Right now Ed is telling you what he is doing.

SHUT UP ED! Right Now, I don't give a damn about your stupid childish aphorisms.

Although the less cynical side of me says that was quite good.

Nerf Herder's excellent take on Van Halen, the "Right Now" video, and Sammy Hagar.

Is this what you wanted, Sammy Hagar?
Sammy Hagar, is this what you wanted, man?
Dave lost his hairline but you lost your cool, buddy.

Unrelated to Van Halen, but still very cool, check out their vid for Mr Spock, on that youtube page. It's geekalicious!

I always liked that video.

(Sammy did indeed lose his cool but that's because of the getup he wore in Finish What Ya Started. But he was good in Montrose back in the day, and I still love "Give To Live". That's good anthem rock, man.)

Note: that song, their choice of name, and the Buffy theme are the only three good things that Nerf Herder has ever done so far as I am aware.

Makes me cry every time. It's that shot of the gravestone at the end that does it.

I keep meaning to buy that album as it's dirt cheap at the moment. It's sad that so much of that video is still pertinent. Still, Mike did get his solo project, although only because he was replaced by Eddie's son, Wolfgang.

Note: that song (...)
posted by cortex 30 November | 11:07

Van Halen, the song? I'll admit I haven't listened to a lot of NH, but "Mr. Spock" is a fine little geek-angsty tune.

Hagar's "Heavy Metal" -- the version on the movie's soundtrack, not the other one -- is still awesome.

The only time I was impressed by Van Halen. In the sense that they exceeded my expectations.

I remember one perfect summer day I was in the back seat of a Mustang 5.0 convertible, top down, VH turned up all the way. 3 friends/bandmates were in the car with me and we did 95 mph up the Pacific Coast Highway, north of the 10 all the way to Malibu and Pacific Palisades.

On the way up to Santa Barbara one of us bought a slimline Ibanez in a beautiful metallic finish called Black Cherry; on the way back we stopped at the GC on Sunset and Vine, and checked out Eddie's first old Strat, the one with the crazy tape stripes and the hand-overwound ES-335 pickup.

occhiblu says Van Halen reminds her of dolphins jumping but to me they will always be the soundtrack of that perfect day.

The guy with the Ibanez is a neurosurgeon now and I keep looking for one of those proprietary Ibanez 5-way switches to replace the one he eventually busted. I found one in white a few years ago but that would never do, so I keep looking.

The guy driving the 'Stang now writes about fast cars for a living.

I have 14 guitars, and the drummer is still crazy, as far as I know.

Ikkyu2 just described Heaven.

occhiblu says Van Halen reminds her of dolphins jumping

I would really love to hear the explanation behind that.

Heh. He makes it sound like I invented the dolphin thing.

I used to love to go to the Shedd Aquarium (in Chicago) when I was growing up. I feel like we used to go once a month or so, though it was probably less. They had a dolphin show that we would always go see, in which trainers made the dolphins do various dolphin-tricks like jumping out of the water and batting beach balls with their nose, or fetching things from the water.

The soundtrack for the big finale, in which all seven dolphins would be jumping like crazy, was always Van Halen's "Jump." I guess dolphins are a literal bunch.

So the song reminds me of being a kid, on a family outing that I always loved, in some sort of eternal summer, waterside with the dolphins. Which is the feeling I'm trying to describe when I talk about "dolphin-jumping music." Popsicle sugar high with chlorine puddles splashing and the humid weight of August.