Nah, you are in the majority there.Originally Posted by vandeleur
Nah, you are in the majority there.
RIDE TO LIVE, LIVE TO RIDE
LET `EM ROLL ONE MORE TIME
If you'd kept your mom off the streets none of us would have had a chance at her... just sayin'...
The best way to solve it is to take 3 blank c.d.s and make a your own best of from all his albums. Worked for me !
I agree with your thoughts to a T.
Plus, he's only a bass player...
hahaha... laughing my ass off.
I still like *some of Skyscraper. I do remember thinking it was a bit cheesy and lotsa synth. But I never listened to much after that
ah..ha. now that is a great idea.
very true. sometimes i hear those 80's bands today and it's pretty disgusting how watered down and bad they got after 1986 or so.
I hear ya. As much as I loved Cinderella, listening to that stuff today reveals how much they sounded like AC/DC with Zeppelin-like production values. So essentially, I liked what I thought they sounded like, as opposed to the band's own inerrant qualities. And when they ran out of ideas about halfway through their second album, I pretty much gave up and moved on, sending me back to The Replacements and Husker Du.
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”― Stephen Hawking
Well, YFLM has a lot of good stuff and some stuff I can take or leave ... but I'd say 'Big Train' kicks more ass than what I think is pretty cliched stuff like 'It's Showtime'. I not that interested in how technically good Becker was as a player, he just never did anything for me. By the time ALAE came out I thought "another gunslinger", cos after a while there's only so much post-Eddie Van Halen guitar playing that you can listen to if the songs aren't there.
There's plenty DLR solo stuff that I'd take over a coupla tracks on ADKOT - namely, 'As Is', 'Chinatown', and 'Honeybabysweetydoll' all of which might be great instrumentals workouts, and Ed kicks ass on them, but they fall short as songs, and for me CVH's big strength (and where they stand the test of time) is that they wrote better songs than all those other bands who followed them.
Wouldn't mind seeing VH play a few DLR tunes onstage, but of course it will never happen.
THINK LIKE THE WAVES
Best solo album Dave did after EEAS was DLR Band in my book. I'd take that over ALAE any day of the week.
My karma just ran over your dogma.
Very true, plus, even though the majority of us didn't have all of the club days bootlegs when the 6 pack came out, you can listen to the songs from the first 3 albums and just tell these were crafted by a foursome that played them hundreds of times in clubs before they were recorded. All of the interplay of Dave's vocal flourishes within the rhythms of the songs tells that these songs were on the stove for some time before they were recorded. While the 3 ADKOT songs you mentioned stand as great and enjoyable tunage, they lack that characteristic of being "wood shed" created, to use Dave's term, by the rhythm section and the singer all at once.
I agree with everything, except As Is kicks ass in every way possible...
And I'd like to hear a Van Halenized Big Train live...
Too bad MA is MIA...
I always thought that tune sounded like something Dave had been carrying around, lyrically at least, since his first VH stint. Just something about it.
I'd love to hear this version of VH do Flex. Don't know that I'd ever want to hear Ed playing a Vai tune. That would just get all weird.
Bump and Grind would be good, but Dave couldn't sing it...
Funny the taste people have. I think those 3 songs are the best on the album. I think they rip ! They sound the best produced or mixed to me. And the rest are not even close in my book. Maybe Blood & Fire. But that is old music. Sadly the mix of the album hurts some of the other stuff for me. Like Bullethead. A favorite unreleased song of mine that finally see's the light of day and the mix is off. Still happy it's on there but some of the energy is lost.
Agreed. Ed seems buried on that one in particular (and Big River and Beats Workin', and Blood And Fire..) turn up the goddamn guitar!
The problem I have with Sheehan is that he stated more than once that the album's final print was essentially over produced and wasn't raw and hard enough. That's fine, but Jesus, he was in Mr. Big and had no problem on slickly produced powerballad radio-whore songs later on...
Exactly. It was the bands like Mr. Big that contributed to the late 80's demise of hard rock music. You can only be saigon kicked in the balls for so long before you stop buying the shit.
Reminds me of this trifecta:
Mr. Big
Extreme
Saigon Kick
3 bands that effectively tore my face off with their live performance (guitar-wise for the most part) that attained commercial success with sap! I still remember going to those shows and picking out of the crowd who was there to sing along with To Be With You, More Than Words and Love Is On The Way, then leave.
