They are angry when they walk, tuning out the ambient voice of the city, tuning out the world, with their portable electronics, that they cram into their ears, or clamp over their heads, which makes it look as if, they are wearing earmuffs, even in one-hundred-degree weather, filling their heads with, whatever echo chamber they have chosen, one that reinforces their beliefs, or their lack of belief, and with complete indifference, to the others around them, never saying hello or hello back, to the friendly passersby, but always ready to shout, at the guy on the bicycle, who was yelling out to them, lookout! as they step off the curb and into the crosswalk, often against the traffic signal.
They are angry when they drive, on the boulevard, on the highway, and on the interstate, speeding and tailgating, and running red lights, and cutting people off, while they smoke their dope and pop their pills, and sometimes they kill people, because they felt wronged by the person, that flipped them off because of their reckless driving, or who were actually driving the speed limit, or just because they are running behind schedule, and in a hurry to pick up their children from school, or to pick up their Shih Tzu at the groomer before they close shop, or to get to their therapists office on time, to work on that anger problem.
They are angry at the supermarket, often acting like the drivers, grabby, sullen, and impatient, as you take the time to check the ripeness of a watermelon, or checking the expiration date on a piece of meat, or checking the milk carton, to see if you recognize, the missing child printed on it, or writing out a check for your groceries, or ordering a sandwich at the deli counter, and they are often guilty of blocking an aisle, and they get all bent out of shape, when you politely ask them to move their cart, as if the request was the equivalent, of asking them, to move a mountain, and they are often guilty of having, more than fifteen items in the express checkout line, because they are selfish, inconsiderate jerks.
They are angry at the airport, which should be a happy place, because they are taking a trip somewhere, and they argue with the attendant checking in their bags, who needs to charge an extra fee, because their bag is overweight, much like themselves, and they argue with the TSA when they try to get through security, with more than 3.4-ounces of anything, like their ridiculous 32-ounce Stanley tumbler that is full of water, or perhaps vodka, that they have to dump out, and they get surly with their fellow passengers who hold up the line, to take all of 5-seconds, to put their carry-on into the overhead bin.
All of these angry men and women, walking and driving and shopping and traveling, make this a dangerous city to live in, because it is never certain what will make them snap, or when they will snap, but when they do, you will hear about the insanity on the local evening news, who will get the facts of the story mostly right, or on the social media platforms, where facts are apparently situational, and often substituted for belief, or conspiracies, and you will see ten different storylines, from ten different influencers, about the exact same event, the majority of which are opinions, and not actual news, and certainly not actual journalism.
I have decided not to get caught up in it, caught up in the urban-borne anger of the others, the anger bubbling just below the surface, the anger that is ready to be unleashed, at the mere whiff, of an inconvenience, or a perceived disrespect, but will instead remind myself, that there are happy people, somewhere in this city, that there are kind people, somewhere in this city, that there are good people, somewhere in this city, but they all must be sought out, because they are nowhere in plain sight.
I’m an unabashed Libertarian and have bones to pick with both the Democrats and the Republicans for all sorts of anti-freedom and anti-liberty policies. See my Politically Homeless post for some background on this.
Unless you have been living under a rock or are perhaps in solitary confinement in a foreign prison somewhere outside of the United States, you’ve heard of DOGE: The Department of Government Efficiency, which I’ll summarize thusly:
DOGE was created by an executive order from Donald Trump, a polarizing figure.
DOGE is managed by Elon Musk, a controversial super-genius level billionaire.
DOGE is acting as a consultancy to the Trump administration.
DOGE is reviled by many pundits, politicos, and media types.
Meme coin and Shiba Inu references aside, DOGE has become a lightning rod of controversy right out of the gate. Elon Musk is notable for his pragmatic approach to solving problems and distilling them down to their essential components, and stripping away any unnecessary elements. He’s very good at it. So, why not take this same practical approach to government spending to uncover any potential corruption, wasteful spending, fraud, overspending, ineptitude, redundancy, etc.? So what if he’s an outsider without any political experience? DOGE is about efficiency, not glad-handing or bashing the opposing political party and their policies and supporters at every opportunity.
Granted, Musk’s approach may seem as if the tool of choice is a machete instead of a scalpel, but I would argue that there is room for both and maybe a chainsaw too. For example, maybe use a scalpel for entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and welfare, and the Department of Defense, but use a machete (or a chainsaw!) for everything else.
