Van Halen - Nashville Eruption - 1978 B.E. (Part One)

Mom, early 70's - with the VW Bus that became my first car.

Van, Fucking, Halen.

There is so much about this band that affected me as a teenager and aspiring musician. 

Edward Van Halen’s immense influence in the guitar zeitgeist is undeniable, but there was way more to it than that.

Van Halen was the soundtrack to my coming of age in the late seventies and early eighties.

They were the house band in my life as I struggled to find out who I was and what the fuck I wanted to be. 

Ritchie Blackmore inspired me to learn guitar.

Van Halen inspired me to live the guitar.

They were my fucking band.

It’s easy to take Van Halen for granted today, especially if you weren’t there when they exploded on the scene in 1978.

It’s easy to criticize and minimize as everyone does with every fucking thing in the world these days and to lose sight of the fact that, for those first few years, they could do no wrong.

They fucking ruled.

I’m so grateful I was around.

******

Look, I know I was an idiot when I was a teenager, okay?

But, I know I wasn't the only one.

We did stupid shit.

That's actually in the dictionary, next to the word teenager. You know, towards the bottom, where they use the word in a sentence.

"Little Johnny is a teenager, Little Johnny does stupid shit."

Some of us were just more of an idiot than others.

It's not like I was a complete dumbass, though, I read books, and I did well in school if I wanted to. I was even beginning to develop deeper concepts of God, consciousness, the universe... and my place in it. 

Even so, that shit would go out the window in a heartbeat if there was some potential fun to be had.

Having survived the idiocy of my childhood, luckily I can look back today with a tad of self-awareness and I’m grateful to be alive.

Every time I wanna get mad at a kid, or an intern, or a millennial, because of some stupid shit they are doing, I have to remember the time I blew up the engine in my killer VW camper van, my first vehicle. It had been given to me on my sixteenth birthday. It was such an awesome first vehicle. It had a fold-out sleeper in the back, a small refrigerator, a table that would pop up, I mean, what were my parents thinking giving me that thing? It was a party machine!

We did many family vacations in our cherished bus when we were kids, but we were older now. 

My buddies and I nicknamed it the "Darvon," because it looked like one of our favorite pills. 

I can’t believe I’m telling this, it’s embarrassing as fuck, but what the hell.

I’d been driving my van for almost a year. I was very familiar with all of its little quirks by then. 

I knew the van needed oil, the light had been flashing red when I took a hard curve, that's how I checked the oil level.

It wasn't that I didn't know how to take care of the van, no... My dad taught me well. 

I knew where the fucking dipstick for the oil was, I was just a dipstick, too.

I could even fix the shitty gear shift when it popped out of the thing, I was good at that kind of stuff.

But no, I had to push it.

I think part of it was the complete self-obsession I suffered from. 

I did most of my stupid shit when I wanted what I wanted when I wanted it... consequences be damned.

"Little Johnny liked instant gratification."

My buddy Jeff and I were over in Donelson, because his girlfriend Tessy, had one joint, and we drove from Edge-O-Lake over to Donelson to smoke it with her. If you were broke, and it was dry, (no weed to be had,) all you did was sit around wishing you had some weed. So, even if you had to do the six or seven-mile drive in your van with a broken gas gauge, then that was what you did, by God. Risking a long walk was part of it, too, because I never knew exactly how much gas I really had. 

(I don't think I ever filled that thing up in the few years I had custody of it.)

We get there and smoke the damn thing, it was the size of a toothpick, and of course, it was shit weed, so I needed a beer.

We pulled in Kwik Sak to get some gas on the way back. I had two dollars, and I got a dollar’s worth of gas.

I stuck the stick down the gas hole, so I knew we had enough gas to get back. We went in to pay.

Jeff said, "Dude, you might wanna get that oil."

I looked at a cold Bud tallboy, there were beads of condensation forming on the can as it lay in the pile of ice, and said, "Fuck that oil, I need a beer."

I whipped out my trusty fake ID, and we were on our way.

Not for long.

