Yes, I went to a concert on Thursday night. I wanted to write about it immediately afterward, but I procrastinated. Oh well.
So yes, a concert. Let me just put a little context to the situation first, though. When I was in high school, a friend of my parents gave them a pretty nice record player, receiver, and a couple big speakers. They had no use for them, but i thought they were pretty cool and would go nicely in the "den" that they had carved out for me in our house. The only problem was that I didn't have any records to play. Well, I did have the single for The Super Bowl Shuffle (one of the greatest pieces of poetry ever put to music, by the way) and a Care Bears sing-a-long from back in the day (don't ask), but I wanted to believe that I was a little beyond that. So the next time my friends and I got together, we stopped at a second-hand music store and I decided to spend some time flipping through their stacks of old vinyl. One section caught my eye because of the bright beam of sunlight shining down on it. Also the disembodied voices of heralding angels.
Yes, there laid Van Halen I and Van Halen II. I had heard of the band because because a friend of mine was mildly obsessed. However, the only album I had previously been familiar with was Balance. Which, for anyone who is familiar, is very different from the first two albums that they put out. Anyhoo, I waffled for about ten minutes, unable to decide on whether I should pay 50 cents for one or the other. It took about that much time for me to realize that I could buy both because they were only 50 cents each. I was indeed as slow than as I am now.
So, back at home, I fired up the ol' record player and dropped LP #1 onto it. A couple snaps, crackles, and pops, and then in comes "Runnin' with the Devil" - followed by a blistering (and to me, impossibly-precise and complex) guitar solo by the name of "Eruption." For a young teenager who had been relatively sheltered in terms of exposure to music, hearing this seemingly superhuman act of guitarwork was a turning point, to say the least. Okay, I'm being dramatic, but keep in mind that this is the first time that I was truly affected by piece of rock music. So over the next few years, I gathered every single Van Halen record ever produced into my small music collection. However, by this time, David Lee Roth and been long gone (he bolted in 1984) and Sammy Hagar was on his way out. It appeared that I had lost my chance to ever see the band in concert after only just discovering them. Well, they did end up touring with Gary Cherone in the late 90s, but that was just weird and doesn't count.
Some years went by, and someone came up with the crazy idea of the two (significant) former lead singers of Van Halen touring together. Sammy and Dave hit Chicago and I jumped right on that. With bassist Michael Anthony joining Sammy, it almost felt right. But not quite - the magic guitar wasn't there.
[I need to stop here; brain is getting lazy and won't let me maintain my writing fluency. To be continued, probably tomorrow]
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