Sorry Dave for all the horrible things I've said on here, that was cool
fuck your fucking framing
Good show.
Never was overly wild about the Skyscraper album or the Crazy From The Heat Ep, but there were several CVH tunes in the set, and the energy level was high. The backing vocals were good, the keyboards weren't overly dominant on the guitar-centric tunes.
I mean, this was Roth still at essentially the peak of his powers in terms of the overall frontman package he represented when he was at his best. Highly athletic, adept at getting a crowd riled up, entertaining and the lead vocals were basically what they needed to be. You can see some signs of the athleticism and the high-end screams beginning to wane, but the essence of what he brought to CVH was still very much intact.
Plus, you get the steel drums, the boxing ring over the middle of the crowd, the surfboard going over the top of the floor seats. A good-sized arena and because of the production and staging virtually everybody in the audience gets to feel like they were in the middle of the action. Just 90 minutes of start to finish high energy rock. Not too much concert time wasted on instrumental solo wankfests.
Roth's career was reaching the end of its commercial peak here, but he was still going string and delivering the goods.
Scramby eggs and bacon.
Can't believe there wasn't an "official" DVD of this tour ever released. Only thing pro-shot I've ever seen is that 90 second clip of "I've Just Seen a Face" from a show in Japan.
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
Dave could have done so much better than Vai...
I find it very interesting that the supposed guitar player Dave had in mind was Steve Stevens, who said no but recommended Vai, if i'm remembering the story events version correctly. I saw Idol/Stevens last year and he is a hell of a guitar player. Loved his Atomic Playboys cd and he elevated Vince Neil. What an interesting combo DLR/Stevens would have made because he is a guitar player that has so many textures and layers......
This was during Vai's 'David Copperfield' onstage phase which continued for a few years until he calmed it down a fucking bit.
Some of the sheer 80sness is nuts in this, the Easy Street walk at 24 mins?
This wouldn't haven't been the same kind of show nowadays with YouTube and the interweb, you were genuinely shocked when a boxing ring came down.
Nowadays Tickemaster would be charging a $30 premium for ringside seats...
Stevens is thanked in the liner notes of either EEAS or Skyscraper, I can't remember which one. There was a small article in Guitar World about Sheehan and Stevens getting together after Sheehan left Dave's band. I remember Sheehan saying "I've got a new Steve and Steve's got a new Billy!"
When Warner Bros wanted to sign Stevens he told them that he wanted the deal Prince got: full control. I like Atomic Playboys but it wasn't that successful. I always wondered if WB made Stevens and Neil work together instead of taking a chance on having two unsuccessful projects.
Found this Neil/Stevens show on YouTube a couple weeks ago. Note the Peavey backline and the EBMM EVH. Supposedly EVH sent a truckload of gear to Stevens when Neil opened for VHagar.
Writing In All Proper Case Takes Extra Time, Is Confusing To Read, And Is Completely Pointless.
Who ever said (s)he's not right about me?
Yes, Lynch would have been a much better choice, as would have Stevens. However, I'd have preferred he went with a relative unknown, that wasn't a soloist. Dave chose flash over substance. Vai sucks at rhythms and hooks. The reason the majority of his music doesn't have vocals, is because he sucks at writing for/with a vocalist and vocals in mind.
Vai was relatively unknown until the dave gig unless you were a Zappa Alcatraz fan.
And not many people were ...... and fuck off with the George lynch , he probably couldn't get in the George lynch band you potato
Yeah, but that was part of the greatness about what Roth did back then, production-wise.
I mean, for the 1984 VH gig, I wasn't particularly close to the stage, but the production aspect of the show was literally so huge it didn't matter: it overwhelmed you all the way to the rear of the arena.
Same thing for this Skyscraper gig: the sheer size and bombast of all of it draws you in regardless of wherever you sit. Including the elevated platforms on the sides of the stage.
Oh, yeah, for sure these days the boxing ring and surfboard aspects would have been leaked...probably via bootlegged pre-tour rehearsal footage even before the fucking tour started! Juxtapose that with the 1984 show, where at the end the lighting rigs turn over and the numbers '1984' are displayed in a massive blast of white light. Nobody knew that was going to happen, and the show I saw was several weeks into the tour.
Yeah, Ticketmaster was charging premium prices for those sitting inside the ring on the floor seating closest to the stage in 2007-2008. Like, upwards of $400 a ticket. I mean, honestly, I'm glad I got to see the vast bulk of the bands I wanted to see in the 1980s and early 1990s. In a 10 year span I saw...what...easily 2 dozen gigs. And bands in their fucking 80s prime. Maiden on their Powerslave tour. Dio twice with the lineup on the first 3 Dio solo albums. Ozzy twice. Rush on the Signals tour. Scorpions on the Love At First Sting tour. Priest on the Defenders of the Faith tour. The vast bulk of those gigs, tix were around $13 a pop.
Like, I remember the ticket prices for the Jacksons 1984 Victory tour were set at $25, which was I think the highest base ticket price for ANY concert up to that point (and was a significant jump up from what other tours were charging...like, I think I paid $15 for my Van Halen 1984 tour ticket at the local record store ticket outlet, which included nominal taxes, fees and surcharges), and people were losing their fucking minds over the cost.