It was the summer between tenth and eleventh grade, I was about to turn seventeen, and I never had any money. I had quit my first real job, about a month earlier. I loaded trucks at the Genesco shoe factory, and when I showed up for my shift, shit faced, after partying with Jeff and Joey all day, the foreman pointed at this huge pile of boxes that I needed to load. I said, "Okay, lemme pee first."

I snuck out, got in the van, and went home to crash.

My last check came in the mail a week later, and it was gone the first day.

School was about to start soon, it was late August. I was not looking forward to that shit. All I wanted to do was smoke weed, and play guitar.

Weed and guitar were cool.

Jobs and school sucked.

As we rolled down McGavock Pike, the VW started to jerk, then choke, then it made a whining noise I had not heard before.

I could almost hear the poor vehicle crying, "Miiiiiiikkkkeeeeeyyy.....youuuuu duuummmmmmb fuuuuucccckkk......I'm dyyyyyyyying! I hoooooope thaaaaaat beeeeeer issss gooooood!"

In a cruel twist of fate, it died right in front of McGavock High School, my school.

We were on a downhill, so I rolled into the empty front parking lot, and we came to rest in a smoky, final, lurch.

"Mother...Fuck." I said. 

Dad was gonna be so pissed.

Jeff looked at me, concerned. He'd better not say it.

"I tried to tell..."

"Dude! NO!" I said, holding my hand up, "Just... go call Randy. He will come."

Jeff looked over at the East office area of the school.

"You think anybody is in there?" He asked.

"Yes," I said, tersely, "There's always someone in there."

I knew, I'd been to summer school the year before. Jeff went to call. I needed a minute to process this heinous turn of events, and try to come up with a good lie.

Randy True would come and rescue us in his green Ford Torino. 

Randy was like our "Wooderson," the character Matthew McConaughey played in the movie, Dazed and Confused. He was the older dude who just couldn’t let go of his teens. He bought us beer, scored us weed, drove us around... we loved him. He was good people. He was an idiot, like us, just older.

I turned the radio on in the van, and waited, at least it was still working. I rarely listened to the radio anymore, so I had missed Van Halen's first single, You Really Got Me.

That's too bad, because the first time I heard Van Halen, It was Runnin' With The Devil on that shitty car radio on the bus. "That was Runnin' With The Devil, by Vaaaannn Halen," the DJ announced in his dumb DJ voice.

The solos in Devil are cool, in the context of the rest of the first album, but the magic of Edward Van Halen is not on display there. The solos are very sparse, almost like another chorus in the song. They didn't grab me during that first listen, like Highway Star, or Lazy.

I was like, whatever.

I thought, "Van Halen? What kind of name is that?"

******

Eleventh grade was weird, man.

Luckily, I had not totally fried the engine on the Darvon. Yes, dad was pissed, but being a guy who was the father of three boys by the time he was twenty-four, he took it fairly well. He was used to the stupid shit by then. Plus, he had other problems. He and mom were on the verge of splitting up.

I had to get another job to pay for the repairs, which was part of the deal for me to keep the van.

This job was pretty cool. I went to work for my neighbor, Bobby, at his print shop, Papermill Press, in downtown Nashville.

Bobby hired me as a bindery person, which was basically taking the printed stuff, and doing whatever needed to be done after, folding, cutting, making pads, collating, and cleaning up after the press guys.

My favorite thing about working there?

At five o'clock we would lock the doors, and everybody would meet back in Bobby's office where we would smoke down! He always had the good shit, too!

I loved him. He was a cool ex-biker, he was at Woodstock in 1969. He had great stories and wisdom.

He taught me a lot of things, one being the printing trade, which I would fall back on for many years when guitar wasn’t paying the bills.

I was still in school, so I worked it out with my guidance counselor to do half days, and leave to go to work after my first three classes. I could do my last two years of high school like that and still graduate with my class.

I had to wear a uniform for the job, which was fine with me because they did the laundry. I would just wear my green army jacket around school anyway, so nobody really knew.

Even though I was over the whole "school work" part of school, McGavock was still cool because it was very loose. I was able to bullshit most of the teachers and pass classes with the minimum of effort.

It was 1978, shit was way different then.

We had a smoking porch!

