http://www.vhnd.com/2018/11/02/eddie...ave-play-2019/
https://twitter.com/AtlanticTheater/...62579115921408
The story is supposed to be Ed & Dave's. Both roles will be taken by actresses...
WTF? :biggrin:
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http://www.vhnd.com/2018/11/02/eddie...ave-play-2019/
https://twitter.com/AtlanticTheater/...62579115921408
The story is supposed to be Ed & Dave's. Both roles will be taken by actresses...
WTF? :biggrin:
Seems appropriate to have both characters portrayed by women... emotionally, they conducted themselves publicly far more feminine than masculine.
Good GAWD, the 80's so need to die.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ZahZoo
Certainly post-1985 split, with all the comments in the press toward one another.
Seems obvious... Ed whining and crying like a butt-hurt school girl. Dave pulling off high school cheerleader stunts and prancing around in tights like fucking TinkerBell... hell, all they need is the real Bette Midler to fill the Sammy Hagar role and they'll have a Broadway hit!!
One positive thing that came out of the 2007 reunion is (for the most part) not having to hear Roth and Eddie bitching about each other in the press.Quote:
Originally Posted by ZahZoo
The downside is Hagar acting like a menopausal second ex wife, pissing and moaning about how his husband got back together with his first wife. Yet even though the whole Roth vs. Hagar biz is something as a fan I tired of ages ago, I paradoxically still derive a small degree of pleasure reading Hagar's comments as to how badly he wants another Van Hagar reunion. That small degree is kind of overshadowed by a feeling of pity toward Hagar. It's like, Van Halen with Dave is all done. The band may well opt to do another tour with Roth or whatever, but he has just gotten worse from 2012 onward, and his advancing age isn't going to prove helpful. It's not 1985 anymore, when it felt like there was unfinished business.
Thus, while I have really no use for 99.9% of Hagar's output spanning the entire length of his career - including Montrose - which is to say I don't hate the guy but the vast bulk of his output does nothing for me (his music for the most part doesn't even elicit a reaction of dislike, but rather "meh"), I say why not do another Van Halen reunion tour with Sammy? Fuck it. Give Hagar another whirl fronting the band. Van Halen...in terms of who is fronting them, it makes no difference anymore. Back in the day, of course it did make a difference. Now? No difference, because the band is done anyway, even if they opt to tour periodically.
It would be a different case if the band had become re-energized creatively with the return of Roth. I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for the 2007/2008 tour, letting that be a greatest hits setlist. It seemed like the band was on track with ADKOT...at least, until the album was released. 4 years reunited, and half of the album is reworked demos from the 1970s? Since ADKOT being released, we got 2 tours and a live album nobody asked for. That is the sum total of the last 7 years. Hagar rejoining now wouldn't be disrupting some creative hot streak Roth and Eddie have going in terms of new material. Sammy can rejoin the band, and Dave can do his off-key one-off benefit performances, complete with dancing girls young enough to be his great-granddaughters. After Hagar gets his tour, the band can always go back to Dave.
It's clear that Roth rejoining isn't going to result in Fair Warning 2. At THIS stage, it doesn't even look likely that we'll get ADKOT 2.
Does anybody here REALLY give much of a shit anymore if Roth is sidelined so Hagar can do a tour with the band?
It would appear few care that Roth is sidelined by a band too lazy to work... maybe it's more accurate to say sidelined by a contract with a band too lazy to work. Dave needs to green light the release of the John 5 project material. What's does he have to lose..?
At least if Van Halen did something with Hagar or anyone for that matter, the fans might have something to be entertained with. At present, there's more dead artists producing musical releases than the alleged "living" members of one of the most iconic rock bands of our time. That's pretty pathetic to be out performed by the deceased... man, talk about weak spirited and still breathing...
I have no idea as to what the specifics are with Roth's employment status with Van Halen. If it has all been on a tour-by-tour/project-by-project basis since 2006, or if Roth and the Van Halens get together and strategize what they're doing...like, if they regularly communicate with each other when they aren't working for multi-year stretches between tours. Or if Roth is contractually constrained from actively pursuing solo interests without informing the band and having the consent of the Van Halens.
It wouldn't surprise me if there are no such constraints but Roth just defers in order to keep the peace. I mean, the fact of the matter is Roth's last two full length solo releases in 1998 and 2003 sold bupkis. Less than 100,000 copies each. There certainly isn't a lucrative market for a DLR solo album, so why jeapordize what he has going with Van Halen? Roth isn't going to be selling out 12,000 seaters on the strength of his name alone, but Van Halen presumably still can. I can't imagine at his age that Roth wants to put out a solo album nobody will buy and go on the road playing small venues to try and promote it, which was more or less the strategy between 1999 and 2006. Not when he can front Van Halen.
But, yeah, Van Halen don't want to work hard anymore. Because they don't have to. Van Halen now is a cush gig. They show up, churn out the hits, rehearse several deep cuts for each tour, collect their guarantees, then fuck back off into their respective hidey holes. Maybe all of that is the payoff for all the hard work they put in for the first twenty years of their existence.
