Van Halen

Son…

Yeah, dad?

Sit down. Let's split a cigarette. And let's have a nice Heineken too.

Ok dad!

Edward... Son, you've got it!

Like a virus, a syndrome, a burden, a responsibility, a destiny. Edward has it. Fifteen years old, a guitar, plenty of music in his head and zero anxiety. Even though your father, a jazz artist, an example, a guide, a role model to admire and follow, has pointed out that yes, you're one of the chosen ones, you've got it, the swing, as he calls it while he spends his afternoons holding a single note forever, chasing perfect intonation. Something distinctive that sets you apart from the crowd, whether you like it or not. You know it, your father knows it, and that's enough. For everything else there's beer, cigarettes, the sun-baked streets of Pasadena, brother Alex to rival and grow up with, mother Eugenia suspicious but understanding. The Dutch homeland is far away, as are the hours spent doing solfège in front of a piano; he's always there, with his ivory keys and endless orchestral possibilities, but now there's California, strange kids darting around on boards called skateboards, fast, dangerous, aggressive, easygoing, disrespectful. But what elegance?! What audacity?! Why not attempt similar moves on the fretboard of his own splendid, cheap Tesko?! Out there is a whole rock world to draw from. There's Cream, there's Clapton, adventurous music, blues and rock spilling into jazz improvisation, leaping into the void without ever losing control. There's the sound, the one coming out of the Marshalls, big, expansive, tremendously similar to that of a saxophone. A roar to control, tame and, who knows, redefine.

And here come the years of the chase, the seasons of passion, of ambition, of youthful madness. For Edward, now Eddie, there's only music, plenty of it. Hours spent playing, not practicing, not mere exercise. It's truly an almost mystical surrender, as mysterious six-string prophets spin on the turntable, British and semi-obscure: Ollie Halsall (Patto, Kevin Ayers), Allan Holdsworth (Tempest, Soft Machine, UK, Bruford), the fluidity of legato, jazz-rock bursting in and reshuffling the accents, and Alex backing him up behind the drums, creating a strange rhythmic blend in which the brothers chase each other, overtake each other, seem to ride waves that double, triple their reach, seem never to meet in perfect sync, almost getting in each other's way, building syncopations that never quite resolve and perhaps for that reason are even more delicious and, in the end, surprisingly linear. Eddie, like Hendrix, Beck, his idol Clapton, Brian May, is perpetually dissatisfied with his weapons, so he decides to build them himself, becomes a luthier: he buys Gibson and Fender parts and who knows what else and puts them together, patching them up with duct tape. He works out how to control feedback, befriends a kid who knows his stuff, Wayne Charvel, and from him learns the art of the pickup soaked in paraffin, the very same substance used, of all things, on skateboards and surfboards. And then comes the insight that changes everything, the discovery of the sound that permanently shifts the coordinates of guitar distortion, the last frontier reached and never surpassed to this day: the Variac, a kind of box that, connected to a tube amplifier, regulates its voltage level, considerably increasing both its power and its dynamic range. The amplifier thus becomes more responsive to the pick's action, allowing for greater personalization of technique, of attack on a single note, of expressiveness. Out comes a huge sound, rich in harmonics, never heard before. Eddie captures it, harnesses it, exploits it thanks to technical weapons learned, absorbed, expanded: hammering (legato), whammy-bar (vibrato arm), tapping (simultaneous use of both hands on the fretboard).

And so comes the time of school dances, of nicknames arriving late, Genesis, animalistic, Mammoth, almost denoting the heaviness of the proposal: an aggressive yet sinuous, choral, mischievous, made-up hard rock, helped along by two new travel companions, Michael Anthony on bass and backing vocals, David Lee Roth, recruited because he owns his own amplification rig. They become Van Halen, from Pasadena to Hollywood, Whiskey A Go Go, Gazzari's, blistering nights running through a repertoire of 400 songs, many of them wildly reworked covers. In 1976 nobody stands a chance against them, but nobody knows it yet. Except Gene Simmons, who sees them, is left open-mouthed, and introduces them to record labels. Rejected. It happened to the Beatles too.

