Great story.
Posted on 10/13/2020 2:55:42 PM PDT by billorites
This was a tough one.
At a formative time in my life, Edward Van Halen went out of his way to befriend me, show me guitar techniques, invite me and my dad to his home, show me his recording studio, chat with me about life, and even give me one of his famous striped red guitars.
I was a seventeen year old nobody. He was the world's biggest rock star. It was spring 1986. My dad's band, Bachman-Turner Overdrive (BTO), was opening for Van Halen on their "5150" tour. I was in high school at the time, but as Dad could never see the point of school when there was rock-and-rolling to be done, he called one day to ask if I wanted to ditch school to fly out and hang with him on the Van Halen tour for a few weeks.
It was the easiest question in human history to answer: Yes, I want to ditch school and go on tour with Van Halen. Just thinking about it felt like a dream. I'd spent most of the past few years trying to learn how to play Edward's guitar parts on "Eruption", "Spanish Fly", "Hot for Teacher", "Ice Cream Man", "Cathedral" (which I played at the church talent show), and dozens of other pieces. And Van Halen was the biggest band in the world at the time; every 20, 30, 40,000 seat date on the tour was sold out. The new album with Sammy was Number One on the Billboard charts. The three singles off the album were either smashes already or on their way.
Even better, this was the eighties—you know, when the world was still fun. There was light. There was laughter. There was big hair and acid-washed denim, just because, dammit. You could still make jokes
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
Great story.
Girls were still mostly cheerful and cute and sexy; they weren’t the lost, hard, paranoid, alternately self-loathing/self-worshipping communist nihilists they are now.
Most accurate sentence I have read in a long time
“...you know, when the world was still fun. ..”
It was indeed.
And for me, growing up learning from Clapton, Page, Blackmore, and being a 17 year old kid when Eddie erupted onto the stage, it was ANOTHER style to learn and master, the “Shred” as we called it.
You were a good one, Eddie. We’ll not forget you, and the music you made to make us all smile.
Rest in Peace, brother.
Ping to a good story.
“communist nihilists”
Lol, that’s funny. Reminds me of the fake action hero from the Simpsons, McBain, always getting attacked by the “commie-nazis”.
No, not too bitter!
Canadian rockers, eh?
good read!! Thanks
The truth hurts, I see.
Exactly, eh?
The highlight of the day was Van Halen who had just released their first album, I thought they were quite good, they really brought the house down. We left after Van Halen's appearance and I read in the newspaper later that another new artist took the stage that day after we left, a guy named Prince. The article said he was booed off the stage.
I enjoyed this article. Nice to see that Tal is one of the good guys.
On a related note, I just learned that Eric Carmen is, too.
It took me about 20 years to warm to Prince, but he certainly won me over.
What a nice eulogy!
17 and on the road with a rock band? (oh to have been a fly on the wall...) His story reminds me a bit of the movie “Almost Famous”.
DLR said it best: “In the 80’s the people smiled, the clothes smiled, the music smiled.”
You want to wax nostalgic about the 80s, look up “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” on YouTube.
Yeah...all that and they also dress like men!
Was that the one where VH “allegedly” parachuted into the stadium?
I don’t remember that. There was a strong smell of pot in the air though.
“His story reminds me a bit of the movie “Almost Famous”.
Yes, at first I thought he was that guy (saw an excerpt over at Instapundit). That was kind of a cute movie, sweeter than I expected it to be, iirc.
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