by Van Halen
Imagine stealing a song from one of rock’s greatest pioneers. Now imagine stealing it, and putting your own guitar-histrionics spin on it. And just for good measure, now imagine that note-perfect but oh-so-deliciously-revved-up version becomes so definitive that people completely forget about the original.
Oh, and do it on your debut album, before anyone has a clue that you’re going to become one of the signature American rock bands of all time.
by Van Halen
You can’t hear the intro to this one and not air-guitar along. Moreover, it’s one that you can learn to play, so you can feed your delusions of EVH-level grandeur.
by Van Halen
If you somehow missed the self-titled debut, no worries. Their follow-up, Van Halen II, was here to sure what ails ya. With a riff that dragged a thousand drunk couples to the dance floor, the the guys proved you could groove on the floor without a disco beat, a funk baseline, or three drummers. Just a band with a great sound, a better attitude, and some excellent harmonies.
by Van Halen
Is it the perfect encapsulation of what Van Halen was all about? Nope. Was it their biggest hit, and essentially their signature song? Yep. You don’t have to like it. Everyone else does, so suck it up. This is the song that launched a thousand parties, and you might as well have fun with it instead of fighting it.
People forget just how dynamic they were in their early-80s heyday
Once upon a time, MTV had a live concert every Saturday night. Not a recording of a show, but an actual live concert. I can’t give you a live concert every Saturday, but I can give you some excellent live concert videos of some fantastic shows, and we can all pretend its sort of the 80s all over again.
by Van Halen
We lost Eddie this past week. Tributes abound, and this one from sportswriter Andrew Buchholz is pretty good. However, you gotta swap out “Cathedral” for “Ain’t Talking ‘Bout Love” on which Eddie showed that even open-fret chords (typically strummed) could be turned into brain-melting riffs if you played them right.
Eddie showed you didn’t need power chords to be “heavy” and the understated brilliance of a riff like the opening here is just another of the innumerable gems you’ll unearth going back through the Van Halen catalog while remembering Eddie.
by Chapterhouse
There was an early ’90s golden age of late-night MTV, especially on Sunday nights with 120 Minutes. There was a huge variety of excellent alt-rock and college radio type bands that were all over the special alt-rock show but never could break through at any other hour on MTV.
Fortunately, not only could you record these things on VHS, but with a little bit of ingenuity you could run the audio out cables from the back of your VCR to the input jacks on your stereo and record the audio from the MTV videos. That way, you weren’t stuck trying to chase around bands the local record store had never heard of, and that you would never see again in any other format
We will certainly cover a whole lot of these artists – Birdland, the Seers, Charlatans UK, and others – throughout this series. But for tonight, just sit back with the ethereal vocals and subtle chill beats of Chapterhouse, and their one semi-hit