Have you ever looked at how many US government programs and agencies that there are? According to usa.gov, which, inconveniently, does not summarize how many there are on the landing page, so you have to count through them manually from A-Z, there are approximately 607 of them. SIX HUNDRED AND SEVEN! I’m no expert here, but that seems like a lot and is probably too many. Do we really need the National Gallery of Art whose statement is, “The National Gallery of Art collects, preserves and exhibits art works, and works to promote the understanding of art through research and educational programs.” Seems like museums, universities, or the private sector can handle that, you know, the super wealthy people that collect and sell art. Or perhaps Sotheby’s.
How about the U.S. Fire Administration (USFA), whose statement is, “The United States Fire Administration (USFA), part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, works to prepare for, prevent, respond to all hazards.” Respond to all hazards seems like a stretch. Do we actually need federal fire fighters? I’m thinking absolutely not because firefighting is a very local state, county, and city service, some of which are voluntary, and so the feds should not be involved at all unless they want to donate a firetruck.
For the sake of argument, out of those 607 federal departments and agencies that spend nearly $7 trillion tax dollars per year, can’t we all agree that they should at least be audited like what Deloitte or PricewaterhouseCoopers do for Fortune 500 companies to ensure that the books are on the up and up and nothing fishy is going on? Oh, that’s right, best practice accounting is anathema to government. But it does seem that Mr. Musk is highly likely to find all kinds of efficiencies to be had across the board. But maybe the politicians really don’t care about efficiency at all and categorically do not want him to be checking the books or poking around for fraud, corruption, and waste (the evil trinity of the federal government) because the truth might slip out. Truth like the American taxpayers have been fooled into trusting the politicians with their hard-earned money, and the politicians have known about the fraud, corruption, and waste the entire time. “Nothing to see here!” Wink-wink, nudge-nudge.
My intuition tells me that the nervous pants-on-fire politicians who aren’t positive that they’ll survive the scrutiny of an audit and their big media sycophants will portray Musk as evil and will stonewall him at every turn and clog up the judicial system with lawsuits challenging everything that Musk wants to do which will grind DOGE to a halt. Unfortunately, it’s all part of the dog-eared political playbook.
If the collective belief of the American taxpayer is that we’re all getting ripped off by the government all of the time and at all levels and it is absolutely corrupt (which should be the default attitude anyway), and the government provides sub-par services to the people they, ah, serve, doesn’t the government have the obligation to prove otherwise in the spirit of transparency? Well, I think so…but they won’t do it voluntarily, so someone needs to force their hand. That’s why we need DOGE.
I also want to see DOGE applied to the state, county, and city government levels too. I’m pretty sure taxpayers are getting ripped off left-and-right there too, especially here in Los Angeles where city hall is a cesspool of corruption and contempt.
I’m going to take the opportunity here to float out my six-step idea called FERRET:
Freeze the program budget.
Examine the program from the top down.
Reform the program.
Restrain the program.
Eject and prosecute anyone that is guilty of corruption or fraud.
Transparency across the board in perpetuity.
I say we FERRET governments everywhere all of the time.
I also strongly recommend that we put governments on the blockchain so anyone can see all of the transactions at any time. Yeah, I know – wishful thinking – but it would be the closest thing to a truth machine that we can get without it being science fiction.
Before living through it (twice in two different houses) I really didn’t believe in ghosts. Actual street addresses in the following story are withheld to respect the privacy of the current owners.
The first haunted house that I lived in was in, Pasadena, CA. It was a 1-story 3+1 California craftsman home built in 1922. My mom, my older sister Lisa, my younger brother Scott, and I moved in with the Dubuque family after my parents divorced in 1972. This is one of those cool old homes with a big front porch and a subterranean cellar with double doors, similar to the one in Dorothy Gale’s Uncle Henry and Aunt Em’s farmhouse in rural Kansas in the movie The Wizard of Oz.
Nancy Dubuque warned us early on about their ghostly resident that lived in the attic. The ghost was described as “A friendly old man” that died in the house. She also said that we might hear the following sounds emanating from the attic, and not to be alarmed:
Pacing footsteps.
A creaking rocking chair.
A rolling marble.
Okay, so being an 11-year-old boy, this ghost, and noises in the attic business kind of freaked me out. The Dubuque’s, however, had apparently accepted the otherworldly spirit as part of the history of the house and its earthly residents went about living there like it was no big deal.
