Billy Sheehan: any question

[diamondclaudio]

Billy and Claudio.jpg18221578_1039493019514113_6919307242191655460_n.jpg
Some more...

[diamondclaudio]

Well, Billy is such a nice guy. We chated for 30 minutes. He signed my Sonrisa Salvaje album and gave Agustina, my daughter a signed picture . He invited us to the Mr Big show he ll be soon bringing to Uruguay, and he gaves us his e mail to give us backstage passes. He told us he liked our country and we invited him to get to know our hometown, named Tacuarembo, which is 4oo km away from Montevideo. He said he`d come back in september and would visit us during his days off. He talked a lot about techiques and explained us that s no the most important. Paul Mc Carthney did no waste time studing these technics and has writen amazing songs. He recommended us to play covers like EVH used to, because that will give tools to extract your ideas. There are two albums you must learn to play: Beatles Sargent Pepper and AC DC Back in Black, they condense all musical rock knowledge. After that you may follow his steps.
He has been playing during 50 yeras and the key word is relentless- he even has this word tatooed on his arm-.
There is no impossible in bass nor in life.

[diamondclaudio]

hIS TYPICAL DAY BEGINS AT 4 AM WHEN HIS CAT sPOOKIE WAKES HIM UP so he`d feed it.
After that he spend 4 hours at I tunes, hes got two terabites of music, he fix albums,study their cover art, and try to catch interesting things to play.
After that he goes to the room where he plays, always plugged, from nine to thirteen.
The he have lunch and take a lil nap. The rest of the day he s busy on some musical project, like designing bass props for Yamaha, or playing with his actual band. He sleeps at eleven til the cat strikes again...

[diamondclaudio]

He `s got the skyscraper master, the eat and smile takes, and some crazy from the heat rough stuff. He also got two a show from the eat em and smile era professional filmed. But Dave has the rights, so he is not allowed to release them, neither torrent them. It s not Dave , but the company is terrible about this.
About playing with Dave, he told me that it won t happen this year nor the next. Dave is working with the brothers right now and that means Dave will be busy until 2019. He hopes Dave would call him and do a dozen shows or so. But he thinks that will happen in a couple of years, after the Van Halen act closes.That all folks, as Bugs Bunny says!!!

[diamondclaudio]

P.S: One more thing: About the 1988 split. Dave expected to return to Van Halen in 1988. Everybody was thinking that way, Hagar included. But at the very last moment the reunion collapsed, and Dave wanted to get a new young band , because Steve and Billy were way expensive to keep full time members, and the temporal deal had expired. Skyscraper was supposed to be the last solo album Dave d release. But things changed, and David wanted to start a long term band, so he could release his solo stuff for a decade or so.

[Terry]

P.S: One more thing: About the 1988 split. Dave expected to return to Van Halen in 1988. Everybody was thinking that way, Hagar included. But at the very last moment the reunion collapsed, and Dave wanted to get a new young band , because Steve and Billy were way expensive to keep full time members, and the temporal deal had expired. Skyscraper was supposed to be the last solo album Dave d release. But things changed, and David wanted to start a long term band, so he could release his solo stuff for a decade or so.

About Roth getting back together with Van Halen in 1988, now there's one I'd never heard before.

[FORD]

About Roth getting back together with Van Halen in 1988, now there's one I'd never heard before.

Never heard of that either, but it wouldn't surprise me. Eddie had to be embarrassed by some of the crap on Othisblowsgoats2. Maybe he heard "Damn Good" on the radio and felt a little nostalgic.....

(one of the few reasons I bother to keep that SkyCrapper CD)

[Nickdfresh]

About Roth getting back together with Van Halen in 1988, now there's one I'd never heard before.

I hadn't heard it either. But I recall Dave has said more than once that he felt his departure from Van Halen was a break not dissimilar to Aerosmith carrying on after Joe Perry and Brad Whitford left, and that he had expected them to reunite in relative short order with some sort of reunion similar to Aerosmith's Done With Mirrors/Pump era....

[DavidLeeNatra]

So...we learn that Dave is working with the brothers right now and look at all the excitement here! I've never seen that place going that nuts about =VH= news! Wow...