In between classes, everybody would flock out there and fire up. There was always a teacher that was assigned to keep an eye on things, but when you had a couple of hundred kids crammed into a hundred-foot covered porch area, there were plenty of ways to discreetly take care of biz. Many joints were bought, sold, and traded, there.

I took guitar class from Mr. Crowder, and I always had my Gibson J45 with me, as I walked the halls of McGavock High. Having guitar class was the perfect excuse to carry my guitar everywhere I went. It was a great way to hide a stash, as well as keep up the newly developing chops.

Ironically, I barely passed guitar class. I would never do my assignments, and I always had a group of dudes in the back of the class, showing them the latest cool Metal licks I had learned.

It would piss Mr. Crowder off to no end!

“Simmons,” he would say, in front of the whole class, “The rock stuff is fine, but you need the fundamentals! Do the damn assignments, Simmons! Don’t think I’m gonna pass you, just because you can play Deep Purple, Simmons.” But, he did pass me, barely.

There were many times I was supposed to be in various classes, but I would blow them off, and stay out in my van in the West parking lot, practicing on the J45. Or, I would find an abandoned corner in the library and show friends Rush songs or Ritchie Blackmore licks.

I had a great, cream-colored Fender USA Strat by then, (just like Ritchie,) and a Fender Super Six Reverb with the pull out knob for extra gain. I fucking loved my electric rig, but truth be told, the J45 was my pride and joy. 

You wouldn’t know it by the way I banged it around, I had no case for it. I had no idea how much it was worth, either.

That was a magic guitar. It was given to me by Tom T Hall's brother, Hillman.

(There is a story about that too, of course.)

It was beat to shit, had been through a fire, and repainted. It rode shotgun in whatever situation I was in, gaining scratches, nicks, and gouges along the way. It was my best friend. I wrote most of my songs on that thing and then transposed them to electric, later.

I was starting to feel pretty damn good about my guitar playing. After being in the band with Robbie, Joey, and Jeff, and being mainly a rhythm player, my lead playing was coming along nicely with the stuff Robbie showed me, and the stuff I figured out that summer studying Blackmore's live solo in Child In Time, from Made In Japan.

Looking back, it's hard to believe that I had not been exposed to the Van Halen record by that fall. Again, it was a different time, and I did not listen to the radio, there was no internet or Facebook, and I had only been to two real concerts at Municipal Auditorium.

Plus, we were in Nashville. 

Van Halen had already been to Nashville once, opening for Journey at the War Memorial Auditorium. I had no clue, I was still a kid, and as much as I wanted to be cool, I was not in the loop yet when it came to the latest killer bands. We were always a year behind around here.

I may have seen a blurb about them here or there in Circus, or Hit Parader, but I remembered Runnin' With The Devil and thought they were just, meh. I didn't even read the articles.

I was a full-blown Ronnie James Dio disciple too, at that time, and the only thing I had heard from David Lee Roth left me uninterested.

My mind was made up about Van Halen. It was gonna be a no for me, dawg.

I didn't know.

I was in my own little world of guitar, and I had no idea how much that world was about to change, on a fateful night, in November 1978.

Bobby, my boss, actually gave me the ticket to the Black Sabbath concert, the day of the show. Something had come up, and he couldn't go. I think it said, "With Van Halen" on the ticket, but I didn't give that a second thought.

I thought, "Sabbath, cool." My friend Drew had turned me onto Sabbath a couple of years back. I really loved the Masters Of Reality record. I thought Sweet Leaf and Children of The Grave, kicked ass. Drew loaned me the record, and never got it back. I listened to it regularly.

My shift went until 7 pm, but Bobby said I could leave a little early as long as I had my shit done, and get down to catch Van Halen, the opening act.

"They are fockin killer!" He said, in his Jersey accent.

Even he knew!

I thought, "Ahh, what does he know, he's like, forty years old."

I left Papermill Press on Capitol Boulevard, next to the Hyatt Regency Hotel, on foot. I was in my uniform, had my work hat on, and the army jacket pulled up against the cold, damp, November night.

It was just a few blocks from there, to the Municipal. I fired up a roach Bobby left for me, and headed to the show by myself, with no clue what was about to happen.