Dave & Dave Unchained VH Podcast

[Nitro Express]

Oh, to be sure. I enjoyed EEAS. Skyscraper a bit less. I liked ALAE. YFLM had a few good tracks on it.

On a personal level, even though I found Dave's solo output from 1985-1993 uneven, on the whole I enjoyed it far more than what Van Halen did from 1986-1995...very little of which I enjoyed, and what I did enjoy tended to be restricted to what Eddie was doing. Even with Hagar in the band, Eddie still managed to come up with a couple of things I liked from a guitar standpoint on each Van Hagar album.

None of which is to say that Van Halen with Hagar didn't have a pretty good degree of commercial success. While they didn't sell as many albums as they did with Dave, it'd be disingenuous to claim - whatever my personal taste - that Van Halen with Hagar was a flop strictly in commercial terms.

Commercial success doesn’t mean it was good. All that means is it got a lot of airplay and if you bought enough advertising in Billboard you got it. That’s how shit becomes a hit.

[Nitro Express]

As far as the question of Al's involvement in the VH songwriting..... these guys seem to think Al is the one who helped Eddie "shape" the riffs into songs. Al may have had a part in that, but he clearly didn't do it on his own, or else the songs on VDIII wouldn't have been such a fucking mess. Van HALEN songs & Van Hagar songs were "shaped" somewhat differently, which obviously means Dave & played a major part in that "shaping".

Ed was a great riff writer but a horrible song writer. He was spectacular inside a very narrow band of expertise. He needed other’s to make great songs and Dave had a big part to play there but also the producer had a huge role. Ted Templeman had a lot to do with what we grew up listening to.

[Nickdfresh]

Mitch Malloy was in Great White?? I thought Great White didn't exist without their Robert Plant wannabe singer? And I can't even remember that guy's name, so that tells you how memorable he was. They really should have given up after the fire.

David Coverdale? When was Vai with them? After their hits period I think...

[twonabomber]

Vai was '89 to '90.

I think FORD is calling Jack Russell a Plant clone.

[Terry]

Commercial success doesn’t mean it was good. All that means is it got a lot of airplay and if you bought enough advertising in Billboard you got it. That’s how shit becomes a hit.

Hence my comment "strictly in commerical terms."

Personally, I had very little use for what followed after Roth left the band, so even if Van Halen HAD sold more records with Hagar it wouldn't have made a lick of difference to me. It certainly wouldn't have made me reassess Van Hagar. In point of fact, it wasn't really until after Hagar left the band that I was even aware of what the overall album sales were.

Put it this way: Jump was Van Halen's biggest single in commercial terms. At best, I liked the tune, and that was true even back when it was first released, back when Roth was still in the band. On the other side of the coin, I quite enjoyed The DLR Band album, and I only happened to stumble across that album in a record store in 1998 when flipping through David Lee Roth CDs, as there was virtually no publicity surrounding the release of it and it ended up selling...what, less than 100k copies, if memory serves?

[Terry]

Mitch Malloy was in Great White?? I thought Great White didn't exist without their Robert Plant wannabe singer? And I can't even remember that guy's name, so that tells you how memorable he was. They really should have given up after the fire.

They had been washed up commercially long before the fire. The nightclub that burned down was just this little hole in the wall place that was one town over from where I lived for 20-odd years. I had moved away a few years before the fire, but when the story broke on CNN I immediately recognized the name of the club and was surprised that pyro had been used at all. Having been there several times in the 1990s, I knew from experience that it was a small, confined space. By the time the late 1990s rolled around, you'd get performers who had basically hit their high-water mark 15 years earlier. People like Blue Oyster Cult, or Dokken. It was a pretty small club, too. Maybe a few hundred people, tops. I went there once for a weekend showcase that was all local bands and the club was about as packed as I'd seen it. Seemed like maybe 300 or so, and it was pretty much elbow-to-elbow when standing there watching the acts. Just getting to the bar to get a drink under normal audience conditions involved a bit of jostling, because people were packed in like sardines. Throw in a building fire, with the ensuing smoke and panic, the conditions were tragically in place for all those fatalities.

I think when the fire happened, it wasn't even Great White proper but Jack Russell's Great White - Russell being the only guy in the band who was with Great White when they hit their peak in the late 1980s - who were playing. Sort of one of those moniker arrangements like Stephen Pearcy's Ratt or whatever.

[FORD]

Vai was '89 to '90.

I think FORD is calling Jack Russell a Plant clone.

Yeah that's it! Dude named himself after a dog.

[Vinnie Velvet]

Ed was a great riff writer but a horrible song writer. He was spectacular inside a very narrow band of expertise. He needed other’s to make great songs and Dave had a big part to play there but also the producer had a huge role. Ted Templeman had a lot to do with what we grew up listening to.

Exactly.

Which is why the songs - not just the lyrics and singing - were just so very different with Van Hagar. Ted and Dave no longer there and that's what we got.

Seriously it should have never been billed as 'Van Halen'.