Favorite L.A. Albums, Part 4: Van Halen II
Flashing back to the VH LP I came in on
Wracked with feelings of sorrow and helplessness after watching from 3,000 miles away as the Palisades and Eaton fires spiraled out of control, I decided to salute my former hometown of Los Angeles with a series of posts on some of the records that truly qualify as “L.A. albums” for me — not just because of their provenance or personnel, but because there’s something about them that instantly pulls me back to my own L.A. experiences. As difficult a city as it can be to love at times, I do truly love Los Angeles, and am profoundly grateful for the role it has played in my life… and in my record collection.
I’m not sure how many more of these “L.A. album” posts there will be, but it’s brought me a lot of comfort to ruminate upon these records and my connection to them — especially while my heart is still breaking over the historic damage that these wildfires have wrought upon the area and its human and animal residents, the ruthless rent-jacking by opportunistic landlords that has occurred in its wake, the egregious lies about the state’s water situation from the current White House occupant and his threats to do away with FEMA entirely. And I can’t even begin to imagine the challenges of trying to recover from a tragedy of this magnitude amidst the unconscionable blizzard of shit and chaos that is already being stirred up said White House occupant’s idiotic tariffs against (former?) allies like Canada and Mexico and by a certain South African fascist’s hostile takeover of our federal government.
Like the previous L.A. albums installments, this post goes out to all my friends, family and readers in Southern California. The fires have now thankfully been completely contained, but the rebuilding will take a long, long time, and for many of you folks nothing will ever be the same. But it does me a world of good to see so many people pulling together in the wake of this disaster, even as so many others are using it as an opportunity to inflict pain and sow division. And I’m especially grateful for the rains that finally fell there last week.
The first three installments in this series can be read here:
This fourth installment overlaps a bit with the musical memoir I’ve been writing about my turbulent adolescence, and parts of it will probably reappear there — like the ones about why a Jimmy Buffett 45 was one of the first singles I ever bought, or how The Eagles inspired me to pick up a guitar, or how the film Grease mirrored my hellish entry to junior high, all of which can currently be perused in full by my paid subscribers.
(And speaking of which, humongous thanks to longtime pal and JTL fan Peter Schilling on for signing on as a Jagged Time Lapse founding member! Your continued support means a lot to me, good squire!)
I had a silent crush on a different girl in just about every one of my seventh grade classes at John Burroughs Junior High, and Emma was my designated infatuation in Art Appreciation.
She usually sat next to or across from me at one of the long tables that took up most of the classroom. She had big blue eyes, voluminous lashes, fair skin with a light smattering of freckles, an adorably rounded nose and wavy chestnut brown hair that was parted in the center and fell more than halfway down her back. She was tall, slim and slightly gawky, but also outgoing and funny in a way that instantly felt familiar, echoing the loquacious, wise-cracking humor of the Jewish New Yorkers on my father’s side.
But when I realized in March 1979 that Emma also had a crush on me, it completely freaked me out. Like the dog who’d somehow caught the car it had long daydreamed about chasing, I was utterly unprepared for this sort of eventuality. Not only that, but she was also a good four inches taller than I was. Such height discrepancies wouldn’t trouble me at all later in life; but back in seventh grade, when I was still about two years away from hitting my adolescent growth spurt — and self-consciously hung up on the idea of “how it would look” — this felt like an absurdly impossible hurdle. Even though I thought she was really cool and cute, the prospect of actually doing anything about it totally froze me in my tracks.
Even more paralyzing was that she expressed her feelings for me not via the usual junior high means — a passed note, or a whisper from a mutual friend — but because she told me directly… or rather, sang it to me directly, right there in the classroom underneath a poster of Giacometti’s The Palace at 4 a.m.
A few days earlier, she’d overheard me absentmindedly singing “Goin’ Out of My Head” to myself while waiting for class to start. I hadn’t consciously meant anything by it; the song had been lodged in my head since hearing it on KRLA that morning as I was getting ready for school, and I was simply letting it out. “What are you singing?” Emma asked. “Oh, it’s just a song by Little Anthony and the Imperials,” I shrugged. And then our teacher called everyone’s attention to the blackboard, and that was the end of that particular conversation… a conversation I promptly and completely forgot about until the following Monday, when I took my usual seat in Art Appreciation.
