Van Halen St. Louis Review
I ended up scoring some tickets to the Van Halen concert in St. Louis on Saturday night, and it was amazing, absolutely amazing. The boys are back and sounded like they were on top of their game. I was sitting in the back of the venue, and all in all the vocals could of been a little bit louder, but I could still make out what Diamond Dave was screaming about. The stage was much smaller than expected, and there was no pyros nor any “flair” about the show. The stage was quite a ways away from my standpoint and even though I could see them clearly on stage, the big screen behind them helped out, especially on the guitar solos. The camera man was quick to follow all of Eddies fingers has he belted out solo after solo just like listening on the albums. After watching Eddie in action, you come to realize, ok, maybe he is one of the greatest guitar players ever.
Dave’s voice, for being in his 50’s, sounded great. He came out, did a few windmill kicks like he did on the jump video that we’ve all come to expect from Dave and started the show out with a bang. Before the end of the first song, he was nailing those high screeches he perfected on the early Van Halen albums. Dave didn’t run around the stage during the show (probably since he was hurting from the windmill kicks before), but took a slow walk stance on most of the songs. I guess the arthritis has kicked in. By the end of the show, Dave’s voice was just as strong as the first song.
I’m not sure if it was one of Eddie’s better nights, but he was on fire. I’ve seen some good guitar players in my limited 15+ years of going to concerts (Clapton, Page, Kirk Hammett, Randy Rhoads, Chuck Berry, Dimebag Darrel to name a few) and out of these, I think more emphasis was put on the guitar solos from a visual aspect. I can’t remember in a Metallica concert the jumbotron zooming into Kirk’s fingers to show the crowd. Every single solo Eddie had, boom, there was the zoom on the fret board. It didn’t get old, since each solo was amazing, but it was thrown in your face. Eddie placement on the stage was very weird. Usually in a 4 piece band, looking at the stage you have a guitar player and bass on stage left or right, singer on stage center and the drums on stage center back. Eddie was positioned right in front of the drums. I’m not sure if they did this to get Eddie, Dave and Alex in on the same shot on the jumbotron, but that’s what happened. There was nobody on stage right. Wolfgang was all alone on the side of the stage, but it didn’t seem to be bothering him. He was probably glad to get away from his drunk dad for 2 hours.
Eddie didn’t do too much movement on stage, he just stood behind his mic for most of the show, but he did jump off the drum riser during the song “Jump”. I did notice he did change his guitar after each song, and sometimes during the middle of the song while Dave was spewing his bullshit, like he loves to do. Eddie was sporting all his vintage guitars that we’ve all come to recognize in his videos.
Wolfgang did a good job on bass, but how hard is it to screw up bass? Come on. I really didn’t miss Michael Anthony on bass. Just filling the void of sound below 1000Mhz. That’s all he did, and he accomplished that.
What I did notice, which probably was not noticeable to the average Joe was the amount of dummy guitar amps on stage. Since Eddie signed a deal with Fender for his 5150 series, they were all Fender full stacks with a custom eVh symbol on both the speakers and amps. When the stage lights came up or the spot lights shined on the amp heads, the front grill was see through and there was nothing in the amp head. Just two little lights showing the audience that the row of 8 full stacks were “on”. I took a closer look at the speakers and they were made out of cardboard. That made sense since all the guys were using in ear monitors, so why did they have only Eddie’s guitars amps on stage? Where were the bass amps? Also, there was no vocal monitors on stage either. I confirmed my theory after the show since we hung around for a while and saw some of the roadies picking up the full stack with ease with no dolly or hand truck. BUSTED!!!!! Plastic amps for SHOW!!!!!!!
Plastic amps and all, this was a kick ass show. They played hit after hit after hit. I knew every single song. I’m sure they played 20+ songs, since they were on stage for 2 plus hours. The encore was “Jump” with the last set consisting of “Panama”, “Ain’t Talking About Love”, “Hot For Teacher” and “Jump”.
Pictures from the event are up on my mobile blog framaram.blogspot.com
