This band called The Outfield was all over the radio. I remember hearing it in the car on 101.1 WIXX, GreenBay/FoxCities. It was a cool song for being a ballad. Their big hit was "Your Love." It was and is still a great song. It was only years later I found out they were British! With a name like The Outfield, you'd think they were baseball playing Americans. Not the case. I came to find out later on in college (via VH1's popup video) that they named their band the Outfield on purpose to appeal to the American audience.
Why the Outfield you ask? There were three guys in the band, and there's three outfielders in baseball (unless you're in Pee-wee league, like I was in 1986). So I guess it made sense to a certain extent.
Here is where it gets weird. Music videos and Mtv was big in the 80's and band were still sort of trying to figure out how to maximize their popularity with music videos. The Outfield, again took a trail of pesky deception! The video for your love included two musicians that were actors. I'm not talking about two replacements to the original three, we are talking about five - yes - FIVE Outfielders. An extra guitar player, and a keyboard player were just tossed into the video. Looking back, they stick out like sore thumbs.
How could it be? How does this make sense? Again it was a ploy to fit in with the American market. Apparently, many bands at that time had five members. So if the Outfield made it look like they had five members in the band, perhaps they could better fit in. If you ask me, between the name of the band and having fake members in their videos - they were trying a little too hard to be cool. I still like more than a couple songs of theirs.
This is one of those songs that sounds really good when played acoustically on guitar. Since 2012, I've been performing this song as open mic nights and acoustic gigs that I'm offered to play. It's slowed down, and the Outfield do a version of it this way, and it's just as good if not better than the original.
The Outfield had another big hit that I really liked. All My Love in the World. "Your Love" peaked at #6 on the Billboard charts. "All My Love in the World" peaked at #13.
They smiled, kicked, jumped and shredded their way into our souls from speakers through our ears. Eddie VanHalen changed the way guitar was played. He changed the musical instrument industry by inspiring guitar players to desire crazy guitar designs with whammy bars. Eddie also has a guitar called FrankenStein. It's a guitar they he has
heavily modified. Most of him being seen in the early 80's is with this
guitar, which sparked a mass exodus from Fender and Gibson vintage style
guitars. This lowered the value of older guitars because nobody wanted
them anymore. Eddie's playing was so big it changed everything in rock n
roll.
"Diamond" David Lee Roth left the band in 1985. This was HUGE news. People heard whispers of DLR wanting a solo career... but we never thought it would come. It was a shock to all of us fans. It seemed that life as we knew it was changing. I couldn't imagine a VanHalen without Diamond Dave! Their story was so cool. Alex and Eddie came to America poor. Their dad was a musician, and Alex & Eddie learned at early ages. The first version of VanHalen as we know it used to play weddings. Can you believe it? I thought that was hilarious when I heard that. How would you like to have VH play your wedding? I always admired bands that had brothers in them, because at this time, my brothers still had their band... Defiance.
They were a family being torn apart.
I have heard other stories about VanHalen, like how tight they were with
roadies. It's popular to hear about the "crazy contracts and riders"
rock bands force venues to sign with all of these ridiculous demands.
David Lee Roth mentioned there was a perfectly good reason for all of
it. Rock shows demand a lot of electricity, and a LOT of safety
precautions. When a band travels to a new venue, a stage must be setup,
and safety is always an issue. In the band contract, all of the safety
precautions, energy requirements, etc. were clearly defined... along
with crazy things in it (like a bowl of no brown M&M's in the
dressing room for example). According to David Lee Roth, if there were
(going on the analogy) a bowl of no brown M&M's in the dressing
room, they were confident the venue read the entire contract, and the
band could be confident all of the safety and energy needs for a good
show were being met. I thought it was pretty clever...
A new band?
Sadly, with Diamond Dave gone, the future of VH was uncertain. Enter Sammy Hagar. I always loved his albums. His energy seemed to match DLR's, but Sammy could also shred on guitar almost as good Eddie! Word is, Sammy was tired of being a solo act, and auditioned with VH to be an additional guitar player. Their first song they auditioned, "Summer Nights" was played, and Sammy decided to sing it. At that moment, Sammy became the lead singer and part-time rhythm guitarist for VanHalen 2.0 or some would call ethem VanHagar.
News of this traveled. Not only could one not imagine VH without Dave, but now one could never imagine how much cooler VH will be with Sammy! This rollercoaster of emotions was settled with the bands first album with Sammy Hagar, entitled 5150. Eddie's secret recording studio was called 5150, which I believe is the California police code for "intoxicated." (Similarly, gangster rappers would commonly say 187, the police code for "murder," for example).
You can view the entire "Live Without a Net" Van Halen concert below in its entirety. It's one of the first concerts Sammy Hagar played with Van Halen. Warning: this it TOTAL arena rock. The energy is SUPER high... they are running all over the place and having a blast. The opening song is Sammy Hagar's I Can't Drive 55... and the place is going crazy. Michael Anthony's bass solo is complete with slamming a bottle of Jack Daniels while playing his Jack Daniels bass guitar. Rocks.
The Rivalry began.
David Lee Roth sparked a solo career. He found guitar virtuoso Steve Vai and a backing band to embark on a mission to "out-VanHalen" VanHalen. It was great for rock n roll because we effectively we seemingly had two VanHalens. It got ugly. VanHalen was doing most of the talking and bad-mouthing, leaving Diamond Dave to "scribbity-bop" prove them wrong. While Eddie and Alex didn't pull any punches, Sammy talked about how good it was to be in a band and how good VH was doing.
