Kid IRA1 posted:

Ya know, I revisited my old copy of the Van Halen debut. I retract my earlier statement. Its a good, fun album. It helped launch a wave of terrible musicians all trying to ape Eddie, but this is not a bad album.

Also, for giggles, Running With the Devil Vocals

You may not care for bands like Dokken or Ratt (I will always have a soft-spot for 80s metal) but I wouldn't fault the musicianship. Guys like Warren Demartini and Don Dokken could really play, and were better players than most of the shitty brit-pop/emo/nu-metal musicians could ever hope to be.

If you re-visit Van Halen again, listen to the last track "On Fire," and put your headphones up to 11. Fucking awesome.

If you really want to talk about two great bands that launched a wave of terrible imitators, look no further than Ten and Nevermind.

scott14 posted:

I liked Chickenfoot's debut for a little while, but it didn't have staying power. I think my main beef with it is that Sammy needs to up his lyrical game.

He's written some good lyrics, like "Right Now" and "Mine All Mine."

And then there's "Up for Breakfast"...

RhettButler posted:

Kid IRA1 posted:

Ya know, I revisited my old copy of the Van Halen debut. I retract my earlier statement. Its a good, fun album. It helped launch a wave of terrible musicians all trying to ape Eddie, but this is not a bad album.

Also, for giggles, Running With the Devil Vocals

You may not care for bands like Dokken or Ratt (I will always have a soft-spot for 80s metal) but I wouldn't fault the musicianship. Guys like Warren Demartini and Don Dokken could really play, and were better players than most of the shitty brit-pop/emo/nu-metal musicians could ever hope to be.

If you re-visit Van Halen again, listen to the last track "On Fire," and put your headphones up to 11. Fucking awesome.

If you really want to talk about two great bands that launched a wave of terrible imitators, look no further than Ten and Nevermind.

good man, i agree 100%

RATT are very under-rated, based solely on there image which is a shame. Some great riffs, and awesome guitar solos

Lib at Large: Sammy Hagar burns bridges in his uncensored memoir, 'Red'

By Paul Liberatore
Marin Independent Journal

Sammy Hagar's memoir, "Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock," doesn't comes out until March, but I've just finished reading an advance copy and I can tell you that there's one poor guy who's going to wish it had never seen the light of day: Eddie Van Halen.

Sammy's one of the nicest guys I've met in rock 'n' roll, but Marin's Red Rocker shows his former Van Halen bandmate no mercy, portraying Eddie as more street person than guitar god.

This is Sammy describing him just before their Van Halen reunion tour in 2003: "I hadn't seen him in 10 years. He looked like he hadn't bathed in a week. He certainly hadn't changed his clothes in at least that long. He wasn't wearing a shirt. He had on a giant overcoat and army pants, tattered and ripped at the cuffs, held up with a piece of rope. I'd never seen him so skinny in my life. He was missing a number of teeth and the ones he had left were black. His boots were so worn out he had gaffer's tape wrapped around them and his big toe still stuck out."

In passages like that, "Red" reads like one of those angry e-mails we write when we're really ticked off at someone and need to vent by trashing him or her. But once we chill out, most of us don't hit the send button. With this book, Sammy hits the send button.

And he hits it over and over. After describing the squalor that he claims Eddie lived in, Sammy lays into him again, writing: "This was Eddie Van Halen, one of the sweetest guys I'd ever

He had turned into the weirdest (expletive) I'd ever seen, crude, rude and unkempt."

So how do you really feel, Sammy?

After his "I Can't Drive 55" made him an arena-level headliner, Sammy joined Van Halen in the mid-'80s, replacing David Lee Roth, another guy he has no use for.

"I hated Dave," he writes. "The guy rubbed me wrong. I'm sure I rub all kinds of people wrong, so it's not like I'm putting him down. The guy was a great front man, great attitude in rock, and had an image from hell, but I just couldn't stand the guy. He was the opposite of what I believed in and what I am. First of all, the guy's not a great singer and he acts like he's the coolest, hottest guy in the world when, to me, he looks gay."