Am going to see X's 40th Anniversary tour in Orlando in a couple weeks at a small, non-descript club, and ticket prices are STARTING at $30. For a fairly obscure old niche LA punk band...at a small club!
And I'll tell you something: ticket prices are probably now ten times the price they were in the 1980s. I get inflation to a point, but there's nothing these bands are bringing to these tours now that is substantively any better than what they were thirty years ago (in most cases, these bands have gotten slower and less energetic with age). Certainly not ten times better!
Put it this way. I paid $50 for my ticket to the 1989 Rolling Stones Steel Wheels show from a scalper in the parking lot at what was then known as Sullivan Stadium, where the New England Patriots played. I thought THAT was fucking expensive, but hey...it's the Rolling Stones we're talking about. Last Stones stadium tour, people are paying $600+ for prime tickets via a LEGITIMATE TICKET OUTLET! Not Stubhub or some "ticket broker"...
It's fucking nuts. Ain't NO band worth that money to me, but I guess it's how much you want to see it.
I mean, fuck, if CVH announces a 2018 tour, I wouldn't pay more than $100 a pop to see it, and that's one show I've been salivating for since 1996.
I remember reading that Steve Stevens decllined, because he was happy working with Billy Idol. And then they only made one more record together, before a breakup of about 20 years or so. After hearing the cover version of "Jump" from a recent Idol tour, I can imagine Stevens would have been a great fit with Dave. He probably should have asked him again before he made the YLFM record (love it for what it was, but Lord knows it could have been better)
No doubt on a technical level Steve Vai has always been a monster.
Far as my own tastes go, Vai's guitar tone on the 2 DLR records he was on was overall a bit too plastic-sounding, if that makes any sense. Way too much distortion/overdrive and high end in terms of the eq frequencies. Am not talking about what he was playing note-wise, but just the sound of it.
The other part of my problem with Vai on the Roth stuff is that on virtually every track he was just...uncontrollable, really. No sense of self-restraint. It kind of made sense within the context of Roth's style of high energy rock to a degree, but sometimes it didn't always serve the songs well. Take, like, Elephant Gun, Big Trouble, Bump N' Grind: the solos are just a blitz of Vai playing as many notes as fast as he can. It's almost as if Vai was thinking he had to try and better what Eddie Van Halen had done with Roth, but all Vai seemed to have gleaned from Eddie's playing was the speed aspect of what Eddie was doing. Was this Roth telling Vai to do this kind of stuff? Other tunes like Ladies Night In Buffalo?, Goin' Crazy and Tobacco Road demonstrated Vai utilizing his mastery of technique to craft solos that were an addition to the songs, rather than a wankfest that was impressive the first time around but less so with each subsequent spin. Like, the Goin' Crazy solo was really quite good: memorable, melodic and not an ounce of overkill in terms of showing off. Contrast that with Big Trouble, where I really like the tune, but the solo is just a shredfest for the sake of it and detracts from the tune.
It's like, Vai knew he was the shit but he was - despite all his showmanship bravado and bluster- in a way insecure about what he was doing with Roth, so he was cramming everything and the kitchen sink into every space he could and just going beyond over the top with the solos...and kind of coming off as an unintentionally humorous parody of the limited stereotype people were defining Eddie's playing as by the time 1985 rolled around.
And honestly, even at the time, watching Vai mugging his way through those videos and performances with Roth (making the typical guitar hero facial expressions and then taking THOSE to the nth degree)...I mean, no doubt my jaw dropped when I first gave EEAS a spin far as the guitar playing went, but WATCHING Vai perform with Roth was laughable at times.
By the time Vai went to Whitesnake, his solos were (despite the fact that I wasn't nearly as good as him then on a technical level...and am STILL not as good to this day) just yawn-inducing. Like, great, ANOTHER 100 miles an hour guitar solo complete with trademarked Steve Vai facial contortions!! Vai always kinda struck me as someone who wasn't totally 100% comfortable limiting himself to hard rock music. Which is fine, because for someone with his abilities I suppose 1980s American hard rock WOULD be a fairly limited genre.
Last edited by Terry; 04-28-2017 at 11:51 PM.
Make no mistake about it. Vai's look and antics, were all Dave inspired. Dave was "The Boss", and they were doing it his way. Dave has been his own worst enemy in many ways, since day 1. That trend continued with EEAS, and continues to this day.
Well, I don't quite know if I agree with the entirety of what you said.
If anything, to hear how people who were around the band when they were playing the parties and clubs in the mid-1970s tell it, Roth wasn't much of a singer or a showman. Many thought Roth's antics, conventional vocal weaknesses and attitude were somehow not up to par with what the Van Halens were doing.
I'd say what Roth did eventually worked well enough for him basically through Skyscraper. After that, a big shift in musical tastes caused Dave's support to wane: 5 years on from Van Halen, it appears to me that a many of Roth's fans who had been there the previous decade had sort of moved onto other musical interests.
I'd say after ALAE, THEN one could make the case that Roth's seemingly at times random approach to his career hurt him. Couple that with the 1996 biz, the combined effect was that of making Dave look sorta washed up.
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