I don’t know what I was collecting these quotes for, but I found them on a hard drive recently and so here are my favourite quotes by Eddie Van Halen!
“I can’t read music. Instead, I’d do stuff inside the piano, do harmonics and all kinds of crazy things. They used to put me in these annual piano contests down at Long Beach City College, and two years in a row, I won first prize – out of like 5,000 kids! The judges were like, ‘Very interesting interpretation!’ I thought I was playing it right.”
“The one thing I do have is good ears. I don’t mean perfect pitch, but ears for picking things up. I developed my ear through piano theory, but I never had a guitar lesson in my life, except from Eric Clapton off of records.”
“It’s music theory, not music fact”
“If it sounds good, it is good. Who cares if you didn’t do it modernly.”
“To hell with the rules. If it sounds right, then it is.”
“I destroyed a lot of guitars trying to get them to do what I wanted, but I learned something from every guitar I tore apart, and discovered even more things.”
“Music is for people. The word ‘pop’ is simply short for popular. It means that people like it. I’m just a normal jerk who happens to make music. As long as my brain and fingers work, I’m cool.”
“David Lee Roth had the idea that if you covered a successful song, you were half way home. C’mon – Van Halen doing ‘Dancing in the Streets’? It was stupid. I started feeling like I would rather bomb playing my own songs than be successful playing someone else’s music.”
“It’s all about sound. It’s that simple. Wireless is wireless, and it’s digital. Hopefully somewhere along the line somebody will add more ones to the zeros. When digital first started, I swear I could hear the gap between the ones and the zeros.”
“If you have a great-sounding guitar that’s a quality instrument and a good amp, and you know how to make the guitar talk, that’s the key. It starts with the guitar and knowing what it should sound and feel like.”
“Actually, if I could deliberately sit down and write a pop hit, all my songs would be pop hits! Let’s put it this way. I play what I like to hear. And sometimes I like to hear something poppy, and sometimes I don’t.”
“Actually, if I could deliberately sit down and write a pop hit, all my songs would be pop hits! Let’s put it this way. I play what I like to hear. And sometimes I like to hear something poppy, and sometimes I don’t.”
I’ve always liked the final Van Halen album, A Different Kind of Truth, and I have found it still stands up after a decade of digestion. As you are probably aware, most of the album is reworked demos. One such demo is “Ripley” from 1984, which later became “Blood and Fire” on the album. The music made it into the score for a movie called The Wild Life which has never seen a proper audio release. Eddie called the song “Ripley” because he played it on a Ripley guitar.
It’s impossible to listen to it without hearing David’s final lyrics and vocals in your head. But is the instrumental version better than the final? That’s a tough call. It definitely would have been interesting to hear what Sammy Hagar could have done with “Ripley”, but if the idea to rework it with Hagar ever came up, it obviously didn’t bear fruit.
I felt like writing again, I hope you don’t mind. My emails are not the esteemed A Life in Letters by Isaac Asimov, but it’s more about the process of the writing for me.
I’ve been listening to Van Halen in the car a lot. Long story short: I’ve been having issues with my music hard drive in the car, with it repeating tracks. I discovered I could fix it by formatting the drive and starting over. Certain Van Halen albums used to give me issues in the car, with the repeating songs. It’s been a pleasure to rock to King Edward this week. It’s hard to believe but he died over a year ago now.
I remember coming home from work the day he died and I was just in a foul mood. Not only was I grieving Edward Van Halen, but I felt stupid for grieving someone I never met and never hoped to meet. It was a torrent of shitty feelings, plus I hadn’t eaten properly. It was a Tuesday and I had to do laundry or something, and I snapped at Jen. I felt like an asshole afterwards. I also remember telling you this story, and you were the one who said it was OK to be grieving. Until that moment I didn’t really consider that maybe you don’t have to be a psycho to be upset about Van Halen’s death.
Music aside — which was usually warm, fun with instrumental and occasional lyrical depth — Van Halen meant a lot to me. I must have been 13 years old when I was sitting on the porch with my best friend Bob, hearing 1984 on the tape deck for the first time. My dad came home from work, heard the noise and asked what we were listening to, as dads often did. “Van Halen!?” he said. “Sounds like some kind of tropical disease!”
