Edward Van Halen, left, with David Lee Roth in New York City, Nov. 13.
The world offers an enormous cavalcade of things that can scare you to the core, and you know all the hits.
For instance, I should be worried about buying Christmas gifts for my son and making certain they don’t have more lead in them than a Victorian fixer-upper. I should concern myself with any number of global crises, or if I’m feeling especially superficial, I should ponder whether the Writer’s Guild will end its strike in time for “Lost” to have more than six episodes this season.
But no, that’s not what is weighing heavily at this moment. Right now, I’m worried that I might be just a little too excited about Van Halen performing at the Ford Center on Jan. 22, and what that says about me.
I’m not alone. I know dyed-in-the-wool-shepherd’s-sweater Belle and Sebastian fans who love Boston’s first album just a little too much, and there’s a local alt-pop marvel who, if the subject of Rush’s “2112” surfaces, might not shut up for a week. There is photographic evidence of one of my best friends, Phil Bacharach, destroying his hearing at the legendary OKC punk club, The Bowery, and yet he wants to go see the Halen with me because our wives would probably rather gargle glass than suffer through a single second of “Jamie’s Cryin’.”
We all have our big arena rock skeletons in the closet, and while I’d managed to suppress this one, the success of Van Halen’s current reunion tour brought the demon out of the shadows.
Though I discovered the music that truly matters fairly early in life — thank you, MTV, for introducing The Jam to my ears in 1981 — the original Van Halen was an undeniable and towering presence among kids growing up in the late-’70s and early ’80s. The group ruled because Van Halen was a band that perfectly combined musical wizardry with boneheaded adolescence: It could blow half your face off with its sheer rocking prowess and make you laugh off the rest of it with its skits and sketches.
It helped that Edward Van Halen was the Andres Segovia of the Sunset Strip, a guitarist who could shred faster than the Nixon administration, and he chose to pair up with a former honor roll student who was an astute combination of Dionysus and Henny Youngman. It all worked beautifully for about a decade, if you count the time they spent as the kings of the L.A. rock scene before being signed to Warners. Then David Lee Roth split from the band in 1985, and both sides of the fence delivered rapidly diminishing returns for the next 22 years.
For whatever reason, I cared about Van Halen longer than any rational person, let alone any music critic, should. I continued to pay attention when the band released albums with Sammy Hagar, but each successive effort sounded sloppier, less committed and increasingly irrelevant.
Roth became tiresome and pathetic — the drunk uncle of rock ’n’ roll. When he imploded during a brief stint replacing Howard Stern on New York radio two years ago, it looked like the end. Then he showed up on “The Tonight Show” singing a bluegrass version of “Jump,” and people wondered if there was a bottom to his fall.
Now, with the reunion few believed would happen, Van Halen is getting its first great reviews in years. Billboard magazine’s Jonathan Cohen summarized the band’s Nov. 13 performance in New York City, writing that “on this crisp fall night, Van Halen was, if only for two hours, once again the greatest rock band in the world. And that was the greatest surprise of all.”
Van Halen never really was “the greatest rock band in the world,” but it was a hard-rock band that a music snob could love. Lobbying to review the concert is embarrassing, but sometimes that 13-year-old kid who lives in the converted attic of your brain just won’t grow up and move out.