My first encounter with the presence of the spirit happened while I was sitting in the large living room in the evening by myself and reading, believe it or not, a worn-out copy of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven. I know; this is heady stuff for such a young boy, but I loved reading whatever I could get my hands on, and the book cover with the image of the black bird intrigued me.
I don’t recall where everyone else was at the time, but I do remember that it was quiet; so quiet that In the midst of reading one of the passages in the poem, I heard the distinct sound of creaky footsteps walking across the attic. This made the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up, and I slammed the book shut and ran off to find my siblings. I never told anyone about it.
The second time I encountered the presence of the spirit was when I wasn’t feeling well and was lying on my mom’s bed in the front bedroom staring at the ceiling in an almost meditative state. It was late at night and everyone else was asleep. That’s when I noticed the creaking rocking chair sound directly above me. It was faint at first, and slowly increased in intensity. This too, freaked me out at first, but I decided to interpret it as a sign that the nice grandfatherly old man in the attic was concerned about me and was watching over me from his rocking chair. I felt his presence and took comfort in it. I chose not to be scared about it. I never told anyone about this either but I never actually saw an apparition while living there.
I suppose that it could have been a much worse haunting, like poltergeist level worse, but over time, I too accepted the spirit as part of the house. We only lived there for about one school year before moving to North Hollywood.
Fast-forward 8-years, and I found myself living in a Spanish-Mediterranean hillside house in Glendale, CA that was built around 1925. I shared the house with two friends named Danny Lord and Mike Anderson. There was a tiled mural in glazed hand painted Spanish tile just inside the front door with the name Machu Picchu and a depiction of the legendary terraced citadel. It was built on a 2-level terraced floor plan taking advantage of the steep hillside lot.
At street level was the top level of the house that included a one-car, partially attached garage, a large living room with a vaulted, exposed beam ceiling and a fireplace, a large patio deck with three double hung French doors, a galley style kitchen, and a large dining room. At the end of the kitchen was a walk-through pantry that had a side door that led to a small sidewalk between the house and the garage. From the sidewalk you could enter the garage from a side door or walk out to the street. There was a wrought iron staircase from the living room that went down to the lower level.
The lower level had a short hallway with three large bedrooms branching off, one laundry room, and one large full bathroom. There was also a glass door at one end of the hallway that led to a flight of stairs that went down to a small outside patio area.
It was actually a pretty cool bachelor house. We had many parties and good times while living there.
Danny was the one who found the house in the Los Angeles Times classified section and contacted the owners about renting it. This is when the owners disclosed that the house was haunted and why the rent was lower than similar houses in the area. So, the three of us moved into a low-rent haunted house – what could go wrong with that? Plenty, as we were to find out.
The story behind this haunted house was that around 1930, a 5-year-old girl died from an exploding boiler tank that was formerly located in the laundry room. My bedroom happened to be directly adjacent to the laundry room.
Per the owners disclosure, the spirit of the little girl was known to do the following:
Turn on sink faucets.
Open and close doors.
Turn lights on and off.
I was working in the electrical trade at the time and always had early hours during the week, generally, up by 5:00 AM and out of the door by 6:00 AM. I was always up before Danny and Mike every weekday.
One early weekday morning shortly after we had moved in, I went upstairs for coffee and a bagel. I noticed a cold draft as I was ascending the stairs and it was when I turned toward the kitchen that I noticed that one set of the double hung French doors were wide open. I was certain that Mike or Danny left them open from the night before when they went out on the patio to smoke a cigarette.
When I got home, I told the guys about it and reminded them to close the doors. They both looked at me as if I had two heads and said that neither of them were on the patio the night before. It was at this point that we all looked at each other and realized that this nocturnal activity was from our resident of the spiritual world. We laughed it off.
Every now and then as I was walking to my bedroom, there was a distinct cold spot in the hallway near the laundry room. This was obviously another sign that there was a spirit in the house. I’ve often wondered if the cold spot was a portal for our ghostly resident.
One night we had a few friends over and were hanging out in the living room listening to records and drinking beer and smoking some weed and talking. Suddenly, the living room lights went off. I said, “Very funny Danny.” Danny said, “I’m over here, Kent,” from the dining room, and he (nor anyone else) was anywhere near the switch for the living room lights. We all looked at each other and had a collective freak-out moment after realizing that our ghostly resident had made her presence felt again. Admittedly, it was a very creepy feeling.
Over the following months we encountered many more of the open patio door events, sometimes it was the side door, and various lights turning on or off, and occasionally a running bathroom faucet.