My dad was always good with one liners! When we watched music videos on Much, he would mock the singers shrieking their best operatic screams. “What’s wrong with that man? Should he go to the hospital? He sounds like he’s in pain!”
Good memories, all. I’m very attached to those childhood memories. I’m trying to commit them all to writing before they’re gone. Often, lost memories can be triggered by an old photograph. But there are many things I wish I had video of! If only there was a tape or photograph of that first time I heard Van Halen. But film was a precious commodity until the last 15 years or so. You didn’t just take pictures of you and your friends listening to music on the front porch.
I remember some of the tapes, and conversations. Iron Maiden’s Maiden Japan was popular in our porch listening sessions. George would come over from next door, and Bob would come over with his tapes. My house was right in the middle! I wonder how much of my happiest childhood memories are due to geographic concerns. If my house wasn’t right there in the middle of everybody, maybe I never would have been there that day to hear Van Halen or Iron Maiden.
Sometimes I worry that I spend too much time living in the past and trying to recapture those moments. But then I think about what you would say to that. “Why are you worried about something that brings you happiness?” I think you might ask. And you’d be right. So bring on the Van Halen. Bring on the Iron Maiden. Let’s party like it’s 1985. Might as well go for a soda — nobody hurts, nobody dies.
There will never be another Van Halen. No player before or since will have the ingenuity and influence he did. From modifying his own guitars and amps to achieve the perfect “brown sound”, to brutalizing the strings with a drill, he was an innovator. He was the most important of all the guitar innovators. And he sheepishly grinned through the whole thing as if to say, “Who, me? I did that?”
The week Eddie passed, we did a tribute to him on the LeBrain Train. You can watch that tribute below, starting at the 20 minute mark.
As if that wasn’t enough, we followed that with another Van Halen show: VH deep cuts! One thing for sure, Eddie certainly inspired a lot of conversation on the LeBrain Train over the past year. You can watch the deep cuts below, starting again at 20 minutes.
Let’s all take a moment to reflect, and play some Van Halen tonight. Tonight, I’m going to go with “Dirty Movies” from Fair Warning to spotlight the greatest gee-tar picker of all time. What song or album will you play for Eddie tonight?
The final episode of the Pepsi Power Hour aired at the end of the summer of 1991. The man with the sad honour of signing off was veteran Michael Williams. Off and on, Williams hosted the Power Hour since 1986 if not earlier. It was filmed at a welding shop in Calgary, Alberta. Because metal? (Bad, bad idea! Audio engineers, your thoughts on this setting?)
Williams played Metallica’s “One”, and “Hunger Strike” by Temple of the Dog. The shape of things to come.
The episode also features an interview with a new band called The Scream, featuring an up-and-comer named John Corabi. A couple years later, and Corabi would be the new singer in Motley Crue.
The very last band ever played on the Pepsi Power Hour was Van Halen. It was a big interview by Kim Clarke Champniss regarding the new album For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. The very last song ever played was “Runaround”.
The Power Hour was supplanted by the inferior Power 30. It was a significant change. I rarely missed a Power Hour. The Power 30 was rarely worth catching. However, look for the ad for a promising new Saturday show called Start Me Up – three hours of rock!
YouTube has forced me to butcher this video to get it up, so there are no music videos. The Van Halen interview is mutilated. There are some ads and all the talking. It’s history!
Speaking of history: 100 VHS Archives! And counting! I started posting these in 2019 and I still have plenty of files left to upload, and a few more tapes to play. I’ve been taking it easy lately because the software is user-unfriendly and my VCR is making odd noises. But we’re not done. Not by a long shot.
On January 10, 2012, Van Halen released their first new single with David Lee Roth on vocals since 1996: “Tattoo”, from the forthcoming album A Different Kind of Truth. An exciting day to be sure.
I had not yet started this site, but if I had, on that day nine years ago I would have written this story.
In 2012, radio station 107.5 Dave FM (now Dave Rocks) was still running the contest that put me on the map locally speaking: The Four O’Clock Four-Play. Afternoon host Craig Fee would play four songs in a row, and listeners had to guess what the common thread between the four songs was. I won more often than anyone else and became a local celebrity named “LeBrain”, and that’s why you’re reading this today. But on January 10, Craig stumped me.