[FORD]

Considering Dave's been back with the band a full decade now, and they have exactly one studio album, which turned out to be mostly a "Tattoo You" style plunder the vaults and overdub the vocals effort, maybe the shock value has worn off a little.

At this point, the only truly shocking things would be Mike Sobolewski back in the band or a completely new from scratch Van Halen album. Preferrably both, of course.

[Full Bug]

So...we learn that Dave is working with the brothers right now and look at all the excitement here! I've never seen that place going that nuts about =VH= news! Wow...

I'm confused! The front page here says a Van Hagar tour this year! Which is it?

[Terry]

I hadn't heard it either. But I recall Dave has said more than once that he felt his departure from Van Halen was a break not dissimilar to Aerosmith carrying on after Joe Perry and Brad Whitford left, and that he had expected them to reunite in relative short order with some sort of reunion similar to Aerosmith's Done With Mirrors/Pump era....

Well, Dave was always consistent in his interviews in the immediate wake of the 1985 split in terms of not putting down in any way what Van Halen had created on a musical level when Roth was in the band, unlike the rest of Van Halen (including Hagar) who - in print - belittled what Roth had contributed to the group ("Dave has a limited vocal range" "Sammy's just a better singer" "There are no limits to what we can do now that Sammy is in the band" blah blah blah).

I'm not saying Roth didn't tell Billy while Skyscraper was being made that [Roth] thought he would return to Van Halen in fairly short order. It's just odd that Dave would have actually thought that would be true in 1987/1988 in the wake of 5150's commercial success and OU812 having a pretty decent initial success when released: like, why would Dave have even been thinking Van Halen would have wanted him back at THAT point?

[Terry]

Considering Dave's been back with the band a full decade now, and they have exactly one studio album, which turned out to be mostly a "Tattoo You" style plunder the vaults and overdub the vocals effort, maybe the shock value has worn off a little.

At this point, the only truly shocking things would be Mike Sobolewski back in the band or a completely new from scratch Van Halen album. Preferrably both, of course.

Good comparison to the Tattoo You-style revamping of old recordings re: ADKOT.

About the only thing left that Van Halen COULD do to really get me psyched would be Anthony returning to the fold and a proper, full-length CVH album of new material. It's really what the band SHOULD do at this point.

That being the case, naturally it won't happen. Much like with Roth back in the fold, what the band SHOULD have done was release a CVH live audio/video box set. What we got for our troubles was (shudder) Live At The Tokyo Dome...

It would have been so easy for the band to have gotten it right at any point in the last 21 years, because the solution was THAT simple:

CVH lineup, new album, tour

Van Halen being what it became post-1985, naturally the group took the long way around the barn, found itself short on definitive members, wasted more time futzing around and eventually came up with a 75% solution that couldn't deliver the goods:

It's 2007. Mike is gone, Wolf looks out of place, Ed's fucked up, Dave is on point

It's 2012. New album of reworked demos, Wolf is fitting in better, Ed's sober and playing well, Dave's off point.

It's 2015. Here's a live album nobody asked for, all three Van Halens are playing well, Dave is trending downhill.

It's like, can you guys just unfuck yourselves, get Mike back, record a new album and give us one final CVH tour? Sooner rather than later? Like, say, in 2018? A 40th Anniversary tour. Take the next 6 months, write and record a new record, then take the following 4 months and rehearse while the venues are being booked. Then do a 3 month summer tour. Then, call it a day. Bring it all back home and go out how you started.

[FORD]

It's always possible that Eddie and/or Alex might have called Dave first to attempt to work things out with him. Van Hagar was certainly commercially successful at the time, but at what cost? Maybe they really hated writing cheese ballads after all. Or it might have been their manager Ed Leffler, who was Hagar's manager before he joined the band, came in with him, and no doubt took his side if there were any disputes within the band. From what I remember, Leffler managed to get the band a higher royalty rate from Warner Brothers in the late 80s. Maybe he did that to stay on the brothers' good side? He must have done something right because Van Hagar didn't really start falling apart until after he died in 1993.

[Dan]

Im Naked.

Hello Everyone.

Roth On.