MA Says There Is Tons Of Old Live Audio and Video

[Nitro Express]

From what I saw and heard, by the time the VHIII album and tour was over Ed was content to basically get fucked up. Sad part for me was hearing his ability wither on that 2004 tour because he plainly wasn't in a condition to play well, which was something new and troubling; whatever one thought of the VHIII album, Ed was still able to...you know...PLAY THE FUCKING GUITAR as well as he ever had. Seeing him futzing around at that 2006 NAMM show, I wasn't even sure I WANTED a reunion with Roth at that point if Ed wasn't up to it.

Ed had an uneven 2007/2008 tour, but the last two Roth tours he was at least back in relative command of his instrument inasmuch as he could execute the CVH parts competently. Shit, when I saw the band in Tampa in 2012 and they played Girl Gone Bad it sounded like Ed hadn't lost a lick since 1984...gave me 'de chills how G-U-D good he was playing. Ed being able to get his playing back up to that CVH level shouldn't have been an achievement...except for it was. And it was a nice ending to Ed's career and for me as a fan that Ed's last two tours displayed him playing well and giving flashes of the brilliance that turned me on all those years ago. Nostalgia? Yep, 100%, but at least Ed was able to deliver the goods in the end, even if it was merely looking backwards.

Whatever else I think about Ed's kid, if [Wolfgang] was the reason Ed managed to pull himself out of his alcohol-saturated/drug-addled seclusion and give us all a glimmer of past thrills long gone by then Ed's kid being in the band overall was a positive thing in that if that's what it took then that's what it took.

After Ed's passing...I mean, for all the ups and downs over the decades, Van Halen was over. If a bunch of unreleased stuff manages to get released, fine. If not, I've learned by now with this group to be content with the years up to and including 1984 that we got. Might as well be content, because that's all there really was when you boil it down.

Whatever emotional and mental demons Ed had he got over. Sadly the damage all the smoking, drinking and drugs did to his body took him. People who knew him who met him after he cleaned up said he just had a happy radiance to him. I think the man was in a miserable marriage for years and he hid out in his studio and got plastered.

Ed needed a woman who wasn’t a pain in the ass.

[Nitro Express]

Ai is probably okay as long as he doesn't get another divorce. He's probably content with cashing the royalty checks.



The Stones are putting out plenty of live BluRay/DVD's "from the vaults." I don't know how well they're selling though. Well enough to keep adding more titles.

Mick is a hell of a salesman and the other band members are fine with it. Mick is just more sophisticated about it than Gene Simmons is,

[Nitro Express]

Van Halen is like Jimi Hendrix. It’s too good to be buried. Stuff will come out. After a relative does it after a big legal fight. We might be in the assisted living home when it happens.

[FORD]

At least Mick (or whomever he has doing it for him) can properly master those vault releases - though I'm not happy with the way they turned Mick Taylor down in the mix on some of the 70s stuff. The KISS releases look like Chaim bought a bootleg himself, and then sold digital copies of it without any sort of production.

[FORD]

Van Halen is like Jimi Hendrix. It’s too good to be buried. Stuff will come out. After a relative does it after a big legal fight. We might be in the assisted living home when it happens.

Hope it's an actual relative. Not like Hendrix where the cash in was a "sister" who never met him, and she screwed over his dad & his brother in the process.

[Nitro Express]

Mick and Charlie managed The Rolling Stones after they decided they didn’t need a manager after their first one ripped them off. They did a pretty good job.

[Nitro Express]

Hope it's an actual relative. Not like Hendrix where the cash in was a "sister" who never met him, and she screwed over his dad & his brother in the process.

Wolfgang might not be around long. I had a friend die at 52 from obesity and diabetes. Alex’s kids are fit. One is a runner. If Wolf marries his wife comes into the picture. Most likely Al’s family will end up with the Van Halen legacy.

[Seshmeister]

I keep buying CD's and have to rip them on my old laptop. I didn't put an optical drive in the last desktop I built.

I'm the same and then just realized that I'd replaced the laptop too - laptops aren't coming with CD drives any more because it's all about being skinny.

[Seshmeister]

Wolfgang might not be around long. I had a friend die at 52 from obesity and diabetes. Alex’s kids are fit. One is a runner. If Wolf marries his wife comes into the picture. Most likely Al’s family will end up with the Van Halen legacy.