“What’s up, Emma?” I muttered while attempting a cool-guy nod, whereupon she showily clasped her hands together, batted her long lashes, leaned towards me and began to sing “Goin’ Out of My Head,” grinning widely with her big eyes looking directly into mine:
I see you each morning
But you just walk past me
You don’t even know that I exist
“Guhguhguhguhguhguh,” I sputtered, as my brain basically short-circuited on the spot.
Completely panicked, I desperately tried to change the subject. Looking desperately around the room for a lifeline, I noticed a denim-covered loose-leaf binder sitting in front of Emma, upon which she’d scrawled “Van Halen” in colorful magic marker.
“Is that your last name?” I asked, lamely pointing at her binder. (I knew it wasn’t her real last name, which was something Jewish — though Emma Van Halen would have been a pretty badass moniker.)
“No, Silly,” she responded, clearly taking my dodge in stride, no doubt having already ascertained that boys my age were strange and stupid. “They’re a band. They’re from L.A., and they’re totally radical.”
By now, I’d been in L.A. long enough to know that “radical” in local parlance meant “cool,” as opposed to aggressively committed to far-reaching political change like the radicals I’d crossed paths with back in Ann Arbor. But I had honestly never heard of Van Halen — their groundbreaking 1978 debut had come and gone without so much as denting my AM radio-fueled musical bubble. I made a mental note to keep an eye and an ear out for them.
As if on cue, I spotted an ad in the Los Angeles Times a few days later for the Califfornia World Music Festival, a weekend of concerts and other music-related activities to be held at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum and Sports Arena, with Van Halen advertised on the bill along with Ted Nugent (who I already knew about from my Michigan days), Aerosmith (whose “Come Together” single I already owned) and a number of other big-name bands. And then, just a few weeks after that, I started hearing “Dance the Night Away” on local AM radio powerhouses KFI and KHJ.
I had no idea at the time that Van Halen were charting a new course for American hard rock and heavy metal, or that their guitarist would become the most innovative and influential rock riffer since Jimi Hendrix. Hell, the song didn’t even have a noticeable lead guitar break to speak of; I only learned much later that the song’s “steel drum” sounds were actually the six-string sorcery of Edward Van Halen in action. All I knew was that I loved “Dance the Night Away” from the very first time I heard it.
The song was fun, catchy, propulsive and uplifting, but also loaded with swagger and just a hint of danger. The singer’s voice was, to put it charitably, less “trained” than 95 percent of the voices I heard on the radio, but it was also brimming with personality, attitude, and a sense of self-belief that was infectious; and whenever the soaring harmonies kicked in on the chorus, they made me feel like I was zooming up the PCH with the top down. Years later, I would regularly put “Dance the Night Away” on various power pop mixtapes, much to the annoyance of certain more doctrinaire power pop fans that I hung out with. But the song had power, it was poppy as hell, and it was audibly drenched in the same bright California sunshine as The Beach Boys’ “Fun, Fun, Fun” — Pete Townshend’s Platonic ideal of power pop — so why not?
The song’s lyrics centered around a young woman (“Barely a beginner/But just watch that lady go”) who couldn’t get enough of the dance floor, or, presumably, Van Halen. Every time I heard the song, I would picture Emma in her usual school outfit (designer jeans, wedge sandals and an oversized “Heaven” t-shirt knotted at one side of her waist), completely lost in bliss as she boogied down to the music.
I never actually got to watch her dance in person, and that was fine — at 12 going on 13, I was too clueless, too self-conscious and too broke to ask a girl on a date, especially in a car-oriented world like Los Angeles. What would I do, ask my mom to drive me to wherever the hell Emma lived (I had no idea, but kids were bussed into my school from as far away as the San Fernando Valley, and we lived over in the Fairfax District) and then drop us off at some movie theater or mall, where I wouldn’t be able to afford to buy her anything? I was happy just to know that she “liked” me… and to be introduced to Van Halen.
