My husband doesn't get my attraction to David Lee Roth.
His eyebrows are bushy. His mouth is muppety. His leg splitting martial arts displays are a spectacle. He crows, blusters and struts, accented by slippery smooth spandex, silvery swords, swashbuckling belts and swirling ribbons.
It's an understatement to say hubs doesn't appreciate Dave's flair for the theatric like I do.
As a long time lover of his campy style and provocatively androgynous dress, I know he's no puritan.
He's about as romantic as a slap on the ass.
His live, carnal, strategic placement of a bottle of Jack Daniels: stage front, crotch high, thumping and splashing onto the faces of young fans huddled together with their red throats unhinged, looks, to me, like a warbler feeding a nest full of hungry baby birds.
I find that poetic. My husband finds it repulsive.
Repulsive or resplendent, DLR represents a slice in the pie of my life. Whether in a 40 year old photo with abs for days and lush leonine hair, or guest-starring as himself on the Sopranos with a fried yellow perm and a sun capsule tan, or in a modern day snap wearing a foppy plaid suit, sporting a crew cut which would make any other 66 year old look like a sentimental jarhead, I see those eyes, that jaw, that swank, and get sucked right back to a time when things for me were
damn
near
perfect.
Dave appeared during a year when I was newly hormonal. I felt fine, moderately attractive, on top of my game and reigning sovereign over friends, extra-curriculars, and school. My family was in tact. I was discovering and owning my own rather bold clothing choices. I wore bubblegum lip gloss which alternately melted and solidified in my pocket.
It was a time when I was encouraged to voice an opinion.
I was pleasantly surprised and emboldened by how much of an opinion I had to voice.
I had my own money to buy my own music.
And what I bought most was Van Halen.
After sports, dance lessons, dinner and homework, I would lie on my back on the bedroom floor with my preteen frame comfortably sunken into three inches of thick purple wall to wall shag. Boom box by my shoulder, I'd plug it in preparing to make phone calls to friends and tape music from the local radio station.
It was about the most content I'd ever been.
Back then, people would call Y96 FM and request songs. The DJ would announce the requests on air, sometimes with a dedication including an actual recording of the impassioned, phoned-in plea. If you listened often enough you could tell who was going out with who, who coveted who, and who had the most diverse musical tastes in our small town. Once in a while, someone would mess with a steady couple by calling and asking for a suggestive song to be dedicated to one of the betrothed. On one particular night, I was lucky enough to be listening when that happened.
After twenty minutes of mushy ballads, the DJ announced a request for "Eruption/You Really Got Me", specially sent to a girl from a boy who had no business sending it to her because, well, damn, because she had just requested Andy Gibb for her boyfriend three songs earlier! The DJ chuckled during the intro, calling it a gutsy move. Sensing a little drama, I rolled over propped my hands under my chin and pressed "record".
I knew the Kinks' version of "You Really Got Me". I'd had a British Invasion education imparted by my Beatlemaniac mother; but this...this was different than the tinny, mono, sneery Ray Davies track. What were those sounds in "Eruption?" Was it classical? Was it rock and roll? What the hell? The guitar was raw and squawky and it sounded like...well, it wasn't so much what it sounded like but more what it felt like.
It felt like stepping off the side of a building into a complete and welcome free-fall. It felt like release. It was seductively somatic in a way that was untapped and unnamed. When the first four notes for YRGM played, I was awash in its raunch factor, and rent asunder by the gritty assuredness and nastiness of it all.
Completely unprepared, after a lifetime of being good and following rules and showing up for everyone and doing my best and never being late and always eating my vegetables, a dormant sprout broke through the wet soil in my belly and a pair of black rebellious wings unfurled across my back.
I shakily pressed "pause" when the song was done. I rewound the tape and played it again. Lying back on the floor, I studied the patterns that my Raggedy Ann lamp made on my ceiling. Had I not noticed before their resemblance to musical notes? When it was over I rewound it yet again. I got on my feet and looked in the mirror attached to my dresser. I turned to the side during the passionate caterwaul of Eddie's finger tapping and regarded my young, promising figure. I casually flirted with my reflection. Then, as Dave wore and tore through the chorus, my scalp became electrified. Shaking my hair and coaxing it forward over one eye, I undid the restrictive leather band and flung my navy blue digital watch. As it bounced off the side of the bed, I decided I didn't care what time it was, not now or ever. All that existed was me and that song.
This was not the Sonny & Cher we listened to in our living room. This wasn't even my Grease soundtrack with Olivia Newton John owning her own sexuality in those black leather pants. This was all me.
Me and Mister David Lee
and the whole tight pants'd package of Van Halen.
I went to bed that night knowing every squeak, every line, and every nuance to that two song coupling.
And I wished the girl it had been requested for was me.