But one event stood out as the most chilling of them all…
One Saturday night, we had a few friends over to pre-game before heading to the Starwood nightclub in West Hollywood to see a concert of a local band and someone in our group knew the lead guitar player. There were six of us in total – three men and three women. We drank a little. We smoked a little. We listened to a little music. Collectively, we were feeling pretty damn good.
As the string of us were leaving the house through the kitchen to the side door, the lights went off. The girls were sure that we were trying to spook them, but as we were groping our way in the dark to find the light switch, we all sensed that someone had rushed past us…and then the side door flew open without anyone near it. The girls screamed. The guys screamed. And now we were all spooked out of our minds. An otherworldly presence was felt by everyone, though there was no appearance of an apparition.
We all piled into Danny’s 1974 Pontiac Firebird and headed to the Starwood. For the first 15-minutes of the drive, nobody talked about what happened at Machu Picchu. Then one of the girls asked, “Do you really think it was the ghost?” This opened up an entire conversation about it.
When we got back to the house after the concert and asked the girls to come in, there was an awkward hesitation, and then came the excuses. “I have to get back home to let my dog out.” “I have to get up early for work.” “I have to be back to my apartment by 1:00 or my roommate will lock me out.” I think the truth was that they did not want to step foot into our creepy haunted house on the hill. I can’t say that I blame them.
We did not move out of the house because of the ghost. We eventually moved out due to the circumstances of life, money, jobs, and personal relationships. We all remained friends but went our separate ways before the first year was out.
Ghosts are a complicated topic because they validate the world of spirits. And if there is a world of spirits, this validates that there is an afterlife of some sort. If there is an afterlife, does this also mean that there is a heaven and hell? If so, this also means that God and Jesus Christ are not fictional characters. If God and Jesus are not fictional characters, it means that the bible is true. If the bible is true, I may be on the road to hell. I should probably work on this. Also, if the bible is true and God exists, I have questions. Questions like, “God, why did you create the mosquito? What purpose does it serve other than to spread diseases (that you also presumably created) that kill people in some of the most agonizing, horrific ways possible?” Questions like this flood my mind. This is my Pandora’s box.
Anyway, to add other credibility to this matter of spirituality, I had a near-death experience in 1994 from an electrical accident which I recently wrote about in a post titled, Anniversary of a Near-Death Experience. At some point I lost consciousness and I saw the white light. I was floating. The last thing I remembered thinking to myself immediately before hitting the floor and regaining consciousness was, “I can’t go; my wife and kids need me. I can’t go.
Even with this evidence of a spiritual world, I’m still very conflicted about this biblical heaven and hell stuff because I really don’t believe that a righteous God wants children to suffer.
L.A. Times newspaper clipping from March 25, 1979.
Story 22 of 52
By M. Snarky
In light of the birthday of Eddie Van Halen on January 26, I wanted to share my story of how I got to see Eddie and the boys play at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1979.
In 1978 I was a skinny seventeen-year-old skateboarding weed-smoking hard-rocking smart-ass white boy from The Valley – the best-known suburb north of Los Angeles. The soundtrack at the time was Corporate Rock, Disco, New Wave, and burgeoning Punk Rock. Bands like Boston, Foreigner, Journey, Bee Gees, Abba, and The Village People dominated mainstream FM radio airplay. This was the height of the Disco Scare.
L.A. based FM rock stations KLOS and KMET played a steady diet of Corporate Rock and mixed in some hard rock staples like AC/DC, Aerosmith, and Led Zeppelin and the usual 60’s rock bands and artists like Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, but overall, the music was starting to feel stale. KROQ in Pasadena was the only L.A. FM station that was playing anything with a new sound, like Talking Heads, The Specials, U2, and The Clash – but I wasn’t ready for them…yet.
One spring day while listening to KLOS, I heard a cover song of The Kinks You Really Got Me by a band I’d never heard of: Van Halen. I knew at that moment that this Van Halen guy on the guitar was an instant legend. He was coaxing sounds out of his guitar that no one had ever imagined let alone heard – with rapid-fire harmonics, fret-tapping, sliding, bending, riffing, and shredding on what seemed impossible 1/64th notes. My friends and I didn’t find out until later after we bought the self-titled Van Halen album that Van Halen was Eddie and Alex’s last name, but that didn’t matter because we knew who we were talkin’ ‘bout…and so did everyone else.