Come on that's a bit much he's only 32.

[Terry]

Hope it's an actual relative. Not like Hendrix where the cash in was a "sister" who never met him, and she screwed over his dad & his brother in the process.

Yeah, well, Hendrix was being cashed in on by Alan Douglas long before the Hendrix family finally got control over the catalog in the 1990s.

Hendrix's stepsister didn't screw over Hendrix's dad, although she did screw over Hendrix's brother.

All of which, to me, isn't much of anything I give a particular shit about in terms of who gets the money...but it sadly did lead to having the absolute bottom of the barrel scraped in terms of the recordings put out, where seemingly anything and everything Hendrix put on tape got released, and more than a small amount of that stuff came across sounding like demos Hendrix made for his personal use and perhaps not stuff he would have put out in the form it was eventually released.

[Nitro Express]

Hendrix is a sad story. My wife grew up just up the road from where he’s buried. He was so broke when died his landscaper father had to pay for the funeral himself. I think there’s was $10 in Jimi’s checking account. His manager ate him raw. Typical story. Keep your client drugged up and keep him booked. Milk the cow for all it’s worth while people still care. His estate was a mess. Jimmy makes more money dead than when he was alive.

[Nitro Express]

Come on that's a bit much he's only 32.

. 20 years fly by quick and most people who are fat at 32 stay fat. My neighbor made a fortune treating poor saps whose livers and kidneys were destroyed by type 2 diabetes. He made enough to have a retirement and travel the world. He’s a great neighbor. He’s never home. He said talking dieting and exercise to most people is like talking to a wall.

[Terry]

Hendrix is a sad story. My wife grew up just up the road from where he’s buried. He was so broke when died his landscaper father had to pay for the funeral himself. I think there’s was $10 in Jimi’s checking account. His manager ate him raw. Typical story. Keep your client drugged up and keep him booked. Milk the cow for all it’s worth while people still care. His estate was a mess. Jimmy makes more money dead than when he was alive.

A few years after Hendrix died, his father got a settlement for $400k, which was at the time reportedly the net worth of Jimi Hendrix's estate when he died. That figure was said by others to only be representative of what Hendrix earned on his last tour of Europe. There were other stories that Hendrix's publishing was held by a consortium of business entities located in the Bahamas, but when Hendrix's father's lawyers tried to get an accounting of the total value of the publishing it was then discovered that the various accounts were empty, having been depleted to settle various pending lawsuits against Hendrix and record advances that had been withdrawn while Hendrix was alive (to pay for the construction of Electric Ladyland studios, etc.).

Not much different from Elvis Presley in the respect that both spent their money as quick as they could make it: Elvis was worth less than a million in liquidity when he died, which is the only reason he agreed to have two 1977 concerts filmed for broadcast (and were after he died) when he was at his most bloated...in that after all those years Elvis needed the money. Same reason why Hendrix went back on the road in the spring of 1970 after having only played a few paying gigs after Woodstock, in that Hendrix hadn't had a new album out in a year and a half at that point and hadn't been playing paid gigs with any regularity since June of 1969: Jimi needed money.

[Terry]

Elvis and Hendrix could have walked away from entertaining or opted not to get stoned into oblivion, though. Just like Morrison, Joplin, Garcia...Eddie Van Halen for that matter. To be sure, there are plenty of enablers surrounding celebrities, but nobody forced Garcia and Eddie Van Halen to be heavy cigarette smokers, or Garcia and Presley to overeat, or Garcia and Joplin to use heroin: that is solely on them.

Sometimes people tend to place more blame on the management surrounding these dead rock icons for their demises than the icons themselves, because surely these icons couldn't be dead from their own choices since...you know, they were so brilliant as performers. And since they were so brilliant as performers, therefore they must have had all their offstage shit so hard-wired that it must have been some malevolent greedy handler who was to blame.

As if being an extremely talented rock musician (or movie actor, or professional athlete or whatever occupation) in and of itself means said person has a handle on The Big Secrets Of Life. Shit, those people I mentioned barely had a handle on themselves.

[Nitro Express]

Both never ditched the manager. This is where Mick Jagger gets the last laugh. The Colonel destroyed Elvis to support his stupid gambling habit. Elvis never could get rid of him but maybe the Colonel had some dirt on Elvis or Elvis was just weak. Watch it Elvis, maybe the public would like to know about the underaged girls.