Okay, so I'm starting my listening, and I'm listening to VHI for the first time in a LONG time.
Man. It just takes me back. It's hard to express to people who weren't there what Eddie Van Halen meant. I get it; in hindsight, there have been SO MANY people that appropriated his style that it almost sounds anticlimactic at this point. Hell, I suck at guitar and I can play the rudiments of most of the songs on that first album. But they were so much more - he was so much more - than the sum of the notes. He played with such AUTHORITY. He was a rock star. I can play the notes on those songs, but they don't come across with the same level of aggression and "fuck you" (for lack of a better word). He just had this swagger, this confidence in his playing that I only dream of. There were and are better singers than David Lee Roth, but no one delivered lines like he did. Van Halen, party band extraordinaire, with the ringmaster, Mr. David Lee Roth, singing "She knew what love was for, it should mean, mean a little more, than a one-night stand!" and yet, you BELIEVED him. He WAS the Atomic Punk, whose love was rotten to the core, and he's taking JAMIE'S side on things? C'mon!
They were, and in some ways are, the perfect American band.