It was through my friend Patrick that I was able to hear the rest of Van Halen II for the first time. It would be many more years before I warmed up to the lumbering cover of Clint Ballard Jr.’s “You’re No Good” (which I knew only as a Linda Ronstadt song) that opened the album, but the rest of Side One — “Dance the Night Away,” “Somebody Get Me a Doctor,” “Bottoms Up!” and “Outta Love Again” was a total good-time hard-rocking blast, the perfect soundtrack to the SoCal keg party of my dreams. Side Two seemed patchier, but I immediately loved “Light Up the Sky” and “Beautiful Girls,” the two songs that bookended it.
That “Dance the Night Away” was the album’s lone hit single — and the first Van Halen song to reach the Top 20 — wasn’t a surprise to me, given that it was the poppiest thing on the album. But I also suspected even back then that the song’s title and subject had more than a little to do with its steady airplay; in the disco-mad days of 1978 and ‘79, when even Bill “Ray J. Johnson” Saluga and Ethel Merman were cutting dancefloor-oriented novelties, any new song with “Dance” in its title was immediate catnip to DJs and radio station program directors. It didn’t even need to be an actual disco song — Nigel Olsson had just enjoyed a major hit with the impossibly dreary “Dancin’ Shoes," a flaccid track which must have inspired absolutely no one to shake their groove thing — but as long as it referenced the act of dancing, AM radio stations of the day could be convinced to give it a shot. “Beautiful Girls,” the festive (and very funny, thanks to David Lee Roth’s “Louis Prima goes to the beach” shtick) follow-up single to “Dance the Night Away,” stalled at #84; I’ll bet it would have at least made the Top 40 if the band had called it “Dancin’ Girls,” though I’m pretty glad they didn’t.
Few folks today — myself included — would rank Van Halen II as the band’s best album. The track order is oddly paced, and it’s not as strong cut-for-cut as their debut LP, or as heavy as 1980’s Women and Children First or 1981’s Fair Warning, or (“Dance the Night Away” notwithstanding) as much of a direct hit on the pop-rock zeitgeist as 1984’s 1984. But it’s my sentimental favorite of their albums, both because it was the record that first got me into Van Halen, and because its tunefully hard-rocking songs and Ted Templeton’s shiny and airy production still propel me back to Los Angeles in the early spring of 1979 like nothing else. Two years later, when I was spending the summer in Greece and feeling really homesick, I bought Van Halen II on cassette from a record stall in Athens, and proceeded to walk through the streets of the Plaka blasting some good ol’ American rock n’ roll on my friend Aristotle’s portable tape recorder.
I’ve always thought of Van Halen as a quintessentially Southern California band, and I suspect most of their fans (and even non-fans) think of them the same way due to their songs and image. But one thing I never really thought about — at least until I recently read Alex Van Halen’s book Brothers — was the fact that, if America had been far less welcoming of immigrants, Van Halen would have never existed.
Sure, frontman David Lee Roth and bassist/vocalist Michael Anthony were born in the U.S., but their grandparents had emigrated here from Russia, Poland and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And drummer Alex Van Halen and his guitar-slinging younger brother Edward were immigrants themselves, sailing to this country’s shores from the Netherlands in 1962, accompanied by their Dutch musician father Jan and their Dutch East Indies-born mother Eugenia. The brothers could barely speak more than a couple of words of English when they began school at Pasadena’s McKinley Elementary; their father — who also couldn’t speak English — was thrown in jail within two weeks of their arrival over a miscommunication with a cop during a traffic stop. (The officer saw rolling papers and loose tobacco on the elder Van Halen’s lap and assumed it was marijuana.) He wound up spending 15 days behind bars before the rest of the family figured out how to get him released on bail.
