"1984" is not supposed to be a training guide!

Van Halen Zero Demos

I'm sure these have been bootlegged for decades but I've never heard them before.  This is what the band did for Gene Simmons in 1977.  The first song, "I'm On Fire," sounds great.  It also seems to sound a lot like it was very inspired by Montrose.  If it's not the greatest guitar playing ever, Eddie is already way up there and I've always assumed that this was why the band was looked at so much.  Even if they fall apart, EVH can still be hired as a guitarist somewhere.  I think Sammy Hagar was even tempted to hire him at one point.

David Lee Roth is great even with his limited singing ability.  He's giving a fantastic performance and knows exactly how to do it.  "Woman In Love" shows that off.  Meanwhile Mike and Alex are perfectly fit in.  Most people probably didn't expect them to become hugely successful but they've all got a great style and are trying to do well-paced pop songs.  The third song even shows off making the band sound like a car horn, who could do that?  The bridge is great too.

Since I'm not actually a huge Van Halen fan, so far they haven't played any songs I'm actually familiar with and if I don't catch Roth singing the title, I have no chance of recognizing it.  The third song is actually doing a great job as an updated version of a pop song, verses, chorus, the bridge, just going all over the place with its guitar.  ["House of Pain"]  The 'car horn' sound is used at the end and becomes the intro for "Running With The Devil," the first song I do recognize.  It's been ages since I've heard it, but obviously that's one of VH's best known.  Since it's been so long, other than Roth's vocal and possibly a slightly faster speed, I'm not sure if anything else is different from the final version.  The guitar solo definitely sounds the same.  Maybe they played everything a little faster to fit it into a half-hour demo, maybe they played it like this all the time in their concerts and it wasn't modified until an actual producer wanted changes.

Then they go into another song I don't recognize but I'm still impressed and I'm barely halfway through the tracks.  I guess it's "She's the Woman" but anyway, they were obviously keeping in one style.  Where else could they go?  It's where EVH was and no-one else could do anything about it, even if they wanted to.  I assume it was also their youth, bands tend to stay in one place when they start.  If nothing else, that gives them more gigs.  Bands like Queen who played in different styles from the start probably came from Art Rock and I doubt they really got started on it until they were in the studio.  The Beatles did different styles from the beginning but they had an excuse, they were English and the first to approach an American type of music.  They also did that as songwriters, very unusual for any rock band at the time.  John and Paul could think of doing something like Elvis, then Chuck Berry, then Buddy Holly, then a Motown band, then a different Motown band, then a country song, and so on, and this was all before they started writing totally original songs.  After the Beatles, bands were expected to come up with their own songs, but at the time they were expected to have professional writers provide their material.  Chuck and Buddy were unusual that way, obviously Elvis and Motown singers had little to do with the songs except showing up to record vocals and then leaving.

"Let's Get Rockin'" and "Big Trouble" just pass by.  They probably did their best work first and now it's just filling up the space.  That's not a complaint, it's natural to go for the best first.  That's how VH did their first few albums when they had several dozen songs to work with, picking the best for the first album, then the next best for the second album, then the remaining best for the third album.  If possible, maybe a more commercial song was kept for the next album's single, but a decision like that wouldn't ever be made public.  I did recognize "Somebody Get Me a Doctor" (appeared on the second album) but I've never been been a fan of that song.  Then there's "Baby, Don't Leave Me Alone" which does sound fine but what I really like are the vocals and back-up vocals.  Unless it was renamed, it didn't show up on any of their albums ever.  Nor did "Put Out The Lights."  This is where a big VH fan would be helpful, they might actually know if these songs were ever used again.

But this was great.  Why wasn't the band immediately put on the fast-track to success as soon as people heard this?  That's probably another issue that the public doesn't get to learn about but based on this, it's almost impossible to figure out.  They were ready to go, it's possibly that they weren't easy to deal with and it might have been hard to figure out how to promote them as a pop-sounding hard rock band.  AC-DC was doing the same thing at the time but they were from Australia, they sounded different by nature.  Van Halen was from LA and in addition to the guitarist, DLR was already the front-man we know him as today.  And a better singer.

