Sic Semper Tyrannis

Brother, Let Me Be Your Servant

Continuing on in my recount of first musical influences, I can remember several moments with my oldest brother Mark. When I was a little kid, Mark was the rebellious one of the family. We are 10 years apart and we might as well be light years apart in personality. I still contend with my parents to this day that I never did anything wrong growing up because I observed how much trouble Mark got into. Drugs and drinking and smoking-all of this while he was still under my parents’ roof in high school and probably before. We were pretty much polar opposites. I liked school and I liked to please my parents. (It is sort of amusing to see how domesticated Mark has turned out-with a wife and two kids.) We’re no longer polar opposites, just regular opposites. He talks a lot and is always telling jokes. I’m pretty quiet and reserved.

Anyway, all of that to say that if my mom was the angel on my musical shoulder Mark was the devil. Mom may have given me The Carpenters but Mark introduced me to the ROCK, and I’m not talking about the actor/wrestler. I remember spending one week engaged in the project of dubbing off copies of his Van Halen tapes totally secret-like, because if Mom found out that I was listening to Mark’s music she would have freaked! In her mind, I’m sure that if Van Halen and Kiss and AC/DC weren’t a direct cause of his rebelliousness, they were at least a symptom. I also had to keep the secret from Mark, because I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea about me and try to proselytize me to the dark side of bad boys. Just because I was a good kid it didn’t mean that I couldn’t listen to bad-ass music. At least that’s what I thought and I had no faith that Mark or Mom could figure that out.

And I spent that week also engaged in a separate artistic endeavor- drawing Eddie Van Halen’s electric guitar. He and that guitar were a fixation for me. It was like everything cool about music could be expressed quite succinctly in this little image-a long-haired guy and his Frankenstein guitar. Eddie totally changed rock n’ roll guitar. (Some would say for better, some for worse-since he was the catalyst for all manner of 80’s hair band guitar-players.) I know this now, but back then, I just knew I liked the unmistakable “skill” that he showed-off. “Eruption” was the coolest thing ever! It was like what an alien would sound like if he came to earth and picked up a guitar. Crazy-fast notes. Dive-bomb howling. It’s all in there.

Oh, yeah. There was also some guy named David Lee Roth in the band. I didn’t care much about him or his words. In my young mind, the words just get in the way of the cool music. I suppose that never left me.

I’ve listened to a lot of music since then. And I’ve been inundated with the doctrine of what kinds of music are “cool” to listen to. The 90’s pretty much killed all discussions of instrumental technique, at least in rock music. It became grotesquely uncool to play like Eddie. Two-handed tapping and whammy bar histrionics are a laughable absurdity from a by-gone musical era. It’s like extolling the musical virtues of the hurdy-gurdy. But I have no problem saying that the first Van Halen album is the sole reason I ever picked up a guitar in the first place several years down the road. Highlights:

“Runnin’ With the Devil”-still feel kind of bad that one of the big musical influences of my childhood, the first Van Halen album starts with this title. Maybe Mom was right and I had reason to be secretive as I began my life-long descent into hell, all brought about by rock n’ roll.

“You Really Got Me”- even as a kid I knew that they were taking an old song and DESTROYING it.

“Jamie’s Cryin’”-Oh, oh, oh Jamie’s Cryin’ It’s a chorus you can’t forget once you’ve heard it. I was a little kid, so the talk of male-female relationships was lost on me. (As it still kinda is.)

“Atomic Punk”-what more do you need to know? The tile pretty much says it all. “Nobody rules these streets at night but me- the ATOMIC PUNK!”

Speaking of which, it is interesting to me how an Eddie Van Halen-led band came about at the same time as punk rock, when their aesthetics have some pretty big differences. Like I said, Eddie was a god on the guitar, playing all kinds of weedly-weedlies on the west coast, while the Ramones could barely play their three-chord songs in New York.

Today, I have most of the Van Halen catalog on CD, gathering dust in my bedroom but, ironically, I no longer have that first album- the one that kinda started it all. But I can still hear it in my head.

Any Van Halen fans out there?

posted by Mike @ 2:00 PM