It's reputed that Eddie has an ego. I've heard rumors that he likes to be the only guitar player in a room, and he wasn't always comfortable with Sammy on guitar because it took some spotlight off Eddie. Yet, I heard from Jerry Cantrell (of Alice in Chains) that when his large tour ever (with Van Halen) was finished, Cantrell came home to a garage full of musical equipment as a gift from Eddie. So I've heard both sides. I can imagine that Eddie has a button that could be pushed like everyone else.
Not "better," just different. We never forgot the old Van Halen.
Little did we know Diamond Dave would eventually come back, and bad blood would be in the future between Sammy and the guys... but for now, we can enjoy the newness of all the great music that is Van Hagar. David Lee Roth says it best in this MTV News Interview...
Album Sales
5150 was so big, it was Billboard's #1 album of 1986. It had eight top 40 hits, and sold over 6 million albums in the United States... x6 platinum. In contrast, David Lee Roth's Eat 'Em and Smile album ended at #4 on Billboard's top 200 charts, with two top 40 hits. The previous year, David Le Roth released an EP featuring lounge style songs like California Girls with an album titled Crazy from the Heat... but Eat 'Em and Smile was his big return to Hard Rock...
In the early to mid 80's our house didn't have cable TV. Not even close. There we only three houses on our entire street. So even when cable TV was branching out to more areas, our street was a low priority for years. How my brothers lived without Mtv through highschool escapes me. Although, I'll get to this when I go through my H.S. years, how Mtv was in the 90's was vastly different than what you see it as today.
Back to my house growing up. A house without cable TV must greatly rely on VHS tapes, rented or self recorded. The label on a certain VHS tape was an orange post-it note with no adhesive, so it was Scotch taped to the video cassette. It was clearly labeled as the Van Halen Video for Jump! I figure one of my brother's friends taped it for one of them. I should probably ask to see if they remember.
I watched this video over and over. Eddie Van Halen played BOTH the guitar and keyboards in the song. I didn't think that was possible! They jumped in sync, it looked like they were having so much fun on stage. Everyone in the band was smiling. Happy rock!? I loved it!
My brothers in Defiance covered that song too. Mike taught me how to play the first five or so notes on his keyboard. I thought I was a rockstar at that point. Two fingers, not unlike "chopsticks" combined with the lowest key on the keyboard.
After Led Zeppelin broke up, people have said "there will never be another Led Zeppelin." I think Van Halen was the Led Zeppelin of the 80's. Flashy frontman, guitarist with pizzaz, killer drummer & bass player. I mean these guys were HUGE.
The album 1984 had WAY more hits on it than Jump. It also featured Panama, Hot For Teacher, and countless others. Everyone knows of record sales. Gold is a half million sales, platinum is for a million sales. Diamond is the 10 million mark. In 1999, VH's 1984 hit the diamond mark.
Eddie Van Halen single-handedly changed the guitar industry. Suddlenly old "vintage" guitars were worthless. Everyone wanted guitars with more frets and a huge Floyd Rose Whammy bar! Many lesser known guitar companies took advantage of this, while the big wig Fender and Gibson stagnated in quality and design. Word is you could pick up a 1950's Fender or Gibson for only a couple hundred dollars... in today's market those same guitars are worth hundreds of thousands. Thus started the "wanker-generation" of guitar players that wouldn't die until Kurt Cobain and Nirvana almost a decade later.
Love him or hate him, Eddie Van Halen is one of the best guitar players EVER. He revolutionized the way we play guitar, and expanded the possibilities of what can be done on a guitar. Don't believe me? Watch this. Custodians became in demand because of all the drool left behind to be mopped up at local concert stadiums!
The music video for Every Breathe You Take was one I'll always remember. This was WAY before we had cable at our house... and I didn't know what Mtv was. I was at my Auntie Ann's house. My sister, my Mom and I were visiting her and my cousins Jennifer and Jimmy. There was a band or a guy playing a stand up bass and playing a song I knew from the radio. I didn't know if it was live, or what channel it was even on. I knew the TV was color because of the commercials so I couldn't figure out why the video was in black and white. Looking back at this video you can sort of see why the Police broke up. Sting was sort of the focus, and it didn't really seem like a band.
The Police had other hits on the Synchronicity album like Wrapped Around Your Finger. It was a good, but very dark ballad. I wouldn't really notice that song and others on the album until college. "Wrapped" also apparently had the interest of pop artist John Mayer, who happens to be the same age as my sister. Mayer included a lyric about Wrapped Around Your Finger in his song called 1983. "It's a bitter sweet feeling hearing Wrapped Around Your Finger on the radio." Songs can take you back to a time and place. I myself have hundreds of them; that is the sole reason I chose to write this autobiography.
Even overrated rapper Puff Daddy thought to make reference to the Police. He ended up rewriting some of the Every Breath You Take lyrics and doing a Biggie Smalls rapper tribute. The rapper Notorious B.I.G. was shot and killed, and Puff Daddy's "I'll be missing you" version of Every Breath You Take took off in popularity. I was in college at the time, and I wasn't really a fan of the remake. You won't be seeing post about it when i reach the 1999 posts. Puff Daddy is a rapper who changed his name half a billion times and got popular riding other artist's coat-tails. Hence the tribute song. Just my two cents. I will post it so you can decide for yourself.
