This album was seismic. Almost 50 years later it would be easy to underestimate just how much Van Halen’s debut changed rock music. Nobody played like this. Montrose’s first album had arguably paved the way but VH took the ball and didn’t just run with it - they strapped it to a rocket engine and blasted it into space. Eddie gets the attention, and his guitar is game changing, the tapping, the fast runs, yes, but listen to his rhythm work, it’s like an orchestra. Alex is an incredible drummer and DLR is a one off, a showman, with a limited but distinctive voice, he fits perfectly, a huge part of the initial impact. But the unsung hero is Michael Anthony, whose fat basslines round out the sound xxxx and whose melodic background singing fills any vocal deficiency from the front man. The production is excellent. The songs are uniformly good - "Runnin' With the Devil", "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love". "I'm the One", covers of John Brin's "Ice Cream Man" showing they could put a spin on the blues, and of course the stunning guitar barrage that is "Eruption" leading into a great version of the Kinks' "You Really got Me". Van Halen were cocksure and bombastic; it is unsurprising that, an admittedly shaky, Black Sabbath struggled to compete when they took them on tour. I love this album, and I think the following VHII is even better. Incredibly influential and still holds up. That VH inadvertently led to 1980s hair metal is not their fault.
Very well done, very poor generic ‘80s rock-pop. “Let It Rock” kicks it off with loads of organ and sounds like Yes or Kansas playing a third rate AC/DC song. Side one contains the big numbers, “You Give Love a Bad Name”, Living On A Prayer”, with that irritating voice box, and “Wanted Dead or Alive” - the three Bon Jovi songs I thought I never had to hear again although the Atmos mix seems to add a lot of keyboards to the soundscape, so that was a thing - now I never have to listen again. The rest of the album is full of forgettable, very earnest tracks with no substance and very little depth. I just don’t get Bon Jovi; there aren’t even any ‘guilty pleasures’ here. There are worse records but maybe not many as bland.
I have had a passing relationship with Iron Maiden over the years. My uncle gave me Deep Purple in Rock, from which I built a record collection that included the classical, blues, jazz and soul influences in Purple’s music, but was very much geared to the heavier side of ‘70s rock. So, when a friend turned up with Metal for Muthas, the NWOBHM sampler which included two Iron Maiden tracks, as well as a pre-Maiden Bruce Bruce (Dickinson) with Samson, I was interested enough to look out for IM’s first album when it was released later that year. And that, I think is the only Maiden album I own. I liked the punky metal with Paul Di’Anno’s vocals. I listened to Number of the Beast when it came out, and I saw, and enjoyed, Maiden at Reading ‘82. I just didn’t love them. I have dipped in and out over the years, and occasionally, I do a deep dive. I have listened to almost everything they have released, have seen them live again recently (it was excellent) and, even if I cannot say they are one of my favourite bands, I do respect them. I joke that Steve Harris is like the old blues singer on In Living Color - I wrote a song about it, like to hear it? Here it goes…- in that he really wears his influences on his sleeve, or in his titles. This album has a song inspired by Children of the Damned called “Children of the Damned”, and one by the ‘60s TV series The Prisoner (“The Prisoner”). Later we get lots of similarly, literal inspirations. But listening today, I hear a tighter, more varied album than I remembered. I can hear Ritchie Blackmore and, especially, UFO/Michael Schenker influences in the guitar playing and, even this early, indications of the proggier sounds that would come in later. Dickinson does have a good voice, obviously influenced by Ian Gillan; he would become more nuanced as he got older - he tends to use Gillan's high register Highway Star voice 90% of the time on this album. But no matter, I really enjoyed this and it is incredibly influential.
Now we're talking. Way back in the dark pre-internet days of 1980 one of the only ways to hear new rock music was via Tommy Vance's Friday Rock Show on BBC Radio One, TV on the Radio. The gang I ran with were huge AC/DC fans, me not so much (that came later). Dirty Deeds, Powerage, Highway to Hell, If You Want Blood were all on rotation on the ghettoblaster, and we were all shocked by Bon Scott's death. So, we gathered around the speakers, 10 PM after youth club, with a bottle of cider, and listened as Tommy played a new song by AC/DC. The slow bell tolled, the mournful riff built and, after a minute and a half, we heard Brian Johnson for the first time. "Oh my god, It's Donald Duck," I said, which brought me a mild kicking... I did get used to, even love, Johnson's shrill voice and, although for me Back In Black will always be slightly below Highway to Hell and Powerage, it is an astounding album. Mutt Lange, as he had done on HTH, makes AC/DC sound huge. The guitars are separate and distinct; you can hear just how much of the band's power is Malcolm Young; open chords never sounded so good. This is probably AC/DC's best sounding record. There isn't a bad song. "Hells Bells", "You Shook Me All Night Long", the title track, and "Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution" are classics; the rest are not far behind, full of Carry-On style sexual innuendo, drinking and partying; all deceptively simple and meticulously crafted. I will always miss Bon Scott's slyer, seedier persona, and I do question the speed at which the Young Brothers completed and released this record following his passing. But Back In Black is one of the great rock albums of all time and broke AC/DC in the USA, even if they never reached the same heights again.
I like Led Zeppelin. They were a fine heavy rock band. I don’t understand why they are held up as huge innovators, The Beatles of the ‘70s, and I hate that they stole songs wholesale from the likes of Willie Dixon and that some biographers continue to justify the theft because “they made them better songs.” Then again, those biographers also reveal that the band, particularly Bonham and Page, along with manager Peter Grant were basically horrible cunts. That said, rant over and getting back to the music, they did make good records, and Page knew how to produce them. This may have been the first LZ studio album I heard in full (I had put The Song Remains the Same on my Christmas list, thinking that as Deep Purple’s Made in Japan was them at their best, Zeppelin live would be similar - they’re not) as a school friend had it. And it is excellent, one of my favourites. It was poorly reviewed due to the number of acoustic songs on the second side but, Page being a better acoustic player than on electric, it is these numbers that really shine - listen to the space in the lovely “That’s the Way” or “Tangerine”. Never the blues master that Clapton, Taylor, Green and Beck were, Page does shine on “Since I’ve Been Loving You” and “Immigrant Song” is the original Viking metal around which a whole sub-genre has grown. LZ III is a proper album, not just a collection of songs - the way the bubbling synth at the end of “Friends” carries into “Celebration Day” and then disappears forever is excellent. So, when you strip away all the mythology and cultish worship, what you have is a damn fine album by a damn fine rock band. No more, no less, but that should be enough.