Then Warner locks them down, puts them in the hands of Ted Templeman, the producer of Montrose, someone who knows what he's doing. He throws them into the studio, ten days, no need for rehearsals, just a few hundred beers and cigarettes. All hell breaks loose here. The quartet picks eleven songs from a repertoire tried and retried on stage to the point of exhaustion, nine originals, two covers, and decides to record them live in the studio, with a couple of overdubs allowed in what feels almost like an ideological choice. The kickoff seems to come from the horn of a truck ready to run you over, not caring about the crosswalks on Sunset Strip; Anthony's distorted bass, a cascade of harmonics, and off we go into the testosterone saga modulated in neo-hard rock sauce, classic yet somehow unprecedented. A string of rhythmically relentless riffs, with Eddie abandoning the overused power chord and approaching the art of the triad.

Everything becomes more agile, quicker, more feral yet more refined, more elegant. "Running With The Devil", "Ain't Talking About Love", "Feel Your Love Tonight", "I'm On Fire", worn-out themes that suddenly regain vigor, also thanks to the charisma of a singer who tries to imitate the legendary screamers of hard rock, fails, and turns it into irony, into splits, into vocal cords that seem to belong to a burnt-out bluesman but that would suit some evening on Broadway just as well; Frank Sinatra meets Cab Calloway, skin-tight jumpsuits and pounds of swagger.

Choruses perfect and precise down to the millimeter, instantly singable in Beach Boys fashion, just like the solo excursions of the trapeze artist Eddie, possessed, blazingly fast, far from the usual bluesy tricks, rich in Bach-like references, yet never coming off as academic or heavy-handed. Suddenly you realize you can even sing a solo in the shower, especially one of these: "Eruption", a seismic jolt, little more than a minute and a half of romping up and down the fretboard of the Frankenstrat, no longer a guitar but a mutant monster, an almost instant icon. An eruption, indeed, of notes, of noises, a catalogue of jolts, of whistles, yet without a trace of sloppiness, right up to the coda that terrifies and fascinates, astonishes and frightens, with that sequence almost suspended in mid-air, utterly fluid, intense, classical, the right hand resting on the fretboard and widening the intervals. It sounds like a wind instrument, no, is it a synth?! Instead it's the Manifesto of the new aerobic rock, of an imminent era devoted to unprecedented spectacle. Eddie reaches and surpasses the masters of sound layering, of orchestration without layering or orchestrating: six strings, a volume control, a whammy bar, ten fingers, and a head like that.

After a calling card like that, everything seems permitted, even the reinterpretation of one of the ten all-time rock classics: "You Really Got Me" is an affectionate letter to their own roots, the British Invasion that anticipated virile rock. Some take offense, almost feel insulted, but it's actually a celebration, an amplification of the already raucous original idea. Ray Davies notices, thanks them and points out, if it were even necessary, the usual instrumental break from the flying Dutchman, a concise yet white-hot solo, a small summary of the history of the guitar, Chuck Berry, Scotty Moore, Cliff Gallup, rock'n'roll and rockabilly, Beck, Page, Hendrix, Bach-like interlockings, the whammy bar pulled and released to give shine to the dive bombs, a kind of recreated explosions.

Then it's John Brim's turn too, Chicago blues, "Ice Cream Man", the acoustic intro, who knows how deliberately parodic, a bridge to yet another Eddie takeoff: a flurry that raises goosebumps and turns into a rhythmically gripping romp.

It feels like being on a roller coaster. It happens in "I'm The One" too, a toy so tightly coordinated that it doesn't suffer from its excessive speed, between vocal interlockings worthy of a musical and an agitated rhythmic swagger. An atomic bomb, or rather an "Atomic Punk", which has nothing to do with mohawks, safety pins and spitting, except for the drive that launches it out of the speakers. A scorching atmosphere and plenty of laughs, professionalism and a whole lot of vices. February 1978, Los Angeles, California, surfing, skateboarding and an endless party. But if you've gotten hurt, don't go looking for band-aids, because you won't find any: they're needed to patch up/decorate the guitars of Eddie and his millions of disciples.

Ride the wave of great music

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03/02/2013