study too. It made an intensity in me such that I could concentrate and make a really good grade. I still do that – listen to it when I’m driving to court to do a really hard hearing or a trial. But free love? The most I did in those days was pretend. Put the tape on in the car, sing at the top of my lungs (I sing the guitar parts too, David Lee Roth’s little sounds too, which themselves qualify as free love), play it as a sound track to the drives with my friends. In those days though, my friends were girls. Boys were a complication I had not discovered. Still. Van Halen indeed made me feel free – free to do whatever it was I wanted to do. I suppose that’s as close to free love as was possible for me then.
Memories like that, especially when you think of them while walking in the hustle of Hollywood are interesting. I tried to explain to my friend that it wasn’t so much free love, just freedom, in general. There was a freedom we all felt. And then… we were quiet. You see, the world actually is so different now. Or perhaps it is my life that is.
A couple of days later, I was sitting at my desk at the job I had then wondering about the last show at the Hollywood Bowl. I looked to see what a ticket close to the stage would cost. I had something else I wanted to do, some reason I had to go again. I’m not sure what or why exactly, but I had to go.
There were single tickets. The seats were in the area just behind the pit, $250, but I had it, so I thought I’d do it. I imagined I’d get that seat, then sneak close to the front, perhaps into the pit. I thought the energy of that would be what I experienced when I actually saw Van Halen four years after the debut album, my first. I had this feeling, as I put that ticket into my cart, I had to do this. I was going to … go back, mentally, in time.
I went alone to that concert, as I often do. Unlike the other concert when I went with my twenty-something friend, there was a chill in the air. I think it was a weekend night. I was wearing a skirt and boots. I bought a black Van Halen hoodie from the concession stand and had that on too. I’m not sure what it is about weather that changes a mood, but the mood of this concert was so very different. The seat was in an area where you need a date, sort of theme to this era of our lives, we need partners or it’s just odd. Another person I didn’t know was next to me, but I lasted only a few minutes in these “date” box seats there before I left and headed to find a place to sneak into the pit. The area between the “date” box seats and the pit collected several fans, me included, and many times security kicked us out. We made it back every time, and on the last time, I tucked into the pit. Everyone else got shooed away for good that time, but the people in that pit — all older “monied” types (very different than the rocker-musicians from the first night) protected me, said I could stay in there with them. That put me three rows back. I told them I wouldn’t take much room in their pit box. They liked it, not because I was being the silly free-love version of myself from before where I could trade a dress for a t-shirt with some blonde kid from the street, but because it was so visible to them how much I loved Van Halen.
My real love for Van Halen was formed when I was in college. My first year, I had a roommate, living in the suite next to mine in my first residence away from home, a dorm where the kids partied more than they should have. She had David Lee Roth posters plastered all over her walls. She claimed she knew him. She had a gold, real gold that is, VH symbol necklace. She used to regale us with stories of ’78 through ’80 Van Halen concerts, and her love for David Lee Roth was … ummm consummated, so she said. My very own groupie friend! She talked of how smart he was, but what I took out of it was almost a dare, because he seemed accessible. Predictably, her time at University lasted only the first year. By my second year, my friends were only the serious girls, my pre-med major friend who went on to become a dentist, and my friend from the same kind of oil family that I was from. The first was up for it. 1981 Fair Warning tour, drive to Houston. I used that other girl’s name, but turns out, nobody actually knew who she was. Who knows how true her stories actually were. I really will never know. But still, if you dress in a short enough skirt and have on enough make-up, they’ll give you one of those passes. Backstage, however, is scary, too scary for me. There were lots of girls dressed way more outrageously than me and my friend. I saw Eddie though; he did a little laugh-smile as I hid behind a concrete column. So much for my moment as a wild girl.
By 1982, I realized what they (the band) actually did post concert was go to the hotel. And I was on a mission, however ill-advised; I was going to meet David Lee Roth. Why? Who the hell knows? Because he’s accessible? Be careful what you wish for, seriously! We left early from the concert, and got a seat at the bar. The bar in the hotel was not having any groupies. I wasn’t dressed like one, not this time, and honestly I couldn’t have pulled it off. In the summer of 1982, months before this pre-Thanksgiving night, I had cut all my hair off, just because I didn’t want to look like me anymore. It was the beginning of the “me” I am now. Serious. A worker. Making my own way. My family money gone in one summer of really bad markets. Oh and in case you don’t know, groupies don’t have short mousy brown hair. Rock stars don’t like girls with short mousy brown hair. So when I said to the waiter, what are you talking about groupie, we got to stay, as all the real groupies were kicked out of the hotel, my short hair selling my story.
I was down to my last three dollars, buying one last drink when we caught the attention of a man who called himself Pete. He asked how I liked the concert and commended my performance. I knew nothing of who he was, but he had access. I got my meeting with David Lee Roth.. I remember telling myself if I’ve gotten this far, well, you know, I’m not going to choke…. Not like when I got an appointment to talk to President Reagan after calling the Whitehouse and then getting transferred for hours until I got to his personal appointments secretary. Who gets an appointment to call the President to raise one’s concern with the actual President of the United States at 8:00 a.m. the next morning and doesn’t call? Me, that’s who. Not this time. No be careful what you wish for and not following through this time. What I got though? Of course, very different than what I would have thought. Turns out famous people, powerful people, rock stars, are just that. People.