Upon waking, the rhythm drummed through my head like a heartbeat. When I walked the hall at school, it was to the cadence of Alex's drums. I wasn't an 8th grade kid with braces and a velour Izod. I was an acrobat, a magician, a superstar, a minx. I bought the Van Halen debut album as soon as I could that week and dove in like a starving man who'd been offered a bag of donuts. Then I quickly and enthusiastically followed it up with Van Halen II.
Hallowed be thy Van Halen name.
Obsessed, I John Hancock'd notebooks, lockers, letters to friends, and the knees of my jeans with the VH symbol (beautifully and coincidentally, Van Halen and I shared the same initials). I owned that signature. The perfect upright linear symmetry of it stacked against the wild molecular abandon of the notes that it stood for felt exactly like me.
It represented who I was. After all this time, I suppose it still does.
Diver Down was released in the Spring of 1982. One of the wealthier kids in school heard me describing VH's stellar remake of "Oh, Pretty Woman" and he chimed in, mistakenly referring to the Diver Down album as Dow Jones.
I laughed. Poser.
I indoctrinated everyone I could. I called the radio begging for songs from Fair Warning and Women and Children First. They are somewhat darker, but they still felt like liberty and breathing room and the vertiginous first hit of a fizzy soda up the nose.
One friend had an attic bedroom (and permissive parents) and we wrote the lyrics to our favorite VH songs on the walls. I wonder if the words are still there 35 years later, and if not, what killjoy painted over them.
When the 1984 album was released, I thought the single "Jump" was a load of crap. I still can't listen to it. Too candy-sweet, too watered down for the masses, and way too synthesized, gah! It's like being forced to hold a cheek full of apple Jolly Ranchers when what you desperately crave is wintergreen Skoal.
Quarter sticks of dynamite replaced bottle rockets. Car rides with boys replaced my bicycle. Black concert tees with long white sleeves replaced those pastel heat pressed ones with the glittery rainbow decals selected off the wall at the local mall. Cherry satin lipstick replaced the bubblegum gloss. In every photograph from that time, a cynical sneer replaced my smile.
I was breaking out.
My parents were breaking up.
Ironically, so was Van Halen.
Therefore, as the front man of the band that best represents my coming of age, Dave is not just a rocker I can't turn away from. He is part of my DNA. He is time in a bottle. He is the capricious carefree feeling of standing on the shore yelling "here comes a big one!" before that wave, bigger than expected, sucks you under and drags you out deep, plunging sand down your suit and salt behind your eyes.
He's the rainstorm before the hurricane.
I see Dave this way because my life took a big old shitty turn during the Van Halen break up. They mark a space in time for me like some people might mark other significant events, you know, like before this or after that.
But as I grew to accept my parents' divorce I also grew to accept post-DLR Van Halen, which many of us Dave fans call 'Van Hagar'. It's a weird parallel, but the parallel is mine.
I heard "Unchained" one day during a particularly stressful time that included doctor-assisted attempts at baby making and my fingers started moving like digits possessed, tracing the VH pattern on my leg, air-drawing my old initials. The song offered me a sense of being unyoked...emancipated. My husband bought me an iPod and I downloaded the whole catalog.
So here I am, now, at age age 51 and as John Denver says, they (continue to) fill up my senses.
Van Halen sounds like safety chains breaking off a boat trailer, the scratching of lyrics by lead pencil on an attic wall, the snick of a Bic lighter wheel repeatedly turning before it gives rise to a flame, and my footsteps running down exactly 13 stairs while my Mom cooks dinner and my Dad takes out the trash.
Their harmonies smell like the metallic lemonessence of Sun-In hair lightener, the piney diesel of a joint, the powdery innocence of baby oil smoothed in circles on my suntanned teenaged stomach, and the comingling of a dozen different musky perfumes as we girls assemble on a Friday night ready to storm the auditorium doors for the school dance.
Their voices taste like tangy grape Bubblicious gum, like the spicy endorphin rush of a jalapeno pepper, like a combination of half coffee, half milk, and three big spoons of sugar thrown back in an unholy hurry immediately following my 5 am paper route.
Van Halen feels like comfortably worn rainbow flip flops and inky designer Jordache so tight they are a hundred groping hands around my thighs; my palm curved around the perfect smoothness of a glass bottle of Coke while someone dances up on me exhaling on the bare back of my neck.
They look like a boy cradling my face, telling me how pretty I am while we speed dangerously down the highway in the back of a truck with no cap.
So, I write this for my husband. Now he knows when David appears, I can't help but invite to the table my pre-adulting rebel self. Maybe he can see the positive in that.
Because, hand to Jesus, having her nearby feels amazing.
Side note: I've seen Diamond Dave, AKA the Ice Cream Man, twice in concert. The first time he performed solo (in Saratoga, where he splashed his JD all over the girls in the front row) and the second time he fronted the inimitable Van Halen (in Boston, Mass). Both nights were bucket-list items for me; pure heaven. I know St. Peter is supposed to meet us at the gates but I hope when I get there, Eddie Van Halen is behind him, all hair and smiling that binky-mouth grin, beckoning me inside.
#mushroomtumbler
