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.
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msnarky 