Uuugh. My band opened for those jugheads sometime in the late 1990s, and you'll never meet a group of more drugged out, overly ego-ed twits in the music business. For one thing, the drummer's kit was comprised of bits and pieces from three separate and mismatching sets, all held together with twine, duct tape and hope. The bastards refused to allow us a sound check, yet spent an additional 45 minutes or so getting further loaded in their caravan, which consisted of a Ford F150 pick up with a camper shell stapled to it and a beat up station wagon. These dorks wouldn't even allow us to put up our stage banner, yet spent the evening playing Black Sabbath and Zeppelin covers.
Reading the writing on the wall, I would soon quit the music business completely a short time later.
Isn't it funny how many bands actually had decent guitarists but chose to appeal rather than apply. Nuno from Extreme was always a heralded guy as was the guitarist for White Lion.
I think Extreme are the exception here. Yeah, they had a big hit with a ballad, but wasn't a power-ballad; and lyrically they were very different from the sex/drugs/rock'n'roll of most the hair metal stuff.
By the time of 'Three Sides To Every Story', they weren't particualry commercial at all.
As a side note, I think Nuno is one of the truly great rock guitar players. His riffs are just ridiculous........
The Power Of The Riff Compels Me
During that time period, trust me - some of them didn't have a choice. Record companies were demanding soundalikes. When I was working in the industry in the 90s, A & R guys would introduce a new band with "These guys are OUR (insert other currently popular band name)."
Some of them were all about the schlock and gleefully played along, true - but some had no choice but to try to write songs that sounded like either their less-than rockin' ballad that happened to be a hit, or some other band entirely...
I'm pretty certain that you and I both chewed a lot of the same dirt. At that time, nobody, from the artists to management, from the road crew to the caterers, knew which way was up. We literally had guys telling us we need to sound more like Creed one week, then telling us to sound less like Creed the next week.
The compromised results haven't changed much since then, which explains why bands like Nickleback and thinly disguised pop bands "playing" so-called country music have a following today. Remember, through some sordid and very evil media brainwashing, a handful of people once took Vanilla Ice seriously, too.
Yeah, i see your point. Extreme just never appealed to me whether it was Kid Ego, Get the Funk Out or Whole in My Heart. I do think Nuno is a talented player. Maybe we should take Extreme out and throw in Danger Danger or Tora Tora or shitty shitty...etc.
I've sung praise for Nuno here before, so I won't get off on that tangent again, but that guy's best work is outside of Extreme.
Hmmm. Must have been the post Jason Beiler incarnation, which had no right trying to exist. My band opened up for them in '95 and they were pretty tight. I liked the two SK CDs with Jason doing lead vocals. Their out on the road with the original singer again. I'm not wasting any dough on that though.
That's one thing I learned doing music marketing... there is a segment of the population that will buy exactly what (and whatever) they're TOLD to... which explains Justin Bieber currently...
Schizophonic's a great solo album!
I always thought the reason for ALAE's lackluster sales, and Dave's fall in general was that he had a phenomenal band in VH, then he was gone from VH and had another phenomenal band. There was a lot of finger pointing between Roth and VH and in short order Dave lost another phenomenal band. I think the casual fans out there just threw up their hands and said, this guy is a joke and he looked like an asshole. That combined with all these other factors that have been mentioned...well it just didn't go. Then the tour was replacements, the hairline was going, the squeal was gone. It was a perfect storm. But I really think it was how DLR looked after losing Vai and Sheehan. My two cents.
I think that had a lot too do with it. But by 91 80's rock wasn't getting the airplay it had, or video's played anymore. Some of they early mid 80's hits were, but Grunge hit so fast after Nirvana it just steamrolled everyone for the most part. Gun's was still in demand. & Metallica (even though they were never a hair band ). I think the only way Van Halen survived sometimes was the Right Now video took off and got so big. And Eddie. I don't think Balance sold that well. It didn't have the big hit on it really. Sure they still were playing way bigger place's than Dave, but I really think it was the band name & Eddie drawing people more than the songs on the last few albums with Hag.
Dave's voice is perfect on ALAE. Perfect raspiness and booming sound.
Far and away his best album. I can't understand how anyone thinks it's a weak album.
Because it sounds like Dave trying to do mainstream corporate rock garbage penned by a comittee...
That's not to say I don't like most of it...
Actually, that's how I described SkyCrapper (for the most part)
Eat Us And Smile
Cenk For America 2024!!
Justice Democrats
"If the American people had ever known the truth about what we (the BCE) have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and lynched." - Poppy Bush, 1992
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