Category: songs

by Van Halen

~ A Thousand Air Guitars ~

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

~ Hard Rock On The Dance Floor ~

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

~ No one cares if you don’t like it ~

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.

by Van Halen

~ Could He Really Be Under-rated? ~

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

~ Late night weekend MTV ~

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

by The Stone Roses

~ THAT is a guitar riff ~

Some asshole at the record company actually released a radio edit that completely truncates the instrumental first “verse” of this song, and I hope he was not just fired but sent home without getting a chance to clean out his desk and that someone gave him a wedgie on the way out the door. I get why you would edit this for the radio, but sometimes you’ve got to shove it down radio’s throat in order to help jack up the quality of the product.

John Squire had an acrimonious split from the rest of the band and it’s too bad because songs like this really make the whole group stand out. John provides the rock & the rhythm section provides the roll, and the lead singer has the good sense to know when to stay out of the way.

But good God, that opening slide riff just really tears the roof off and launches a thousand air guitars. The build at the end of the song where the band just starts a repeated drive underneath the coda takes the end of the song to a great crescendo and the higher end of Squire’s guitar playing makes a great appearance here too, as the different layers of the production all continue to build to what’s a great climax to an incredible guitar tune.

by the Electric Angels

~ Yes, I’ve played this one live ~

When you’re the one booking all of the bands for the long concert outside a couple of dorms in college, you get to book yourself as one of them. We put together a short four song set, with two guys in the rhythm section that I played with off and on quite a bit and a lead guitarist who lived in my suite and was way better than you would expect for an 18-year-old.

He and I had practiced up in my dorm room for the better part of three weeks going into the show, and the bass player sat in with us a few times. I had played with both the bassist and drummer many times on different gigs, and including some bad four-track recordings of a few songs I’d written.

But what was most memorable about this live gig was after soundcheck as we’re getting ready to count in the opening number, I turn around and see the lead guitarist and the drummer introducing themselves to each other & shaking hands because they never actually met at a rehearsal and our first full gig as a four piece was that live show in front of several hundred people

You know what? It all worked out and everyone had a good time.