Ordinarily I do not like reviewing concerts. Unlike movies, television or music releases, you cannot take this advice and experience it for yourself afterward. The moment is lost to you, and anything said now might not rise above the level of a humble brag. “I was so lucky to see this show, and you didn’t.” Yet there are a few extenuating circumstances that could have altered the evening completely, and that’s worth discussing.
The first and most recent involves the venue, the PNC Arts Center. Only a week before, two people were shot in the parking lot at a hip-hop concert. That was never going to stop this show, but it definitely could have altered the logistics of the performance. There was a clearly noticeable additional contingent of gatekeepers patting down attendees as they passed through the front gates. Apart from that, not much else had been altered, nor should it have been.
The second issue came more than a month before in an article for Billboard magazine. Legendary guitarist Eddie Van Halen was the subject of an interview, and the headlines screamed how his opinions were – at best – uncharitable toward anyone who did not have the last name of Van Halen. When the nexus of your criticism is the person who is currently your lead singer, that’s a problem.
So too was the grapevine buzz from concertgoers earlier in the tour, most of whom said singer David Lee Roth sounded awful to non-existent. In other words, the fact that the show happened at all is a minor miracle. Despite this, the show was entertaining.
The opening act, the Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band, is a fine blues-rock outfit, and the group put their all into their performance, but it was still a mismatch. Blues-rock requires a specific coterie to be at its most successful, namely a collective of like-minded groups and a crowd that is accepting – even appreciative – of various blues-rock tropes. Opening for a jam band or even Jack White, Shepherd and company would have owned the night. Opening for one of the bands that redefined the hard rock sound from the mid-1970s well into the nineties, the group proved not to be a hard act to follow.
Opening with that lascivious throb and that pulse that promised naughtiness throughout, Van Halen took the stage to “Light Up The Sky,” a song from their second album that has opened every night of the tour. Was Roth on target with his vocal performance? To be honest, no he was not. To be even more honest, Roth was never one of rock’s most on-point singers. His fix for any note he felt he couldn’t hit has always been a screech. You don’t ask for Roth to be that guy, however. You ask for him to be a consummate showman, an entertainer, and at a supernaturally spry 60 years old, he high-kicked, strutted and danced, whipped his microphone stand around like a martial artist, and was still a magnetic personality.
But that showmanship only gets you so far. You need to have an army behind you with the firepower to back up your shimmy-shake. Author Greg Renoff recently released the book Van Halen Rising. Its subtitle is “How a Southern California Backyard Party Band Saved Heavy Metal.” Most backyard party bands will never be as accomplished as the Van Halen brothers though. Starting with drummer Alex Van Halen, his boogie and stomp are both in mint condition, evidenced by the hamstring pain-inducing opening to “Hot For Teacher.” During a drum solo he proved he is every bit as crucial to this enterprise as his sibling, but gets far fewer accolades than Eddie.
And as for EVH, who is less than a decade past a life spiral that could have killed him, the audience was left gobsmacked and bewildered. The crystalline “Cathedral,” the attack of both “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love” and “Unchained,” the sheer mercilessness of “Chinatown” all speak to the validity of his perch as one of the guitar’s finest practitioners, being inventive, athletic, and polished.
His saint, and probably the person most likely keeping Eddie on the straight-and-narrow, is Wolfgang Van Halen, Eddie’s son and bass player. The problem with being in this band is that the material was never engineered to let the bass player shine, so most of the time Wolf was keeping the rhythm down as Uncle Alex hit the stratosphere. If you need proof however that he’s more than the guy at the left of the stage, check out his full-time work as bassist for Mark Tremonti’s band. Credit must be given to Wolf for taking on what could very well have been the most thankless of tasks: filling the shoes of Michael Anthony.
We won’t get too into the weeds on this. Anthony’s fans and detractors may both have valid reasons for their opinions, but the politics of the Sammy Hagar-fronted years bleed into everything. That iteration of the band, much like the single Gary Cherone edition of Van Halen, is done. And there is every possibility that this version of the band will also drift into the sunset after the tour. We can be glad we had this stellar opportunity to enjoy David Lee Roth as frontman, if that should happen.
Here’s the lingering question: must a band be full of friends? This is something that has vexed music fans for years now, this notion that the interpersonal relationship between bandmembers has to be close and jovial, a brotherhood, and there should never be a hint of a feeling that it was done for the money. And yet, every album to greater or lesser degree, every tour, unless explicitly noted, exists as a business effort. Does that actually affect the music?
A friend and colleague, writer Chris Holmes, once said that it really doesn’t or shouldn’t. Much of what we think of as these blood-bound unions are so full of behind-the-scenes drama that a generous helping of that public chumminess is smoke and mirrors from the start. The final product is untouched, and in the mind of the listening public, the song is the song no matter how many microphones were thrown in the studio.
Or put this way: there is a persistent myth that John Lennon and Paul McCartney mended fences before Lennon’s murder. Beatles fans love that story, and it may well be true. It might be just talk. Does it affect either man’s work, either from the start or over time? Isn’t that a naïve position if that’s the one we cling to?
As stated from the outset, the Van Halen tour and the PNC Arts Center show seemed fraught with reasons to hamper it from even happening. Yet it did, and as far as reunion tours go, this resides in the enthusiastic “keeper” side. If it is to be one of the band’s very last, they go out on the triumphal side and not the tragic side. For anyone whose experience was marred by the thought that Eddie and Dave may not be friends…that’s none of our business.
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