I Like Van Halen

After yesterday’s post, I started thinking about the history of my music purchases. If I’m not mistaken, I think my last cassette tape and first compact disc were Van Halen’s “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” and "OU812" respectively, though not in that order.

The “OU812” CD was a joint purchase by my sister and me in celebration of the family’s first CD player, which I recall being a big deal. My dad wired the family den with tiny wood-encased speakers that hung in the corners of the room--quite a futuristic departure from the giant wood-encased speakers that had previously stood on the floor, nearly as tall as I. In any event, my sister and I shared “OU812,” which I imagine worked out just fine considering there was only one player on which to listen to it. Eventually, I recall getting a Sony Discman for Christmas and my sister getting a Panasonic boombox (both of which amazingly still work) and there being fights over various CD’s. But in the beginning, life was good.

Despite being my first introduction to Van Halen, “OU812” never satisfied me from start to finish. At age ten “Finish What Ya Started” was more complex than what I cared to hear. But with MTV blocked from our cable box by my parents, my primary source of musical exploration was Casey Casem’s Weekly Top 40 Countdown, and “When It’s Love” was a pretty great power ballad if I’d ever heard one.

Eventually, I discovered a second source for new music: the cooler kids on my school bus, who were cooler only by virtue of having been born to more tolerant/less protective mothers. So, when Van Halen released “F.U.C.K” and my mom evidently failed to decipher the reverse-acronym, I went down to the National Record Mart and picked up my very own copy of the cassette tape, because CD’s were twice the cost of tapes then, and so despite having a CD player much of my lawn-mowing money was still spent on cassettes well into the early ‘90s. I recall being blown away by the power drill intro to “Poundcake,” which also happened to be the intro to the album. To my now-twelve-year-old ears, the rest of the album rocked straight through. With each hit single from the album released over the following months, I felt extremely self-satisfied to be ahead of the trend, even though I was technically way behind it, having been born a year after the band’s debut.

Anyway, I sought out more. A friend’s older brother had some of the older Van Halen albums, so we snuck into his room and had a listen. While I was intrigued by the image of a young angel smoking a cigarette on “1984” and drawn to the familiarity of some of the Roth-era songs I recognized from the radio in my dad’s Wagoneer, it was “5150” that sucked me in with Eddy’s heavy synthesizers and Sammy’s passionate vocals. I dubbed it onto a blank tape and wore that tape out, then eventually bought it on CD. To this day, while the scenesters find only the early VH worth an ironic nod, “5150” stands out in my mind as the band’s best record, though these days I enjoy it digitally.

Download: El Ten Eleven – “I Like Van Halen Because My Sister Says They Are Cool”

Wait for the imeem playlist… it takes a minute to load:

Touche