I had a nice talk with this man who called himself David. His idea; you see, there aren’t many women who find their way to rocks stars who can talk. I can. Just talk. I learned from this talk. I learned what it means to follow a dream. Literally. Dreams were a big theme of that talk. I learned I had a power to do anything I want. If only it were that easy, but that’s another story. I had a friend in him, the one person for decades to whom I told what it was like to lose one’s station, a life I can barely remember now. There were things I saw too; I knew Van Halen would end. Sure, it went on to have the 1984 record (we talked about that book too; I was an avid reader, so it was good to talk books), but Van Halen did end. I knew the later music would have keyboards. I thought it would be good. I knew it was not going to be easy to write. I even tried to give him advice, not that that is relevant now, but I remember telling him what he had in this band was one a million. On a personal front, he was nice, gentlemanly, never even said a curse word. As it turns out, rock stars and girls who are kinda, sorta the opposite of that, can have a fairly decent conversation. I have no illusions that he remembers any of that. I was one of thousands of people he’s come across in his life. But Van Halen became very literally mine then; it became real. And that was good and that was bad. Be careful what you wish for because you’re bound to get … the opposite.
In that second concert in 2015, I was close enough to see faces. I was center stage. David Lee Roth was telling stories to the audience, very different stories than that first night, the funny of the first Hollywood Bowl concert night replaced with tenderness. I’ve often thought the David Lee Roth we get on the stage, in interviews, is almost unrecognizable from the private person. He even looks different. That night though, there were moments where he was … a person, that person. Unlike the first night, I didn’t dance. I didn’t sing. I stayed tucked into the cloth partition that formed the pit wall so as to not disturb the kind men who had let me in their pit-box. For most of the concert, I watched like that, just thinking, and perhaps in as small a way as I can, in this time where the hourglass has had so many images flash forward, reliving a moment where I learned so much. Oh and in case, your wondering, later that night, I got that bacon wrapped hotdog afterwards too.
Van Halen … they are men. They had their triumphs, young and bold, like the words of the song Little Dreamer from the first. Those concerts from the early days? Are there even adjectives, especially for those of us who lived them, who crawled through the masses to get to the front row, how I saw every concert, honestly the only real way to have seen them? I’m so glad I lived that. It’s its own version of free love, just that by itself. And who doesn’t want a good free-love-moment? There are those who think that Van Halen with Sammy was as good, better even, those of us who like only the original, those of us who cared only, or mostly, for Eddie’s guitar. I get that, and certainly time has shown it was and is Eddie’s band. But I can’t help but think that if they had found a way to not fall apart, to age before our eyes, to grow, to constantly evolve, as opposed to reforming an old band in an era when the hour glass had changed the world, everyone expecting to time travel back to 1978, what it would have been? One in a million, really one in a million?
At some point in that second concert in 2015, David said to the audience, can you hear me out there? I yelled “no”, and I could see he heard it. He turned his head my direction. I thought for a second he was mad. Who knows, but he broke character though just for a few seconds. I will take his anger just to see him break character. And Eddie… You know the rock devil-horn symbol? People held that up when Eddie played his solo. Me? I held up a heart. I wonder if those two moments weren’t what I went there for – to see David break character just for a second when he heard me, to make a heart to Eddie. As for everyone else, sometime during the concert, David, and I swear he was fighting tears, said that the years on stage with that guy, the one I held my hands in a heart for, were the best of David’s life. I’m pretty sure David talked about dreams too, although seeing as this review is more than two years late, I can no longer remember what David’s words were. In the end though, I remember, again not the words, just the effect of the words. As David left the stage his words were final. I can’t quote him, but whatever it was attached to that “thank you, goodnight” seemed like a bookend to all of this, the last time for Van Halen, as I loved it, or three-quarters of it anyways, on a stage.
I’m one who likes goodbyes, or perhaps I should say needs them. If someone is going to leave me, I’d like it if they tell me. I’ve even asked men I cared about at the start of a relationship, a fling, a whatever, to say goodbye when they are going to leave. I didn’t write my review in 2015 because my overwhelming thought was that second concert was a goodbye. I feel fortunate enough I had the $250 to have heard it, but I think they’re done. And I waited on writing this review until I was as certain as I can be. You see, if you don’t get that actual goodbye, it takes a while to know what you’re facing is a goodbye.
What do I think as a fan? As a fan, I don’t want the ride to end. I want them to do something more. Honestly though, what? Should they regroup with both singers to make all fans happy? Do they make a new record? It’s all up to Eddie; it’s all whatever he wants, his band and all, which really isn’t fair to the rest, but nothing will change that. I don’t have any idea what Eddie wants, but personally, I would want a residency in Vegas, a month-long run of shows where they play off on the history, have a really cool stage, videos during the songs, lots of talking to the crowd, lots of songs, a mix of hits and deep cuts, probably a mix of all Van Halen versions, only in guest appearances though, mostly the original Van Halen. A new record would be great, but I don’t hold any illusions we’ll ever get that because it was too much on them to do A Different Kind of Truth, and even that didn’t sell enough to leave a mark on the planet like they were used to leaving. Don’t yell at me for that statement; I’m talking about sales; it was just a gold record, not a five-times platinum record like the one we are celebrating today. Honestly, I think they realized the next line of the song –and didn’t that change with a wink of your eye — is a distinct possibility if they keep going, and that’s because any future path creates controversy no matter what they do.
What do I want as a fan, recognizing reality? An announcement, a thank you to the fans, a statement that they’re going to leave it at [we] were young and bold. Please, I want them to say goodbye, not make us guess, not make us get frustrated, or worse, angry. And then I want them to live. I want them to do all the things they want to do. I think Eddie is doing a great job making guitars and amps. I want them to be nice to each other too, give each other the credit each of them deserves to give each other. I think David Lee Roth should do a radio show. If Nikki Six, Steve Jones and Alice Cooper can, why not him? Just be normal though. Be real. I know he can. And if any of them want to play music in some new version, I’ll listen.
From them to us though, let us go. Say a proper goodbye. And from what they taught – the love of music, the feeling of freedom, the thought we can do or be anything we want — know we were better for the very existence in the hourglass of time of those young and bold men.