While my first real Van Halen memory dates back to the late 1970s and hearing “Jamie’s Crying” on Dad’s car stereo in Dearborn, Michigan, by way of Detroit’s WRIF, my true passion for the band developed a few years later. If you ask me whether I’m a “Dave man” of a “Van Hagar guy,” I usually reply that I’m a “VAN HALEN guy.” What the brothers Eddie and Alex do is always the constant and the most irreplaceable. Among my peers, in 1984, Van Halen’s album of the same name was as much a staple in our day-to-day lives as Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Huey Lewis and the News’ Sports. Those albums dictated the way I and my fellow sixth graders walked, talked and dressed.
Fast forward to the first two months of 2012. Michael Jackson is now almost two whole years removed from his mortal coil, and by the time he passed away in June of 2010, a whole generation or two were oblivious to the enormity of the pop megastar’s wattage, how guys wanted to be him and girls wanted to date him. By 2010, the frail single parent of three was a shell of his former self, never fully living down charges of sexually inappropriate behavior with children that never did stick to him in terms of criminal convictions. Any quirks that Jackson displayed back in 1984 were just that, quirks that the masses would gladly oblige a supremely talented singer and performer who’d charmed and dazzled audiences since his age was in the single digits. But for years before his death due to prescription drug abuse and living beyond his means, the quirks became more and more unsettling to any rational, albeit average, American not remotely immersed in global celebrity of Jackson’s level. While he was actually prepping a world tour that was supposed to re-light his star, no one knows how well it would have played and how long it would have lasted considering that he didn’t even survive the preproduction.
At least Huey Lewis’s story is anything but a precautionary tale. While the hits have been but a distant memory for going on three decades, I’ve personally been happy to see Huey Lewis on a couple of occasions already in 2012. Like it was the 1980s all over again, Lewis and his longtime backing band turned up in their native San Francisco to sing the National Anthem at the 49ers’ first of two playoff games at Candlestick Park in January. And not long after that, Lewis was on hand, as he has been for years, actually, at Pebble Beach for the golf course’s annual pro-am event. Safe to say the roots rock and roll band’s most commercially successful days are behind them, but there is certainly nothing objectionable about their current musical trajectory, still touring and recording.