I don't know who's going to be more upset by that, Roth or gay people?

Settled down now at 63, Sammy writes ecstatically about his second and current wife and their contented family life. But when he was younger and his first marriage was on the skids, he took full advantage of his rock star status during his decade as lead singer of Van Halen.

"I was eating in the greatest restaurants, drinking the finest wine, flying on private jets, walking on stage to sold-out audiences going crazy. The only thing missing was ... I don't think anything was missing."

Groupies certainly weren't missing. Like the other members of what Sammy calls "the biggest rock band in the world," he had his own sex tent underneath the stage. Roadies would stock it with "five or six girls" every night, and Sammy writes about getting it on with them during Van Halen's nightly guitar solo. On this particular subject, he reveals a little more than I'd prefer to know, but it will probably sell a lot of books.

It seems like everything Sammy does makes money. At the beginning of his career, he was smart enough to buy the "architectural wonder" of a house on Mount Tam where he still lives for only $60,000 down, a pittance now. He was on the road a lot, so he started a successful travel agency in Mill Valley. He has a profitable fire sprinkler company in Fontana, the blue collar Southern California town where he grew up. And his Cabo Wabo Cantina in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, has spun off into franchises in Lake Tahoe and other places.

More recently, he made headlines when he sold his Cabo Wabo tequila company to the Campari Group for $80 million in a deal that lets him keep 20 percent of the business.

"If I wanted to be a billionaire, I probably could," he writes. "It's probably not that hard. But I'm not interested."

From that, it's clear that Sammy, with Joel Selvin, didn't write "Red" for the money. So he must have had other motives, like getting even with the Van Halen brothers, Eddie and Al, for not showing up at their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2007, leaving him and bassist Mike Anthony to go it alone.

The question of whether Sammy quit Van Halen or was fired doesn't really get answered in "Red," as far as I can tell. One thing it does do, though — "Red" is hot enough to burn bridges.

Don't care what any peep may say, I still love Cherone


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wy_N3J_GQss



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/15/2011 09:37PM by MissyMay83.

It does get confusing:

In defense of Van Hagar ...

Believe me, I don't want to be the one to defend Van Hagar. I've spent nearly five years building a peaceful community on this blog, only to throw it away faster than you can sing the chorus to "When It's Love." (Please don't.)
What could possibly go wrong?

But while you will never see a discussion of circumcision or breast-feeding on this so-called parenting blog, we do tackle music controversies. And I'd like to defend Van Hagar.

With each new piece of Van Halen news over the years -- most recently a report that Van Halen is working on a new studio album with David Lee Roth -- a new round of Sammy Hagar bashing emerges. Was the Van Halen era with Hagar as lead singer a downhill slide? You can argue that it was, and find many allies. But Hagar was definitely not to blame.

My Chronicle colleague Joel Selvin wrote, in a review of the Van Hagar "5150" tour in the mid-1980s, that Sammy Hagar ruined two bands when he joined Van Halen. (Hagar responded by giving out Selvin's phone number to the crowd. I was 15 years old, and in attendance. I swear I didn't call, Joel ...) But looking with a quarter century of retrospect, I would argue that Hagar saved Van Halen. As you can tell by the song "Jump," the band was headed in a more pop-friendly synthesizer-heavy direction come hell or high water. Shedding David Lee Roth and bringing in a new lead singer provided the clean break that was necessary to explore these murky waters.

And when the band was done, and the world gave its verdict on Van Hagar, Roth could return and all would be forgiven -- with the mercenary Hagar, not the architect Eddie Van Halen, taking the blame for any wussy post-"1984" sins. During the last tour, Van Halen (with Eddie's son on bass) was able to pretend like the latter half of the 1980s and most of the 1990s didn't happen. That would have been impossible if Roth stayed in the band.

