Thursday, September 30, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury
Replay: Van Halen, Women and Children First
It was 1980, and technology was primitive. I had one of those tinny cassette players that lay flat on a table and had a plastic handle on one end. KFM, then an album rock station (an extinct species), announced that it would broadcast Van Halen's new record in its entirety. As a VH fanatic with limited funds, I had only one option: Record the station's broadcast on my tape player. I ordered my little brother to leave me alone for half an hour and closed my bedroom door. At the appointed time, I brought the cassette player's microphone up close to the radio speaker and hit the red record button.
That bootlegged copy of Women and Children First served me well. In fact, I relied on it for several years. The recording wasn't great, but it didn't matter: Eddie Van Halen's guitar pyrotechnics and David Lee Roth's rock god antics came through loud and clear.
Women and Children First was Van Halen's third album and arguably its best. The band's first first two albums are hard rock classics, but on its third disc it exhibits total confidence in its ability to enthrall listeners. The album's nine tracks may represent the best example in rock history of a band reveling in its charisma, talent and the utter coolness of standing atop the rock 'n' roll mountain. Almost everything about the album is gratuitous, yet the performers are so good at what they do that it almost never grates.
"And the Cradle Will Rock" kicks things off with Roth relating a classic tale of a young man at loose ends who finds his calling in rock 'n' roll. It's a theme that runs throughout the album. "Everybody Wants Some" is a jumble of a composition, really, but VH pulls it off, even Roth's play-acting in the middle ("I like the way the line runs up the back of their stockings. ... No, no, no, don't take 'em off. ... Yeah, that's it, a little more to the right.") "Romeo Delight" is a rock 'n' roll buffet, shifting smoothly from rollicking boogie to roller-coaster solo to intricate interlude ("Feel my heartbeat") and building back to a ram-jam conclusion. "Baby, please, I can't take it anymore," DLR pleads, and you believe him. But perhaps the album's highlight is "Fools," during which Eddie Van Halen and Roth basically fool around with their respective instruments for the first third of the song before launching into a midtempo headbang-fest. Roth had an uncanny ability to reach the hearts and minds of his teenage fans: "My teachers all gave up on me/ No matter what they say, I disagree."
The album closes with the folky "Could This Be Magic?" and the earnest, radio-friendly "In a Simple Rhyme," reflecting the band's ability to drop the pose and delve in the finer points of pop. VH could do no wrong there for a while.--Geoff Schumacher
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Originally Posted by katie
