Everybody Wants Some!
Boston’s Tribute to Van Halen (CherryDisc/Roadrunner)
by Nik Rainey
Who among us has not had their youth enriched by the power, the glory, the utter majesty that is/was Van Halen? Uh, well, me for starters. During my formative years, as I was developing a rarefied and sophisticated ear for music (i.e., when I was a prissy little sound-snob), I had no time for the shaggy-haired, libidinous arena-pomp of this band nor (especially) the beer-bong-and-dry-heave crowd that followed them around. Besides, that Eddie cat played far too many notes with far too much clarity when all you needed was a couple of blood-drawing barre chords, a street wave of heavy distortion, and a glacial sneer to attain an exalted musical state. By the time I realized the value of Ed’s virtuosic fretboard Mozartisms and the self-parodying machismo of Diamond Dave’s stage persona and lyrics that were to cock-rock what the inflated crotches in the Swan Lake sequence in the movie Top Secret! were to the Bolshoi, it was too late – the dreary castrato-in-need-of-a-throat-culture Van Hagar era had set in like a dose of gangrene and Mr. Lee Roth had lost that dynamic Charles Atlas tension he perfected and waddled out to a course of bloated comedy-rock records of vertically-diminishing value. I never counted them among my favorite bands (too much of the snobbiness of youth has settled like coffee grounds in my liver), but in retrospect I recognized the value of a good joke in a business ever-starved for them, and prime Van Halen was a delicious joke indeed, the kind every horny Spicoli out there could dig – the teen age is one big cartoon, and VH catered to that impulse and let us in on the ludicrousness of it at the same time. Arena-sized slapstick, perfectly proportioned.
The cover of Everybody Wants Some!, the latest in an endless series of artist-homage collections, this one based on geography (all the featured bands are Boston-based) as much as hagiography, states it plain: it closely resembles a panel from one of those old “Tijuana Bibles,” the illicit comic books published in the ’30s and ’40s, usually depicting familiar cartoon characters bumping line-drawn nasties in explicit detail (such were the activities of our elders in the days before the cut-and-paste functions of Photoshop made it easy for the average eight-year-old to graft Teri Hatcher’s head to Candy Samples’ body) – a goofy pre-coital clinch with sweat falling on the Diver Down sleeve lounging beside the old box phonograph. A little archaic-looking, mayhap, but does it capture certain portions of your young adulthood a little closer than you would like? (Or – let’s come clean – what you hoped those certain portions of your young adulthood would be like?) Of course it does. When it’s on, EWS! is as proper a retrospectful tribute to the overripeness of youth as it is a mere compilation of cover tunes. Let’s take ’em one by one:
“Eruption,” the Reverend Ed Broms – No, I don’t believe this is some neo-rockabilly nom de quiff, this would appear to be an actual man o’ the cloth from West Roxbury, MA, taking the famed overture and riffing madly on his organ (knock it off…) with full Catholicoustics. A properly religious opening to this properly religious program.
“Could This Be Magic?,” Trona – Add a strolling bassline, acoustic guitars and chick-up-a-twee vox from Mary Ellen (“you got womens on your mind” – gender-fucking and bad grammar: two great bad tastes that tastefully grate together!), with a slightly-drunken-sailor chorale corraled with a touch of distortion and you get a compendium of eighties sound chomps seemingly diametrically opposed to the VH experience, but with a light tone which keeps it firmly in the campy camp just like a Roth-child should.
“Jamie’s Crying,” Jayuya – ¡Ay ay ay! Zappa meets Zapata in a bilingual horizontal mambo with greasy, tear-slickened horns, beat-a-fajita bongos, and guitars Vai-ing for attention in the Banderas-bandito mix.
“Everybody Wants Some,” Talking to Animals – …some martinis, by the sound of things. The inevitable Lounge Halen track – a moistened Stereolabia soaked up by a spaced-age bachelor pad secured firmly beneath ripped velveteen spandex, a soundthat’ll make you wanna get laid… back.