I mean, I'd like to hear the John 5 material, too. From where Roth is sitting, though, it might not even be sensible to release it in terms of his semi-regular day job with Van Halen and the economics of putting it out: why bother when nobody is going to buy it, and why bother putting it up online for free?
I think it's time to break out of the big record company paradigm when it comes to music releases... I suspect Roth and the Van Halens are still locked into that business model mindset.
There's thousands of artists releasing new albums of material and it doesn't cost much... under 5 figures even with studio time included. There's no need for any huge distribution deals with CD's and Vinyl only being optional at this phase. Roth & John 5 have all the necessary legal/publishing resources already in hand... it takes little effort/cost to publish via streaming/download sources. They don't even need some big Live Nation tour to support it... hell, a few small shows in LA, NY, Vegas... have some fun and be back home doing nothin in no time. Just do it because it's what artists do...
I do wonder what the premise of this "play" content is... A Train Wreck in Pasadena...
I was thinking along the same lines when ADKOT came out, in that while it was kinda neat for a geezer like myself to see tv ads for the album and tour, I often wondered why the band felt it was necessary to sign to a label by the time 2012 rolled around and have a producer, seeing as the band does have a studio at their disposal. Unless signing with a label and having an outside producer was just a way of doing it in a somewhat neutral manner in order to keep the peace between the Van Halens and Roth, in addition to distribution. Or if, as you say, Roth and the Van Halens are just mentally locked into the traditional way of doing things.
I had sort of mentally spitballed a scenario where the band recorded ADKOT themselves, then paid a company to produce however many copies of the cd the band would want at a given time. Like, say, start by producing 250,000 of them. Take that product on the road and sell the cds at the shows as well as on the official band website direct to the customers, if you are determined to go the cd route. When the initial pressing gets close to selling out, manufacture more copies as needed. I'm sure that would have pissed off some record companies who were being cut out of their chunk of the profits, and even if Van Halen didn't give a shit about that, I'm sure various record companies would have given Azoff an earful.
It's obviously a very broad outline, and I don't know all the angles business-wise of the record industry, but it was creative thinking along those lines that the band could have pursued.
Now there is no CD. Who wants a CD?
That leaves streaming which pays ludicrously low money and vinyl which I guess they will sell a few but it's a strange market. There are some smaller bands able to tour internationally on vinyl sales as merch which I love exists but it's kind of niche I think and often a hipster/doom metal type thing.
I doubt there would be a huge difference between Van Halen doing it themselves via a distributor or record company at that/this point. The money is in the live tickets and merch for Van Halen. At some point Eddie did seem to be confused by this, I don't know if he still is. He thought that because he didn't make millions from selling albums then that somehow made there to be no point in making them and that they had no value. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how music works now. I guess it must be further confused when you are playing arenas and get much less feedback from the new stuff but without any new stuff you become a nostalgia act.
It's a weird and difficult road to walk but it's hard to feel super sorry for multi millionaires that can still clear 100 grand a night or whatever it is for doing what is a fun hobby for most.
I just bought a CD, NIN Badwitch, for less than $8 on Amazon and that includes the MP3s as well....
Well, I find it hard to feel super sorry for the Van Halens.Quote:
Originally Posted by Seshmeister
I can overlook 1985. It wasn't working anymore. Won't even speculate with if it could have been worked out, or who was to blame or whatever.
The Hagar years were what they were. Ed has his fair share of the responsibility for turning the band into a 2nd rate synth pop act: Hagar doesn't bear that burden all by himself in my book.
Since 1995, the Van Halens have specialized in fucking up a sure thing. The sure thing being getting Roth back in the band while the members were still able to do something other than churn out oldies. By the time the Van Halens came around to Roth in 2006, it wasn't because they really wanted to. It was because they wouldn't get any sort of tour guarantees without Roth. Not after the 2004 Hagar debacle. Eventually, Ed got cleaned up, which can only be a positive thing.
I've said it more than once, but it STILL feels weird to me that this band that could do no wrong up until 1985 has spent the last 20 years getting precious little right.
Van Halen ended in 1996. Really all the name has been since is a corporation, nothing more. Need a little cash ? Sell something with stripes. Need a ton of cash ? Grab flavor of the year singer and cash in with some kid on bass. I guess the 07/08 tour was decent. A.D.K.O.T. was a good effort. After that ? With Dave's vocal issues no new music to speak of its kind of like whatever. Ed still can play well but does anyone really care in 2018 ? I'm kind of amazed you bother to put so much thought into these guys anymore. They don't even do it......Quote:
Originally Posted by Terry
Yep. Been told by more than one person here that I seem to give more of a shit about the band than they do. Felt it was a shame that Dave rejoining the band didn't lead to more on the creative front. I would have preferred more new music to the touring.Quote:
Originally Posted by 78/84 guy
Oh well.
Newsday has a write-up on the play:
https://www.newsday.com/entertainmen...way-1.26325501