The Four-Play that day was, of course, Van Halen’s “Tattoo”, played four times in a row! Craig, who has since left the radio business, was a massive Van Halen fan. He was the kind of guy who would see “Love Walks In” on that day’s play list, and remove it in favour of “Hear About It Later”. He was unafraid and that combined with a diehard love of Roth-era Van Halen must have been all it took to play “Tattoo” four times in a row on the Four-Play.
Truly it was a glorious time to be listening to the radio. You never knew what Craig was going to play on any given show. He had a penchant for “Rainbow in the Dark” by Dio, and of course Roth-era Van Halen deeper cuts. He played half of Fair Warning on his show once. I don’t know what the real-world consequences were for these musical shenanigans, but Craig’s bravado was inspiring. After the Four-Play contest was discontinued in April of that year, the show’s format became more of a listener call-in program, and the glory days came to an end.
But what was the “common thread” for the purposes of the contest that day? “Tattoo” played four times? Arbitrarily, it was the Elvis tattoo in the lyrics. “I got Elvis, on my elbow…” Of course it could have been anything, but Craig just needed an excuse to play the song over and over and over again and still give away that day’s prize.
This post is dedicated to Craig, who I hope is doing well out there in his post-radio life. I feel very fortunate to have had his show to listen to at work, playing all this stuff that no other radio station would have dared. We Van Halen fans were in our glory that day, getting our fill of the new tune and enjoying every moment. Of course, people who hated the song were in agony for that show. Oh well! So sad, too bad.
Hard to believe David Lee Roth was back and an album was really coming — and now we had the proof in our ears! Almost as hard to believe Craig got away with playing “Tattoo” four times in the space of a 30-minute contest.
A story for the rock n’ roll history books; a memory for the ages.
Big thanks to 2020 for making this our most successful year at mikeladano.com yet. The final tally is:
284,513 hits from 135,708 unique viewers. This is a massive uptick from our previous best year, 2018, which received “only” 215,440 views. Thank you pandemic, because that’s what this totally is. I had no new ideas for 2020; I had given up on “growth”, only for 2020 to come to the rescue with a goddamn pandemic!
One way you can tell this uptick had nothing to do with me: All the top hits are old, old posts with deep roots on Google searches.
The death of Eddie Van Halen caused October to be our best month ever, and helped push Van Halen to #1 this year as well as contributing to the record hits overall. The Van Halen Zero review is now the most popular thing I’ve ever written, having been read 12,294 times.
By comparison, the best-read “new” post this year was:
What do these stats show us? The power of both Eddie Van Halen and a worldwide pandemic. I’m pleased that people chose to read my stuff at those times, but I’d give just about anything to get Eddie and our normal world back. Since I can’t, I can only tell you this: I don’t plan on stopping in 2021! And that’s about all I can say. 2020 taught us that life doesn’t give a shit about your plans. I had plans in 2021 and they didn’t involve sitting in this little space live streaming. This time there is no plan except give ‘er. The universe tends to unfold as it does.
I wish you nothing but peace, happiness and harmony in 2021. Let’s give ‘er together.
A hearty thank you to Kevin / Buried on Mars, Aaron / Keeps Me Alive, and Eric / Uncle Meat for appearing on this episode of the LeBrain Train! (Conceiving, in Kevin’s case.) And a salute to Derek Kortepeter for submitting a cool list as well. The subject was Van Halen deep cuts and we brought ’em to ya. Any that we forgot came up in viewer comments. And a great show was had by all!
At the start, Kevin and I killed some time looking at some new arrivals, and talking about the forthcoming new punk EP by Max the Axe. (I have a copy and it is killer.) If you want to skip that and go straight to the lists, then start at 0:20:25.
The LeBrain Train: 2000 Words or More with Mike Ladano
Episode 34
As suggested by the inimitable Kevin / Buried on Mars, Friday’s show will be the Nigel Tufnel Top 10 Van Halendeep cuts. Join the panel and I as we run through the best stuff they don’t play on the radio. Friday October 30 at 7:00 PM E.S.T.
Episode 35
Halloween Memories! One thing I’ve noticed this year is that many friends are really bummed about the loss of Halloween. I feel bad about this so I thought I’d throw a Halloween live stream party. I used to be a real Halloween kid, so I thought it would be a lot of fun to just talk Halloween memories! I have many good ones going back to the 1970s, and best of all, I will be in costume! Saturday October 31 at 7:00 PM E.S.T.