Hagar may have been the fall guy, but he wasn't a phony. Van Halen got exactly what they hired -- Hagar's persona and style didn't change when he joined Van Halen. Hagar didn't force Eddie Van Halen behind the keyboard. Hagar wasn't the one who cut Eddie's hair. Hagar didn't even write the most derided songs. And he was never a habitual douchebag. In the history of Van Halen, only Michael Anthony (whose benevolence included thanking Van Halen III singer Gary Cherone during his Hall of Fame speech ... and look how he was rewarded ...) was a nicer guy.

Finally -- and I'm bracing for your rebuttal -- Van Hagar did make some very good music. The band had more than its share of near-apocalyptic missteps. (Start here.) But I'll maintain that in the 13 or so years Hagar was a member, the band produced enough quality music for one very solid hard-rocking Van Halen album.

I have this playlist on my iPod, filed under "decent Van Hagar."

1. Poundcake: I consider this the band's attempt to apologize for the early Hagar/Van Halen years. After nearly a decade of love songs, Eddie pulls out some power tools and the lyrics appear to be entirely about a girl's ass. This is my second-favorite Van Hagar song.

2. Best of Both Worlds: Alex Van Halen sounds like he's in a retirement home, but Eddie and Sammy are definitely in sync here. The best song off the "5150" album.

3. Finish What Ya Started: It's a bit soft, but so were several Van Halen songs in the 1970s. The hook is great. Close your eyes and it's easy to imagine this as a Roth-era song.

4. Aftershock: Some of Eddie Van Halen's best post-Roth guitar work. The song rocks pretty hard, and Hagar gets in a nice groove.

5. Black and Blue: This is my favorite Van Halen/Hagar song. The relentless sincerity that marred the Van Hagar era is missing, and Van Halen sounds like a complete band.

6. Summer Nights: Strictly filler, but they had that on the older Van Halen albums, too.

7. Runaround: OK, the argument is starting to come apart here ... . The first 1:06 of this song is good, and then it all falls to pieces. But you know what, I fast-forward past the chorus of "Dance the Night Away," too.

8. 316: A harmless and short guitar interlude, named after the birthdate of Eddie's son Wolfgang. It's not "Eruption," but neither was "Jump."

9. 5150: I almost put "Why Can't This Be Love" here, but figured I would lose the three people who are still on my side. Alex Van Halen actually sounds like he's trying on the title track "5150," which almost never happened in the latter half of the 1980s. And the lyrics make absolutely no sense, which was always the safest route in the Van Hagar era.

Hate the Sammy Hagar years of Van Halen if you must. But don't blame the man. Even if you didn't like the music, he was more of an innocent bystander than an accessory to the crime. And if you liked the music -- even a little -- go ahead and say it with pride.

PETER HARTLAUB is the pop culture critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and founder of this parenting blog, which admittedly sometimes has nothing to do with parenting. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/peterhartlaub. Your questions answered on VYou at www.vyou.com/peterhartlaub.

Read more: [www.sfgate.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/23/2011 07:24AM by RhettButler.

i just read that david lee roth insured his own sperm for a million dollars
what a douche

it's been confirmed by a lot of sources

here's a couple
compensation claim article
another article



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/31/2011 10:21PM by LobotomyBaby.

DavidLeeRoth.com

"Get Ready."

very excited for this but I will really miss Michael's back up vocals. They were a staple in all good things about the band.

hoffan1939 posted:

Never attempted to even listen to these guys. I get "asshole" vibes. Maybe that's my fault. I should just give them a chance...but every time I think I might, I think "EVH" is an asshole...not a good way to go about listening to something you've never even heard i know...

Um, okay.

New Chickenfoot album out in September--Chickenfoot III

I picked up the new Chickenfoot album today, III and think it's really good. Sammy Hagar/Van Halen fans will want to add this to their collection.