The moment anyone heard Van Halen in ‘78 knew that the rock & roll landscape had experienced a paradigm shift and was irrevocably altered seemingly overnight and forever. And although Eddie Van Halen’s innovative playing style was copied by countless others, it was never fully replicated because Eddie was the true Chosen One. The buzz was that Eddie saved rock & roll by altering what’s possible with an electric guitar.
The debut album titled, Van Halen, colloquially known as Van Halen I, was an immediate success and it got mega airplay throughout the year. Songs like Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love, Runnin’ with the Devil, and Jamie’s Cryin’ were heard everywhere. ‘78 was a good summer for rock & roll fans. Most of my rocker friends and I bought the album and the first time we listened to Eruption, which wasn’t getting any airplay at the time, we knew we were hearing greatness – Eddie Van Halen was the Jimi Hendrix of our generation.
Sometime early in ‘79, KMET started promoting the CaliFFornia [sic] World Music Festival for Wolf and Rissmiller Concerts. The concert was scheduled for April 7-8, 1979, at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum and Van Halen was one of the bands in the lineup. I absolutely had to go see these guys live and on-stage. This was pre-Internet, so if you wanted to get tickets to a concert, you had to go to the venue’s box office or find a ticket outlet like Ticketron somewhere in the city and stand and wait in line at Tower Records or Sears and hope and pray that the concert didn’t sell out before you got to the counter. I skateboarded over to my local Ticketron from my apartment in North Hollywood (now referred to as “NoHo”) and at the time it was located inside the Sears department store at Valley Plaza which was located at the intersection of Victory and Laurel Canyon Boulevards, only about 2-miles from where I was living. General Admission tickets went for $15, and the concert was billed as “Rain or Shine.”
Van Halen was playing on the second day of the festival, Sunday, April 8, and the band line up for that day were:
Aerosmith
Van Halen
UFO
Toto
Mother’s Finest
Eddie Money
April Wine
Boomtown Rats
Brownsville
All to be hosted by Cheech & Chong! Not too shabby of a lineup for a young rock & roll fan like me.
In March of ‘79, just two-weeks before the concert, the album Van Halen II was released and it was getting mega airplay too with new songs like Beautiful Girls, Dance the Night Away, and Bottoms Up! It was another fantastic album by those hard rocking’ Dutch dudes, and I was very happy that they weren’t a one-off band.
The concert at the Coliseum was “festival seating,” meaning, first-come-first served, so my friends and I decided to drive down to the Coliseum the night before the concert to get in line to make sure we could get in early on Sunday to get a good spot in front of the stage.
When we got there, Ted Nugent was wrapping up his set with Motor City Madhouse, and, well, it was a madhouse. 65,000 or so screaming fans inside the Coliseum and thousands more hanging around outside. When the concert ended and the people started streaming out, it was a massive flood of humanity!
For us, it was a night full of partying and carousing and nobody got much sleep. Everything was getting passed around – from weed to cocaine to tequila to god only knows what else. Nobody was saying, “No, no thank you.” It was pretty much YES, YES, THANK YOU! The LAPD was present, but fortunately, they weren’t harassing anyone for partying.
Someone in line next to us broke out a fresh deck of cards and an impromptu round of Blackjack-on-the-sidewalk began. People were betting whatever they had on them whether it was cash, weed, pills of all colors shapes and sizes, or a vial of cocaine. Winning a round of cards was also scoring! I didn’t have much cash and was never lucky in cards, so I just watched in amusement. As the wee hours of the morning approached, we slept a little bit sitting on the sidewalk with our backs against the chain-link fencing that surrounded the perimeter of the Coliseum.
As daylight approached, we were hungry for breakfast, so we pooled our money together and had someone walk over to a local McDonalds a few blocks away for some coffee and Egg McMuffins which were only like 85-cents each. The other people in line were very jealous when the coffee and hot food showed up!
By now it was close to 7:00 AM which was the time when the gates were supposed to open. People started stirring around and standing up in line but there were a lot of people that were still sleeping or passed out lying on the sidewalk. The first band wasn’t scheduled to start playing until noon, so we had plenty of time to get a good spot and settle in.
Fortunately, we were only a couple hundred people back from the front of our line at one of the many entry gates and knew that we made the right choice coming the night before, but by now, the line that we were standing in snaked around the Coliseum and people spilled out onto Exposition Park Drive.
