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TAL BACHMAN REMEMBERS EDDIE VAN HALEN: Three Weeks in ?86. I was a seventeen year old nobody. He wa?

By Ed Driscoll

TAL BACHMAN REMEMBERS EDDIE VAN HALEN: Three Weeks in ’86.

I was a seventeen year old nobody. He was the world’s biggest rock star. It was spring 1986. My dad’s band, Bachman-Turner Overdrive (BTO), was opening for Van Halen on their “5150” tour. I was in high school at the time, but as Dad could never see the point of school when there was rock-and-rolling to be done, he called one day to ask if I wanted to ditch school to fly out and hang with him on the Van Halen tour for a few weeks.

It was the easiest question in human history to answer: Yes, I want to ditch school and go on tour with Van Halen. Just thinking about it felt like a dream. I’d spent most of the past few years trying to learn how to play Edward’s guitar parts on “Eruption”, “Spanish Fly”, “Hot for Teacher”, “Ice Cream Man”, “Cathedral” (which I played at the church talent show), and dozens of other pieces. And Van Halen was the biggest band in the world at the time; every 20, 30, 40,000 seat date on the tour was sold out. The new album with Sammy was Number One on the Billboard charts. The three singles off the album were either smashes already or on their way.

Even better, this was the eighties?you know, when the world was still fun. There was light. There was laughter. There was big hair and acid-washed denim, just because, dammit. You could still make jokes without a Twitter mob destroying your life forever. You could try a backyard bike stunt without your friend videoing your subsequent crash on his smartphone, then uploading it on to YouTube for your grandchildren to watch fifty years later. Even with its occasional dips, the Reagan economy boomed along. Girls were still mostly cheerful and cute and sexy; they weren’t the lost, hard, paranoid, alternately self-loathing/self-worshipping communist nihilists they are now. It was clear even then?not just in retrospect?the world was in a pretty fun phase. Hell yeah, I wanted to go.

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Full post as published by Instapundit.com on October 13, 2020 (boomark / email).