Obviously, things worked out all right for the Van Halen brothers. They learned English and assimilated quickly into their new adoptive country; and, channeling the love of music and drive for achievement instilled in them by their father, they practiced and gigged their asses off until their band became huge — the American Dream with Marshall stacks, in other words. But I also wonder how well they would have fared in a virulently anti-immigrant age like this one, when teachers are contacting ICE to snitch on kids in their classrooms who can’t speak English, and immigrants who are here perfectly legally — or even children who were born here and thus guaranteed citizenship under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution — now have to live in fear of being separated from their families and sent to detention camps or flat-out deported.
I will go to my grave believing that immigrants are a big part of what actually makes this country great, and have played a major role in creating the endlessly fascinating multi-cultural stew that constitutes American popular culture. As a descendent of Russian/Polish Jewish, Italian and Scottish/English immigrants, who has spent significant portions of his life in this country’s three largest and most diverse cities, how could I honestly think otherwise? Sure, there are problems with our current immigration system, as there are with so many other aspects of U.S. government policy, but the current GOP-led drumbeat of fear and demonization of immigrants (especially ones with darker skin) sickens me no end.
And that’s because I firmly believe that not only is all humanity intrinsically alike under the skin, but that a significantly high percentage of the things that make my daily life (and quite possibly yours) worth living can be traced directly back to people who migrated — or were forcefully brought — to this country, if not to their immediate descendants. I am so thankful for all of their contributions… and not least for the brave Dutch, Indonesian, Polish and Russian Jewish immigrants whose convoluted journeys to this land ultimately resulted in the good-time hard-rocking blast that is Van Halen II. I’m guessing that Emma, wherever she is today, probably feels the same.
Once again, I’m going to leave you with a list of donation links to organizations that are doing great work on the ground right now, and which could definitely use your assistance if you can give it.
Greater Good Charities Disaster Relief
Healthcare for Homeless Animals
Los Angeles Fire Department Wildfire Emergency Fund
Los Angeles Regional Food Bank
Pasadena Humane Society and SPCA Wildfire Relief
And if you’re out in Southern California and can lend a hand in person, here’s an extensive list of volunteer opportunities.
And as per Rock 'n' Roll with Me, if you’d like to assist any of the musicians or Black and Latino families that have been displaced by the fires, there areplenty of GoFundMe’s to contribute to — including one for my friend and fellow Substack writer S.W. Lauden, a.k.a Steve Coulter, whose family lost almost everything in the Eaton fire.
Finally, I’d like to thank everyone in L.A. and elsewhere who has pitched in to help the people and animals whose lives have been massively impacted by this tragedy. Despite all the ghouls and jackasses, there are a lot of good folks out there who realize that the only way through crises like these — and all the other shit that’s already blowing our way — is via togetherness, combined action and mutual assistance. Even from 3,000 miles away, I feel honored and energized to still be a part of the L.A. community.
"Few folks today — myself included — would rank Van Halen II as the band’s best album. "
I would-- but for the purely subjective reason that I think VHII showed us just how good this band would/could be, even if they didn't know it yet.
You're after my own heart Mr. Epstein! WACF was my first, so wonderful to see the DTNA video, I'm not sure if I'd never seen it or forgotten I have but damn, that's as good as it got man. As much as I love the debut it was savagely overplayed in my world so II, WACF and Fair Warning are the only albums I listen to on purpose anymore. I love all of II, "Spanish Fly" holy shit, it isn't a trick! The DOA riff slays me, as does Light up the Sky with I think the only true Alex break and it's perfect for the song. In college (Western Michigan U. in Kalamazoo, widely regarded as the Harvard of the midwest) me & my drunken dorm buddies had a weekly happy hour before an often times pukey cafeteria dinner. One of my classic 60 minute TDK SA mix tapes started off with "Bottoms Up" - every glorious Wednesday.
The best Alice Cooper Band albums, the best 70's Aerosmith and the Roth era Van Halen is as good USA album making rock got.
Way to weave the story back to a country of immigrants, nicely done. It's amazing how here we are in the so-called information age and it still hasn't dawned on about half the people living in this country that their heritage is either Native American, slave, refugee or immigrant. They don't even understand that they are not at all anti-immigrant, what they are is intolerant racists.