Van Halen’s playing Cleveland tonight! We’ll be posting photos and video here as the night rocks on…
First… and this is KILLER…a unique event poster for Van Halen’s concert tonight in Cleveland. It’s a short-run commemorative for the band and venue staff only, by Zak Wilson of VHND & Luke Muller. There are none left over and none for sale.
LIVE GALLERY:
FAN GALLERY:
“Last night at Blossom I had at least 10 people come up to me and asked me about my Van Halen 1978 world tour T-shirt they asked me where I got it from and I mentioned Van Halen Store. It was a great show and you guys do a great job for Van Halen and their friends. Thank you, Frank Fitzgibbons”
“The Mighty Van Halen rocked this family at Blossom music center. The kids are VH lifers now!”
Drop Dead Legs
She’s The Woman
“Dirty Movies”
We quote some of the Cleveland Scene’s review:
How is it, for example, that the band never played “Drop Dead Legs” on the tour to support 1984? No matter — it made for a heavy slab of paradise, hearing the assembled Van Halen family — Eddie, Alex and Wolfgang — putting down a thick and funky groove on the album favorite. And “Dirty Movies” gave Roth a chance to riff on the title and wonder, “Does anybody actually go to the movies? Or do they just go to the internet? They just use their cellphones,” and as he quipped, “I just use my wrist watch.” A Van Halen concert of course is a chance to collect plenty of those memorable lines from Diamond Dave.
Early in the night, wearing a sparkly black jacket, Roth told a lengthy story where at one point, he shared with the audience, “I already knew at that young age that I was not like the other kids in Sunday school.” (At this point, we figured that out quite a while ago now.) It seems that according to Roth, at some point, his parents had threatened to sell him back to the Indians. At that young age, if you can believe it, it seems that Roth was being difficult. He shared his childhood dreams from those formative years when he was growing up and told the crowd with a grin, “Careful what you tell your kids — that shit is for life.”
Fan fears were further eased yesterday when Van Halen returned to Ohio’s Blossom Music Center in support of their recent Live From Tokyo Dome (a 2-CD concert set recorded in June 2013). The verdict’s out on whether Roth diehards give the singer’s Tokyo Dome performance a pass, but Dave acquitted himself marvelously at Monday’s show (thank you very much), shucking his way through the old-school anthems that made him the quintessential ‘80s hair band poster boy.
Given that the Pasadena rebels are only playing Roth-era tunes on tour (unlike when Hagar covered the Roth classics during his tenure), the majority of the material on offer in Cuyahoga Falls harkened to Van Halen’s heyday (circa 1978-1984), well before “Wolfie” was even born. In fact, the band delivered most of 1979’s Van Halen II and half of 1984 alongside choice cuts from Women and Children First and Fair Warning.
And we loved it.