(We didn't have to dig back too far to find all of CREEM's Van Halen record reviews; the big rock boys are still veritable pups vinyl-wise with just four records to their credit to date Think of all the Van Halen records you have yet to buy. at inflated 1980's prices! Meanwhile, take this brief —very brief—stroll down memory lane with us as we observe CREEM's crack reviewing staff socking it to our heroes with their usual gusto. — Ed )

VAN HALEN (Warner Bros.)

Let me tell you about dinosaurs. No, "dinosaurs” may be too harsh a term, even if Van Halen-style rockers do find their evolutionary fulfillment in a quick extinction Maybe the best, most contemporarily useful term for the H/M we celebrated only yesterday is Helen Wheels' succinct "big rock”.

Okay, that settled. Van Halen are archetypal big rockers, out to make a big noise on a fluid rock scene, if Warner’s promotional efforts are any indication. By geographic origin. Van Halen are onehalf Dutch (the Van Halen brothers, Alex on drums, and Edward on guitar), thus suggesting immediate (and appropriate) images of Focus — or Golden Earring-like pompotechnoflash; and one-half Californian: Michael Anthony on bass, and Dave Lee Roth as vocalist (enterequally telling imagery of Black Pearl and their redoubtable B.B. Fieldings).

The back cover shows Roth barechested, hippie-haired, leathertrousered, back arched in supplication to the immortal spirit of Jim Morrison: his vocals contain all the above influences, and more—unreconstructed sexism, if you want it —and should be mightily pleasing to fans disappointed with Jim Man-

grum forgetting (organized) religion or with Mark Farner for going collegiate.

The band has all the late-psychedelic/early-metal pyrotechnics down solid, especially in Edward Van Halen’s snarling-Dutchman solos. Sure they’re barband veterans. more accomplished musically than many punk upstarts, but style is essential to slicing the mustard these days. guys.

Van Halen have shot off several marketing harpoons, including covering the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me" (which should do the job, if Robert Palmer’s simultaneous cover of the tune doesn’t get there first), doing an old blues number ("Ice Cream Man”), and writing one tentative, semi-punker (“Atomic Punk”), with its Dictators-rip “I am a victim of the science age” tag. The rest is metal/metal/metal, sometimes as tedious as your average hockey-arena concert evening, but more often plain old kinetic.

Van Halen. Big rock. Remember the names. Extinct is forever.

Richard Riegel

(June 1978)

VAN HALEN Van Halen II

(Warner Bros.)

When Van Halen is soarin’, when they’re creatin’ massive disturbances in the molecular structure of the cosmos, when they're lurching forward from the frosted mists of an alien suburban haze, when they’re magnetizing, when they've got all those lug-nut noiseasms working just right, they can chip the rust off any satellite. Why is Van Halen a group hysterical enough to cleanse the fading soul of an aged metal mahatma? Well, while so many other bands of the h&m ilk are busy careening about the inner philosophical workings of machinehead, the VH’s are ignoring said workings and not so quietly weaving a noisy chastity belt for the world intent on destroyin’ its only prophylactic against radiation impregnation. Y’see, this little orb is surrounded by many layers of radiation. The first layer is the dreaded Van Allen Belt, the second the not-so-dreaded Van Cliburn Belt, the third the ever-yawnful Van Heflin Belt, followed by the slowlydeveloping girdle named (drum roll) the VAN HALEN BELT (rimshot).

On their first LP, the VH's ran with the devil and created the nextto-last big thing—the atomic punk, the nuclear nerd, the radioactive rapscallion, the—you get the meaning. So on this second eagerly-awaited release, they’ve got quite a lot to live up to, and they do crack away at the wailing wall of noise to a certain extent, only this time around they’re a little too subtle and a little too clean and a little too cautious and a little too boring.