When the gates finally opened, there was a bit of a rush and people started pushing and shoving and cutting in line. causing a bit of a ruckus. We avoided getting into the mix by going around it and as we briskly walked down the tunnel toward the field, we realized that we were amongst the first couple of thousand people to get in – we could get front-and-center of the stage! Awesome! But it was only like 7:30 AM by this time and there was a long way to go before Van Halen took the stage. We put our blankets out on the grass far enough back where we had a perfect view of the stage and kicked back for a bit.
However, as the day progressed and more people came in, we had to stand up to see the stage and soon people were standing on our blankets, and we were getting further and further compressed into the crowd. By the time Toto started playing at around 3:00, we had had enough of the crowd and headed up to the seats. Fortunately, there were still decent seats available, and we found ourselves to the left of the stage around the 50-yard line at mid-level up around the 222 section.
Toto finished their set and left the stage at around 4:00 and while UFO was getting set up, the largest scale food fight I’d ever witnessed happened and it went something like this; a group of people to my right from the back of the crowd on the grass field started throwing trash toward the people in front of them. The people in front retreated toward the stage and when the assailants ran out of trash to throw, the former victims counterattacked and grabbed the same trash and advanced and threw all the trash toward the back. The people in the back retreated and then raided some more trash cans and moved forward again with another aerial assault. This went back-and-forth for a while – I’m talking about thousands of people here – and this left-to-right and right-to-left movement of people with trash flying through the air had us mesmerized.
After about half an hour of this back-and-forth, someone on the PA system finally asked the crowd to stop throwing trash, and they fortunately complied with the request. I’m just glad that we weren’t caught up in it. Trash was strewn everywhere plus a few fights broke out – what a fucking mess! On the other hand, it had been over 24-hours since our last shower so maybe the smell of garbage to the people sitting around us would’ve been an improvement over our, um, musk?
Finally, at around 7:30 PM Van Halen took the stage. We sparked up a fattie as David Lee Roth strutted out wearing suspenders and a pair of white gloves and was holding a bottle of Jack Daniels in one hand and his mic in the other and he addressed the audience with something like, “How y’all doin’ tonight?” It felt like the entire stadium erupted into cheering and clapping. We knew at that moment that we were in for a fantastic performance and man-oh-man; did they deliver the goods!
Between Eddie’s soaring, rapid-fire, precise, shredding guitar licks and David Lee Roth’s vocals and impressive gymnastic moves, it was truly an electrifying performance. Women were throwing their undergarments on the stage! Eddie was smiling the entire performance and he had the crowd eating out of his hands and he was loving it! These guys were young but were already polished showmen and they knew it. They were entertaining, exciting, charismatic, engaging, and full of swagger and boundless energy.
The setlist, according to concertarchives.org for the show was:
Light Up the Sky
Somebody Get Me a Doctor
Drum Solo
Runnin’ With the Devil
Dance the Night Away
Beautiful Girls
On Fire
Bass Solo
You’re No Good
Jamie’s Cryin’
Feel Your Love Tonight
Outta Love Again
Ice Cream Man
Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love
Guitar Solo
You Really Got Me
Bottoms Up! (encore)
Eddie’s guitar solo was simply epic – a mash-up of Eruption and some guitar licks from other well-known rock songs but with Eddie’s matchless style and interpretations. Eddie proved without a shadow of a doubt that he was a true virtuoso, and he was the new master of the electric guitar. He absolutely rocked the Coliseum and blew the crowd of 65,000 people away with his incredible musicianship!
By the time Van Halen finished their encore, the crowd was exhausted, but they wanted more; the cheering for another encore went on even while the roadies started taking down the equipment!
Even though the concert was 45-years ago, it seems like only yesterday. To this day, this remains the best live band I’ve ever seen, and I’ll always look back fondly at the experience. I never had the chance to see Van Halen play again because, well, life happens, but that performance left an indelible impression upon me that I’ll never forget.
Of course, Van Halen was an integral part of the soundtrack of many more summers to come.
When I heard the news of Eddie Van Halen’s death on October 6, 2020, I was dumbfounded and didn’t want to believe it. I kept thinking back to this concert and how invincible he seemed. Yes, I know that even Rock Gods must die, but it was too soon for Eddie. Also, fuck cancer!! Much love and respect to Valerie and Wolfgang for their loss.
Godspeed, Eddie. You left behind an incredible musical legacy here on earth and I hope you find a heavenly guitar shop where you can painlessly play and tinker on guitars in peace for eternity. Rock-on! \m/
Of course, after writing this, I had to listen to the OG album Van Halen I. It still holds up well.
msnarky 