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Van Halen rocks anew at SDSU concert
Armed with new album, '70s hard-rock kings return
Written by
George Varga
5:13 p.m., June 15, 2012
Updated 10:14 p.m.
Here’s a surefire way to get a rock concert audience hot and sweaty before the music even begins: Turn off the air conditioning system!
That is precisely what Van Halen did Thursday night at SDSU’s Viejas Arena. The move, apparently enacted as a voice-saving measure by lead singer David Lee Roth, has also been applied on other stops during the hard-rocking band’s latest reunion tour.
“I know Dave has been having problem with air conditioned buildings, so he has it turned off when he comes in, and he doesn’t change in (the venue’s) dressing rooms — he changes in his (tour) bus,” Kool & The Gang leader Robert “Kool” Bell, whose band is the energetic opening act on the tour, told U-T San Diego during an interview last week.
The result, at least at Viejas Arena, was that Van Halen and its audience shared in a temperature-raising experience that was alternately generated by the performance and by the increasingly warm setting.
When the music soared, as it did during such potent new songs as “Tattoo” and “China Town,” and during such combustible classics as “Runnin’ with the Devil,” “Everybody Wants Some,” “Panama” and “Ain’t Talking ‘Bout Love,” hot, sweaty fun was the order of the night. When the show plodded, as it did during Roth’s momentum-killing, mid-song, stream-of-consciousness gabbing on “She’s the Woman,” “Trouble with Never” and “Dance the Night Away,” cooler temperatures (and, perhaps, some free ice) would have been welcome.
The 24-song, 100-minute concert marked Van Halen’s first area appearance since its 2007 reunion tour stopped at the same SDSU venue (which was then known as Cox Arena). By comparison, and even with its periodic, Roth-fueled pacing problems, Thursday’s no-frills, nearly all-business performance was a dramatic improvement.
Five years ago, guitarist Eddie Van Halen did not appear to be in good shape, physically or artistically, and the band stumbled repeatedly. Worse, the audio quality of its 2007 concert here was so muddled and deafening, it often sounded like the music was emanating from the world’s largest hybrid dual-blender-and-vacuum-cleaner. To further compound matters, Eddie’s then-16-year-old son, Wolfgang, had just joined the band. He had replaced the ousted Michael Anthony, and he was doing all any teenager could to try and keep up.
With Eddie Van Halen now clean, sober and newly buff — and his two bouts of cancer happily behind him — he sounds (and looks) like a man reborn. Wolfgang, 21, has developed into a confident, rock-solid bassist capable of executing fleet unison runs with his dad and playing with punch and power.
While Wolfgang still can’t match the departed Anthony’s vocal prowess, his harmony singing is much improved over the 2007 tour. He also locks in much better with the propulsive drumming of his uncle, Alex Van Halen, who Thursday played with a winning combination of ferocity and agility as he navigated around a massive drum set that would fill an entire living room in the average home.
The fact that the band is now touring in support of a new album — its first with Roth since 1984 and the group’s first new release since 1998’s disappointing “III” — has given Van Halen a welcome new lease on life, creatively speaking. This holds true even though a number of the songs on the new album, the 13-track “A Different Kind of Truth,” were written back in the 1970s and look back, rather than ahead, stylistically.
Essentially, “Truth” is a place-holder, at least until Van Halen can work up a batch of bona fide new music. But the album enables the four-man band to move beyond simply revisiting decades-old hits, as it did on the 2007 tour. As an added bonus, Van Halen’s current tour finds the group digging into some deep early album cuts, which at Viejas Arena included 1977’s “Ice Cream Man,” 1979’s rollicking “Somebody Get Me a Doctor” and 1981’s “Unchained” and “Hear About It Later” (the latter of which boasts an infectious, pop-rock chorus with a distinct, mid-period Beatles flavor).
Not all the songs worked. “Dance the Night Away” seemed to be going in several directions at once, prompting concertgoer Gordon Wilcox, 49, to comment: “This is a train wreck.” It was, although there’s something endearing about seeing a veteran band uncharacteristically skid off the tracks and then regain its bearings.
Eddie Van Halen performed with verve and pinpoint precision throughout the evening, executing dizzying six-string swoops and bluesy bends one moment, quicksilver flurries, chiming accents and jaw-dropping tapping the next. His unaccompanied solo opus, which (if my ears didn’t deceive me) combined parts of “Cathedral,” “Little Guitars” and the epic “Eruption,” was a dazzling delight that sounded fresh and vital from start to finish. At times, it suggested what might have happened if Johann Sebastian Bach and Jimi Hendrix had somehow fathered a son together.
“Eddie’s a master, he’s the Mozart of the guitar,” Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready (a former Del Mar resident) told me during a recent U-T San Diego interview after attending Van Halen’s Seattle concert last month.
“I went (to the Seattle show) with Eddie (Vedder) and (Alice In Chain’s) Jerry Cantrell, and I watched Eddie (Van Halen) in awe. I like the new Van Halen album and I wasn’t expecting to. It sounds like the old Van Halen.”
That it does, although Roth — at 57 — can no longer hit the high notes with consistency. On Thursday, his vocals grew more pitch-challenged as the show progressed. While he appeared trim and fit, his energetic showmanship from earlier decades has diminished significantly, although his perpetual leer remains intact.
Recalling Van Halen’s 1982 tour, Roth told the Viejas Arena audience of about 9,000 fans: “That was a good year. I think I only had my clothes on for the two hours we were on stage, if I remember. I was a sexy... Is it too early to make a booty call? Never too early. Never too early.”
Um, no, but maybe a bit too late?
Like his periodic crotch-grabbing, a little of Roth’s patter went a long way. His longest monologue came between “Beautiful Girls” and “Ice Cream Man.” It lasted five minutes, but seemed to stretch on twice as long. Nearly all of it was devoted to Roth plugging his most recent non-musical gig as “a professional dog handler,” as footage of he and his dogs, Benny and Mikey, was shown on the enormous LED screen at the rear of the stage. His band mates were nowhere to be seen, perhaps wisely, as Roth professed his love for his dogs and his three pick-up trucks at length.
It’s impossible to say whether this canine-inspired segment was designed to boost Roth’s new vocation, give Van Halen’s other members a breather before the concert’s final five selections, or both. Whatever the impetus, it brought the concert to a total standstill at precisely the time when the band should have been kicking into high gear for a volcanic, wham-bam finish.
The concert concluded 27 minutes later, with Van Halen having to work to regain the lost momentum before finishing with “Jump” and enough confetti for the launching of a new ocean liner. Despite its flaws, the concert’s best moments were strong enough to suggest that Van Halen’s future could hold considerable promise, if the band doesn’t implode again. Here’s hoping "A Different Kind of Truth" is the start of a rich new musical chapter, not the conclusion.
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