Following their soon-to-be-developed trend of doing cover versions of good old songs (sort of like a comedian stealing material, which ain’t all that unusual seeing as how it's been found out through the grapevine that Ed Roth, aka the Face, is none other than a blood relative of Uncle Miltie Berle hisself). Van Halen begins its attack with an absolutely cringing version of “You’re No. Good," originally a pop love song, then transformed into an angst-laden feminist dirge, and finally transmortified into an anthem of misogyny. It works if you’ve just mass consumed 14 cases of beer and nine bottles of no. 10 Valiums and you can’t pick up that beautiful blonde over there at the bar because you can’t figure out how to make your mouth work. Frustration translated into anger in an emotional display of the old physics adage (taught to me a long time ago by an old physic), every action has an opposite and equal reaction. Hubba hubba.

Following all this aural sensuality comes this summer’s BIG hit, “Dance The Night Away,’’ a song that cooks like a body under the sun. It reminds me of high moons, no wind and car accidents. The other truly noteworthy toon emerging like a Van Gogh amidst the Walter. Lantzes on this set is “D.O.A.’ (not another cover, nobody has that much nerve), a nice quiet cavantina to the bliss of oblivion and the sigh of brain rot.

Van Halen, the group, not the Belt, are here to stay, so we might as well get used to it; at least Roth is better than Jim Dandy, and those Van Halen brothers sure can make good faces, which is a primary part of the ever-complex definition of heavy metal sonicology. Put simply within the barbed-wire history of the. movement of metal, this bunch isn’t as good as early Montrose or the Black Sabbath boys, but they are a sight better than 80% of the other slag passing itself off as metal music. This year’s II LP is good prod-rock and all the udderless drones will glom the glint and drool the decibel when Van Halen hits the airwaves like Kronos crunching some poor Mexican with a metallic plunger.. .yadda yadda.

Joe (He Stares In Teenage) Fernbacher , [July 1979)

VAN HALEN

Woman And Children First

(Warner Bros.)

Up until now. it’s been relatively easy to ignore Van Halen, or to confuse them with Van Johnson. Their dubious remake of “You Really Got Me," which was as unimaginably ridiculous as Sissy Spacek in a Loretta Lynn wig, struck Z’s into many a skeptical heart. Their fans, the ambulatory ones that is, look like rejects from the studio audience of Focusing On Toddlers. And as for this David Lee Roth character. ..well, his dressing room mirror is so covered with his own smoochprints that he can hardly see to admire himself anymore.

So if VH is that dumb, howcum their new album is such a smoker? I mean, heltfire and shee-it, if you pass this one up on bad rep alone, years from now you’ll feel an empty foolishness not unlike Ann Landers’ lifelong regret at not having taken Latin in high school as you fork over two bills to some zitty record collector for an old beat-up copy. Combining as they do the most endearing musical aspects of helicopter decapitations, clothes dryers full of hunting knives and your average hailstorm of frozen aluminum dinnerware sets striking a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant, the little Dutch boys and their pals have cut through the facade of heavy metal manners and taken on a bead on pure form bamalama.

Like all good things and airsickness, Women & Kids takes a little while to build up. Exactly 3:31 in fact, the time it takes “And The Cradle Will Rock" to be over with. It’s not crummy or something Ronnie Montrose would kick out of bed. but the real action starts with “Everybody Wants Some," a tailcurler for sure with a guitar sob that sounds like a high speed Japanese commuter train derailing into a blackboard showroom.

Another ripper's delight. "Fools," sets the pick for "Romeo Delight." which has about as much to do with old Bard-puss as Rupert Holmes (the next Bob Welch) does with the male gender. As inconceivably hot as Mr French ramming a redhot crowbar up Buffy’s nose, the bambam vibes carry over onto “Loss Of Control." which takes off from the sound-effects opening of the second side like Rodan with a hotfoot and just as quickly vanishes.

Warning To Consumers: no one will be admitted during the last 10 minutes of this album, which are as shockingly distasteful as going to take a swig of Diet Pepsi and getting a mouthful of toenail clippings instead (this really happened). It sudcs is what I'm getting at. Nothing but some acoustic guitar dribble and our friend wanglungs mewing through a tryput for Sopwith Camel.

What all this adds up to is one of those rare occasions that are worth the full price of admission even though you only get half a show. Especially if you have a tape recorder. NOT THAT I'M ADVOCATING THE UNAUTHORIZED DUPLICATION OF SAID LP RECORD. JOE!

Just the good cuts!