I've also been working on my reading ability again, this time with a comic that you'd obviously expect me to go to, Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars.  I've wrote about it earlier [see Double, page 76] but that was over ten years ago.

As I write this, I'm through the first four issues and under the same effect I've had for decades.  First of all, it's totally horrible.  Even the art isn't very good with the characters constantly looking different and never showing any sense of real behavior.  Even in the backgrounds, the heroes' base looks different on the first panel of page 77 than the last panel of page 76 and there's no clue if another artist was involved.  The base is seen from the same angle in almost every panel it appears in and the shame is roughly the same but more or less detail is added.  Of course it was destroyed in the fourth issue and very little sense of what's in there except for giant hallways and stairways.

There's very little to the characters.  Captain America, Thor, the Fantastic Four, Wolverine and maybe Spider-Man are the only ones who stand out at all and only that comes from being slightly different from the rest of the cast.  The FF are a team and always react differently to each other, Wolverine's a violent idiot with nothing else to go on in his life.  Possibly someone who read Iron Man at the time might know that this was Rhody in the armor, not Stark, but that doesn't show up here.  Yes, at some point by the end of the series, Rhody will take off a glove and whoever is nearby will see he's not white, but that's it.  At least Storm and the one true Captain Marvel are obviously black just by looking at them, but that's how Marvel rolls.  The villains don't even have that much personality.  Dr. Doom, the Molecule Man, the Enchantress, Doctor Octopus and the Absorbing Man are the only ones with the slightest bit of personality and the latter two only stand out by having reaction to anybody else.

Then there's the story itself which is mindbogglingly bad.  I'm trying not to recap what I wrote about it ten years ago, but it's just that bad.  Most of Marvel's big name heroes are kidnapped to another galaxy which is then destroyed except for one planet and they land there.  So do a handful of Marvel's villains, most of whom are generic and all carry large hammers or other tools.  I noticed that almost none of them have the slightest bit of long-range powers.  Cyclops, Storm, Iron Man, Human Torch, Captain Marvel and Hawkeye could have taken them all down from a distance with ease while the other dozen heroes sat around doing nothing.

The fight scene that starts at the end of the first issue and lasts a few pages in the second had the same effect.  The villains lose, several are captured and the rest just run in fear.  Thor or Wolverine could just follow them and keep in touch with Professor X or Reed Richards to drop in and finish the battle, easy as that.  Of course Thor, Wolverine and Captain America are all trained soldiers so maybe they would never think of that like I did.

Then there's the use of the X-Men and Magneto which I suspect was Shooter trying to use Claremont's characters while simultaneously confirming that they're owned by Marvel and Claremont has to go along.  That's just a guess, obviously there's no way to tell what's going on other than being so lousy.

Magneto was probably being moved towards the hero's side.  Claremont did make long-range plots and I think Secret Wars was his first appearance since X-Men #150 in 1981 where for the first time he'd actually been given slightly-more complicated personality than he'd had since Lee and Kirby created him in 1963.  This may have been Shooter going along with Claremont's ideas.  Magneto quickly ditches the heroes in #1, then attacks their base in #2 with an unexplained plan that he quickly gives up on and decides kidnapping the Wasp is a better alternative.  There's a bit of interplay between them which actually does make sense but Jan is obviously faking it, and then the X-Men show up to join Magneto, again for reasons that make no sense.  Yes, they're totally willing to ditch the heroes' side to join their worst enemy because...  Well, skin color, gender, sexual orientation are all not happening, what else is there?  Muties!!!

Then the Wasp escapes and I know she'll get a plotline for the rest of the series - rare for even the heroes to have an actual individual plot - but this whole thing was otherwise pointless, unless it was about the mutant viewpoint, which is sounding more believable now that I think about it.  And that came from Claremont.

Anyway, I'll probably write more on this later.  It's just so bizarre that this was considered so popular at the time and there's no resemblance of reality for people, stories, places, dialogue or anything.  Superheroes are unrealistic, comics and fiction are made to show non-real people doing non-real things, but it's still possible for them to behave in ways that actual humans can believe in.  This isn't anything of the sort.