“Atomic Punk,” Cherry 2000 – Evidently, C-2K didn’t wear their lead aprons, `cause the first three-quarters of this track is heavily contaminated with lounge fallout from the previous number until the last movement, when the bomb-shelter makeout vibe gives way to a full-on erotic meltdown. Toss another slug into the nukebox for me, baby.
“Why Can’t This Be Love?,” Gigolo Aunts – This album’s sole evidence of the Visigothic pillage of the Hagar the horrible error, uh, era, made over into a perfect approximation of the early Fabs, strict stereo separation, handclaps and harmonies that head-wag sideways instead of the expected up-and-down whiplash. (I can’t drive `65?)
“Beautiful Girls,” Red Time – I guess nobody had the heart to the tell the guy who painstakingly lettered the sleeve that there’s another “u” in “beautiful,” but that’s just the copy-editor inside me niggling. Music-wise, this is the first time on the record that the guitar plays an Eddie riff more or less straight, restoring it to its full `70s kingly leer, while they bust a randy Clintonian groove thang, like P-Funk where the “P” stands for something else.
“Take Your Whiskey Home,” Honkeyball – Maybe not the best idea to put these side by side, since the initial riff’s just a truncated version of the previous one, though that’s academic once the martial lock-step and guttural bellowing kicks in. Not too inspiring, but I bet it sounds just fine under the influence of some potent potables with a testosterone chaser.
“Jump,” Mary Lou Lord – The balloon-cheeked buskstress set the bar impossibly high on this one; why try another wispy acoustic version of VH’s biggest hit when Aztec Camera already did it up to morose perfection a dozen years ago? So light, it barely inspires one to stand upright, much less leap. And I find it interesting that she drops the “how old are you?” line – I didn’t realize girls were that sensitive `bout the age thing.
“Somebody Get Me a Doctor,” The Ghost of Tony Gold – A nice touch of breathy glitter camp from these spectral spores, a little closer to Diamond Dogs than Diamond Dave.
“Mean Streets,” Elbow – Nothing remotely Scorsesean here; a little slurp from the swamp, a little bow to the bayou, a touch o’ wang-dang-sweet-distorto-twang, a blues travelogue with a slip on the slide-guitar.
“Feel Your Love,” Fuzzy –Darlene Love, that is. Up against the Wall of Sound, motherhubbard!
“Panama,” Captain Rock – The brassiest VH derangement (with Morphine’s Dana Colley, among other reed-wetters) and the funniest vocals yet, Brundleflying Captain Beefheart, Jim Dandy, and the Cookie Monster into the aural equivalent of skin cancer from too many hours in the tropical sun.
“Little Guitars,” Vic Firecracker Orchestra – Howzabout no guitars? Kronos Quartet-like chamber music with a stage-whispered singer; a classical gas gas gas.
“Dance the Night Away,” Tom Leach – Two-stepping `til dawn by the “camp”fire with maximum tortured twang; the metal headband as steel-guitarred Hank-erchief.
“Romeo Delight,” Sam Black Church – Curtis’ favorite band bulldozes the original’s sly crotch-charm under a piledriver of generic thrash `n’ bash. Got any more of that poison, Juliet?
“Eruption,” Crick Diefendorf – And here we come almost full-circle, from the cathedral where we began to the Shakey’s Pizza next door with a banjoriffic flourish, hence winding up our journey with no repeated stops along the way. Considering the array of local talent assembled here, it’s strange to think, that of all the Bostonian burblers that Ed `n’ Alex `n’ Mikey coulda chosen to replace their second ousted yowler, they settled for one of the biggest bozos in Beantown, but hey, at least there’s a burstin’ back catalogue to draw varied inspiration from. There’s even the threat of a Volume 2 – all the better to dream of what, say, Chevy Heston might do to “Big Bad Bill is Sweet William Now.”