Rick Johnson (July 1980)

VAN HALEN Fair Warning

(Warner Bros.)

AC/DC

Dirty Deeds Done Cheap

(Atlantic)

The first time I saw Grand Funk Railroad—and make no mistake, this whole thing started with the sadly forgotten Terry Knight when he correctly figured that the younger brothers and sisters of the mid60’s pop-into-major-cultural-statement generation wanted some music of their very own, music not so fraught with redeeming social significance and the concern of older kids, something like “Limousine Driver" where maximum arrogant swagger equals maximum sexual magnetism, something a little more to the point than “Dear Prudence," something, uh, adolescent. But I digress.

The first time I saw Grand Funk Railroad they were opening—I swear on Alice Cooper’s golf cart— for Arlo Guthrie in a small hall. I thought they were kidding. The next time 1 saw them, in a hockey rink with Special Guest Black Oak Arkansas. 1 knew there were more things in heaven and earth than I had previously considered. That's when 1 learned that there would be a new rock ’n’ roll generation every three years and that, regardless of what I thought. Grand Funk’s music worked and vast numbers of young people proved it by reaching for their wallets. It did not work for long, but such are the vagaries of fate. Some bands have inter-generational legs (Beach Boys, for example) and some bands don't. How many Chicago songs would you like to hear right now? Does anybody remember Uriah Heep?

Meanwhile, back in ’81. AC/DC and Van Halen are working quite well, thank you, sitting at 3 and 4 on the charts as I write. Van Halen has been the only Led Zep there is for at least three years now and producer Ted Templeman has even managed to make their records sound better than Zep’s did. On Fair Warning the band once again invokes the heavy metal trinity— thunderthud bottom, preening peacock out front, and dramatic slowhand guitar all over the place— with zest and, truly, a sense of humor. The songs are not exclu-z sively concerned with eviscerating every 16-year-old girl in Southern California and/or duking it out with Beelzebub. In fact, “Swing You Sinners!" and "Hear About It Later" back to back on Side 1 are absolutely first rate: energized, exciting, and they don’t overstay their welcome. (No “Moby Dick" 's in these waters.)

AC/DC is much closer to the ground, flying low to avoid radar. Valerie Bertinelli would never marry one of these guys, but they have endured much worse and prospered. The press (both straight and bent) has utterly ignored them, their lead singer (and lyric writer) died tragically and their records keep going multiple platinum. As a sort of last laugh (and shining example of waste not. want not economy) they released Dirty Dedds Done Dirt Cheap, an album more than five years old. and watched it run out of the stores as fast as kids could mow lawns, deliver papers or deal drugs to pay for it. To say the weary blooze riffs are rehashed is irrelevant because if you're 13. it's all new. “Gonna Be Some Rockin' " and “Ain’t No Fun" are passable examples of the refried boogie, but "Big Balls" and “Squealer are songs that only someone who’s just discovered jerking off could love Everyone over 20. if they’ve heard of AC/DC. abhors them—with the possible exception of a few FM singles, notable "Highway To Hell." Every 13-year old knows who they are and. at the very least, appreciates their efficiency. The men don’t know what the little boys understand.

Obviously I think that Van Halen makes much better records and does more things well, but that's because 1 like more things—I'm not as single minded as I once was. And though Van Halen's "Mean Streets" is deadly serious. I don’t expect either band to make a major cultural statement in the forseeable future—it s not their line of work. Time will tell who has the legs— right now they both have the moment I wish them both good Luck and look forward to receiving instruction in taste, discernment, and historical perspective through the letters column.

Jeff Nesin (September 1981)z

CREEM SPECIAL EDITION

VAN HALEN

DAVID LEE ROTH "Oh, no!!!! It's Elmo!!"

CREEM SPECIAL EDITION

VAN HALEN

EDDIE VAN HALEN "Well, it's not as soft as Val, but it'll do in a pinch."

CREEM SPECIAL EDITION

VAN HALEN

ALEX VAN HALEN "Hey, Mom!! Over here!!"

CREEM SPECIAL EDITION

VAN HALEN

MICHAEL ANTHONY Quit laughing at me!!"