Never Forget By Greg Renoff (@GregRenoff) Give me your memories. Sounds odd, doesn’t it? Of course, no tactful and thoughtful individual would ever say that to another person, especially one who generously takes the time to recount stories from long ago. Memories, as we all know, are meant to be shared, not taken. But I learned something else about memories during the four or so years I conducted interviews for Van Halen Rising: some memories are more precious than others. When I first started contacting folks who had grown up in and around Pasadena during the 1970s, I had not really considered how their memories of Van Halen differed from my own memories of the same band. You see, I’d initially encountered Van Halen in 1984, first on MTV, and then in concert. To me, David Lee Roth was some combination of Tarzan and superhero, a frontman who could chug Jack Daniel’s and then leap off a massive drum riser. He could sing, dance, and tell jokes, all while making girls scream and delight. Similarly, Edward Van Halen wasn’t anything like anyone else I’d seen or heard play guitar. His fretboard speed was blinding, his songwriting magical. He was a guitar hero. A guitar god. In other words, my teenage memories of Van Halen were of happy abstractions, not of real people. But when I began interviewing people from Pasadena, I soon realized (a rather obvious point in retrospect) that the members of Van Halen had been a part of their lives in a way that they hadn’t been in mine. As my interviewees shared their stories, I learned that while the four members of Van Halen had played different roles in the lives of different people, Alex, Dave, Edward, and Michael were anything but abstractions. The various stories I heard characterized them as everything from classmates and friends to lovers and rivals. They were musical peers and neighbors, mentors and enemies. They were entertainers and musicians. They were, it turned out, real, three-dimensional people who my interviewees knew on a personal level. They were men who mattered to them, and not because Edward Van Halen revolutionized the electric guitar or because David Lee Roth became one of the biggest rock stars in history. Instead, they mattered because of interactions they’d had with them long before anyone outside of Southern California had heard of Van Halen. The mattered because of acts of kindness, like the time Edward went to a music store with a friend to help pick out an acoustic guitar for his friend’s girlfriend. They mattered because of the experiences they’d shared, like providing musical backing for Roth during his stint in his pre-Van Halen band, Red Ball Jet. They mattered because they’d done crazy shit together, they type of hair-raising and hilarious stuff that makes teenage life tolerable. Those are the types of things they shared with me; the instances when the members of Van Halen had touched their lives. So to the Pasadena folks who took to time to talk to a stranger, an historian who had gotten stuck on the idea that he should write a book about Van Halen’s beginnings, I say thank you again for taking the time to share your precious memories with me. They’ve enriched my life, and I know they will enrich the lives of Van Halen fans when they read Van Halen Rising.
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 04:14:24 +0000
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