Thankfully, I didn’t give away all my magazines. Some special ones remain. Most of those are Kiss-related, but a few are not. I was smart enough to hang on to a few that are special, at least to me. Today we’re looking at the only issue I own of The Inside, an excellent Van Halen fan club magazine. This comes from Fall ’96, a brief period where the Van Halen lineup was presumed to be a reunited band with David Lee Roth. That’s only one of the things that makes this issue interesting.
GETTING MORE TALE #864: The Inside
The location that I first managed had been open only about six months. 1996 was an eventful year both for music and for me. Notably, Sammy Hagar left Van Halen, and in a whirlwind of events they were recording new music with David Lee Roth. People wanted to talk about it at the front counter and find out what I knew. I knew no more than anybody else, but one of my early customers had the scoop. He had access to The Inside, an unofficial Van Hagar magazine that would have been the best place to find information on them in the pre-internet-in-everybody’s-living-room age.
I can’t precisely remember how he got this issue. Passed down from a brother-in-law, I believe. Issue #6. The front cover broke the news: David Lee Roth was back?! With a question mark, of course. It already had some water damage when I received it third-hand. We had been discussing all the latest Van Halen happenings in-store, and this particular guy already read the most in-depth coverage you could find. He told me he’d pass the magazine down onto me, and true to his word, he did. The news was so fresh that the letters column only contained correspondence from readers pre-split.
“These are strange times indeed,” reads in the first line on the first page, “Letter from the Editor”. On page 10 is a detailed timeline of the breakup/reunion, monitoring early internet mailing list chatter and official statements. It’s fascinating and many of the details turned out to be true, including the title of a new song, “Me Wise Magic“. On the 14th page is an update on Eddie’s upcoming hip surgery, and the news that the Toronto pay-per-view concert was not scheduled for home video release. Page 15 reveals that Dimebag Darrell recorded covers of “Everybody Wants Some!!” and “Outta Love Again” for B-side use, and that Pat Boone was covering “Jump” and possibly also “Panama” for the album that became In A Metal Mood. (Only “Panama” made the final cut.)
Most of the issue is dominated by David Lee Roth, both coverage and speculation, but with big photos splashed over the pages. There’s an interesting interview about the Balance tour with the lighting tech, but due to circumstances beyond their control, this was old news by comparison.
For music geeks that crave the obscure, there is a two page article on Brian May’s Star Fleet Project featuring Eddie Van Halen. This article details the two day session that brought the three track mini-album to life. How it came together, details and trivia. There’s even an ad for a rare CD release of the album, complete with bonus tracks, as part of Brian May’s & Cozy Powell’s Resurrection release.
The back page has information on an album called Fatherless Child by Rich Wyman, featuring a guest appearance by none other than King Edward himself. (If you have been watching The LeBrain Train: 2000 Words or More with Mike Ladano, on our Van Halen tribute episode, a viewer from Norway mentioned this release. I claimed to have never heard of it, but apparently I had just forgotten!) Eddie caught Wyman live and was impressed enough to produce four songs on Fatherless Child (Wyman’s second CD). Better than that, he even played guitar on three. This article details the songs and playing, and concludes with an interview with Wyman.
Generous customers like this, who treated people like me at the Record Store like an actual “Humans Being”, helped “Balance” out all the real assholes we got in that first year. Shirtless dudes, shoeless dudes, (no pantsless dudes thankfully), construction workers tracking in dirt, thieves, troublemakers…and the odd real gem like this now-forgotten Van Halen fan. All we did was talk a little Van Halen. He had this magazine that he finished reading, and wanted to pass it on to a fellow fan. He returned with the book in hand, and it’s been in my collection ever since.
In a way, it’s kind of wrong that I still have this issue. The original owner passed it on to someone else, who passed it on to me. In the spirit of the way I acquired it, I really should have passed it on again when I gave away the bulk of my collection. But I do still have it, in the same condition as I received it. The inner page is loose as they often come to be, but it’s perfectly readable and enjoyable.
Instead of giving it away, I’ll live up to the spirit of the gift with this story and the pictures above. Thanks, mystery Van Halen fan. If you’re out there anywhere, let’s raise a toast to King Edward.
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