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T A B L E__T A L K

What bands have "sold out" today? What does selling out mean today? Philosophize on integrity, indie labels and the Spice Girls in the Music section of Table Talk.

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R E C E N T L Y

Edwyn Collins
I'm Not Following you
Setanta/Epic
(10/24/97)

Everclear
So Much for
the Afterglow
Capitol
(10/23/97)

Paul Paray
Joan of Arc Mass
Reference Recordings
(10/22/97)

Divine Comedy
Casanova
Bar/None
(10/21/97)

The Pixies
Death to the Pixies
Elektra
(10/20/97)

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V O W E L L

Sound Salvation
By Sarah Vowell
True blue tributes
(09/19/97)

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F E A T U R E

Almost Heaven:
John Denver 1943-1997
Dawn Eden remembers the man whose music left no room for cynicism (10/14/97)

[ DAVID LEE ROTH ]
___The Best
___[ -- RHINO -- ]

BY GAVIN McNETT | Like you, I hated Van Halen in high school. They weren't, remember, just another tetrad of clown faces on MTV back then -- they were THE GREATEST BAND IN THE WORLD!!! Eddie Van Halen was the BEST GUITARIST EVER!!! Alex Van Halen was so good he needed FOUR kick drums and Michael Anthony had a bass shaped like a JACK DANIEL'S BOTTLE!!! Eddie played solos with an ELECTRIC DRILL!!! Woo!

Like at your school, the bullies flicking Marlboro ashes onto the MHS shop building steps would stiffen and bark, "VAN HALEN RULES!!!" at random intervals, like spastics or Tourette's victims. Little, winged "VH" logos were as ubiquitous as nitrogen -- pasted onto denim jackets, carved on desks and set into wet cement; drawn on blackboards, walls, windows and car bumpers with marker, spray paint, Liquid Paper and probably blood or worse. Sheesh. What a relief it was when Sammy Hagar joined the band -- 'cause all the hard-line Van Halenoids went out and shot themselves, and a boy could have some peace and play Damned and U.K. Subs tapes out on the cafeteria patio without getting pelted with rocks and garbage.

But over the past couple years, I've been picking up copies of all the pre-Hagar Van Halen albums in a furtive sort of way, just to kinda have them around. There's a certain bombastic, seat-of-the-pants verve to their best stuff that you just can't get anywhere else. I'd thought it came from David Lee Roth, since it dried up pretty quickly after Sammy Hagar took over, but, his vaunted personality aside, most of his solo work is actually rather inconsequential. "The Best" features Roth's vaudevillian MTV hits, like "Just a Gigolo" and "California Girls," all of which are worth having; but the rest is faux-Halenite olive loaf, pimentoed with the athletico-yodelings of guitar mechanic Steve Vai. Bad! No!

The "Everybody Wants Some" collection drives home the point that it wasn't personality alone, but chemistry and -- above all -- songs that drove the Halen engine. Out of 17 (apparently Boston-based) bands here, only the Gigolo Aunts are totally familiar -- and on the day that half the unfamiliar bands on a compilation are in any way remarkable, the devil will put on Gore-Tex and scrape his windshield. But the styles here are so diverse and well-achieved, the treatments so free of excess precocity and (most crucially) the material so fleet and seaworthy that "Everybody Wants Some" bears up to a straight listen all the way through. Highlights are Sam Black Church's master-crafted, crunch-metal treatment of "Romeo Delight"; Tom Leach's great, thoroughly credible Western swing take on "Dance the Night Away"; Fuzzy's Spectorish "Feel Your Love"; and the Gigolo Aunts' Beatle-schtick on "Why Can't This Be Love?" But practically every track is interesting in some regard or another, no matter how weirdly conceived or calculatedly silly some of them might appear on paper.

There are two versions, for instance, of "Eruption" (the putative GREATEST GUITAR SOLO EVER!!!) -- one on a church organ and the other on banjo. The first, by the Rev. Ed Broms, is fairly effective, in a grandiloquent, mad organist kinda way. The banjo bit doesn't hold up, but Crick Diefensdorf, the culprit, gets points for technique. Trona does "Could This Be Magic" with an odd straw-boaters-and-cardigans, flapper-rock slant, like a peppier Squirrel Nut Zippers without the horns; and the Vic Firecracker Orchestra -- actually a chamber ensemble with a vocalist -- turns "Little Guitars" into a gorgeous lo-fi doom anthem.

Is "Everybody Wants Some" a great album? Not hardly. But if all we ever listened to were great albums, we'd be down to the Damned's "Machine Gun Etiquette" and maybe one or two others. Still, it's a fun thing to have around. Keep an eye out for Volume Two. As for the Dave, it'd be better just to hunt down his first two records.
SALON | Oct. 27, 1997