I Love it! Its like those stories you read of when Elvis or John Wayne was starting out and they were told the company didn’t want them: “You don’t have a chance kid!” Actor Clark Gable, the ‘King of Hollywood’ experienced it. My favorite as an Iowan was when legendary running back Gayle Sayers visited the University of Iowa in 1960 as a high schooler, and Coach Jerry Burns couldn’t be bothered to meet with him. Gayle took Kansas to the championship instead.

Van Halen only came on my radar because of MTV. They had a series of videos back in the first part of the 80s when MTV played music. Jump, Panama, Hot for Teacher, Runnin’ with the Devil. There are “experts” on Van Halen, and I ain’t one of them. You could finger drum to their songs when they came on the radio, and they had some cute girls in their videos, but that was about it for me.

Like I say, there are people to whom Van Halen was a god. Which would explain their reaction this past week when he died. Media will do that when a rock person dies, ascribe an aura of mythical proportions to a very strange person. Elvis being the classic. I was just a kid in the 60s when he was making movies and music. Sure he was huge, his songs were okay to listen to, but he wasn’t that big a deal with your typical teenager.

But God help us when he died! Later on in the 90s it was some guy named Kurt Cobain. We were all supposed to be sad about this druggie dying. Sorry, couldn’t do it. When I pointed out on a blog one time I didn’t know him or anything he sang, this guy called me a liar! On a stack of bibles, don’t know the guy. Tom Petty recently assumed room temperature. The media tried to go all sad on him. He was a rather homely individual with a whiny voice. Take your celebrity worship somewhere else.

Kind of my reaction when Eddie died. Probably his bigger claim to fame for me was that he had been married to Valerie Bertinelli. Then there’s my longtime problem with rockers who make drinking and drugs seem like just the coolest thing there is. It isn’t. In fact, they make it sound like you’re a nerd if you don’t go through life chemically altered! A lot of poor fools buy into this crap, and have their life ruined. Nope, sorry you died too young Eddie, but I ain’t going to get broken up over it.

Oh, and the lead singers they went through? To the casual fan the impression you always got was that it was David Lee Roth who was the jerk. That it was Sammy Hagar who was impossible to get along with. Listening to Armstrong & Getty yesterday, one of whom has been in a band and the business for 40 years, it wasn’t Roth or Hagar, it was Eddie. He was an alch.