So who was singing "bap ba da ba shoobie do wa" during the break?

What a farking gorgeous guitar sound. Seriously, forget about the last 18 years or so and remember that this changed guitar rock forever. This is absolutely gorgeous.

EVH is the best, not because of this particular track but in general. IMO of course.

Although in technical playing, Malmsteem is but he has no soul. He must have sold it in exchange for the ability to play those farking arpeggios.

Buckethead FTW!!!!


/not really
//"best" guitarist does not exist

Love him or be insanely jealous of him. Eddie significantly changed the world of rock. That much is fact.

Mark Ratner: Wow. F*cking amazing. You can hardly see his fingers move.

Try watching it in 1080p

Arn_Dee: Great tone.

/Lynch ftw

I'll tell you... it just sounds freaking bad-ass and always has. Even their new track "tattoo" which is pretty silly lyrically, the guitar sounds like a dream. In the much maligned "Without You" the same thing was true: EVH's guitar sounded like a finely-tuned engine.

GiantBat: miltonbabbitt: To really put this style and sound into perspective, you should have heard how it sounded when framed within the culture of 1978.

It was the summer between 6th and 7th grade. I was playing vacant-lot baseball when my stepbrother drove up in his orange Monza. He popped the hatchback and out came the sound of Eruption.

We ALL dropped our gloves, and our jaws, and ran up the hill to his car to find out what that was.

I went from listening to Styx and Kiss to Van Halen, Led Zepplin, and Cream that summer.

I was in my first year out of high school, but not in college at the time. I went to the record store at the mall, don't remember which one, and found this in the miscellaneous "V" section. I thought it looked interesting enough to give it a shot, brought it home, listened to it absolutely dumbfounded. I called my friends over, and we just all sat there with the stereo maxed, amazed. Most of us were in bands, and it changed everything.

I can remember reading in an '80s Guitar Player magazine article that Eddie was in a music class in high school, and his teacher had assigned them to write a piece of music. Eddie turned his in, and received an "F". He protested to the teacher and was told that what he'd written had broken most every law of music theory. He challenged the teacher to allow him to play it for the class, and let them decide his grade. They gave him an "A".

factoryconnection: Arn_Dee: Great tone.

/Lynch ftw

I'll tell you... it just sounds freaking bad-ass and always has. Even their new track "tattoo" which is pretty silly lyrically, the guitar sounds like a dream. In the much maligned "Without You" the same thing was true: EVH's guitar sounded like a finely-tuned engine.

Most of you probably already know this, but at least in the early days Eddie rebuilt his own pickups. He unwound the wire coils and then rewound them with a very specific number of winds for each coil. Then he dipped them in melted paraffin wax. Removed the frets, filed them, replaced them. I can't even remember the pedals he used for his setup. It was pretty elaborate. I think I still have the copy of Guitar Player Magazine where he went into all of the nitty gritty details. There's just no freaking way I'd do all of that to a guitar.

Ted Nugent was at a concert with them and Ted Nugent tried Eddie's setup and...he sounded like Ted Nugent.

meyerkev: After a certain level, the rules are there to be broken.

The article reached pretty much the same conclusion. Eddie was a guest instructor when my friend was a student at GIT, in the '80s.

nvmac: So who was singing "bap ba da ba shoobie do wa" during the break?

Me! This truly is my favorite Van Halen track ever, between what we just heard, minimal Roth retardation, and all the harmonies of the break.

\The Roth era was by far the better era, but it doesn't mean you have to like Roth and his godawful obnoxious antics
\\When you get to the talkback line in Unchained, I've never pictured that Ted's tone towards Roth was the problem *if* they did, as they allege, rehearse the line.

dig420: yeah 'Drop Dead Legs' was pretty good too dammit... the problem with VH, imho, is that at their best they were good beer drinking music and that's about it. Not much more than momentary fun, and at their worst they were aggressively bad. Made me want to crawl into the speakers and punch EVH in the face. I mostly hate them because to me they're part of the Def Leppard brigade, all flash and no substance making heavy metal that 13 yr old girls could love. Such a HUGE step back from the 60's and 70's.

Our parents (I'm 45) got Cream, Traffic, The Who, the Stones, the Beatles, Hendrix etc. We got VH, Def Leppard, Ratt, Poison. Our kids got Nirvana, STP, Green Day.... it just doesn't seem fair and I'm still pissed off about it. My generation got totally screwed.

No, you totally didn't. Look at the Hot 100 lists from the 90s and you'll see that we might get some goodies here and there, but rock was dead by then. It was killed by the synth and the DJ. Music that anyone could make themselves and not worry about getting a backing band together for it. It's farking lazy-assed shiat that can't hold a candle to real, unadulterated rock, be it hair, metal, classic or whatever.

\was actually looking at said Hot 100 lists today while looking for stuff for an upcoming bday party...
\\The #1 track the day my nephew was born was Gold Digger by Kanye, and the day my niece was born it was "Love in This Club" by Usher. They're sooooooooooo never playing those at their 40th bday parties.
\\\I'm turning 36 this year, so i got MJ and hair bands for my childhood and Pearl Jam and STP for my adolescence... best of both worlds, if you ask me