Van Halen, or Van Hagar?

In recent years, the list of celebrities appearing at political conventions looks something like this:

Celebrities appearing at the Republican Convention:

Charlton Heston (deceased), Charlie Daniels Band

Celebrities appearing at the Democratic Convention:

All other celebrities

Why is it that most famous, creative types -- from Pete Seeger to John Lennon, Arthur Miller to Sean Penn, Picasso to Keith Haring -- tend to swing left? 

Are songwriters, artists and actors more attuned to celebrating life than fomenting death?  

Do right-wingers like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly remind creatives of their guidance counselors and parole officers, those despised authority figures against which they are destined to rebel?  

Or are creative people just more optimistic that compassion and human interconnectedness will prevail, always espousing those Utopian platitudes shared by other naive radicals like Martin Luther King, Gandhi and Jesus Christ which conservatives so love to ridicule?

Allow me to open my sanctimonious bleeding-heart and talk about Van Halen for a second.  Because it has come to my attention that another name can be added to the list of notables attending the Republican convention in St. Paul:  Sammy Hagar.

You remember Sammy -- yellow jumpsuit, yellow perm.   He was the "I Can't Drive 55" guy who joined Van Halen after the inimitable David Lee Roth left or was fired from the band, depending on who you ask. Hagar became the front man for one of the world's hardest-rocking bands and helped remake it into a sappy, corporate rock franchise, and now he's rooting for John McCain (as he has previously for Bush/Cheney.) 

First, Sammy Hagar helped ruin van Halen; now he wants to help ruin the country.

Some categorize Van Halen alongside rock innovators like Led Zeppelin, the proto-metal of Black Sabbath or hair bands like Poison, but they were really their own genre:  party rock, with a virtuosic twist. Because they came from a time when a guitar hero was an actual person who played on a stage, not in front of a video game; and because they epitomized a time when big rockers rolled from sold-out arena to private jet, Van Halen was a different animal.  This progression may not have been a good thing for the genre or the culture, but VH were the perfection of excess.  Perhaps more than any other band, Van Halen was an actual incarnation of the mock-rockumentary band Spinal Tap, as fronted by the ecstatically irreverent David Lee Roth.

From the late 1970s to around 1985, Van Halen's music was loud, dumb, and euphoric.  They were the band that caused young girls to climb onto their boyfriends' shoulders at rock concerts and remove bikini tops. They had some introspective and musically inventive moments, but mostly they had hits:  "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love" "Dance The Night Away," "I'll Wait." Sample lyric:  "I found the simple life ain't so simple." They were the soundtrack to the smoking area. 

"I used to have a drug problem,"  Roth said at the height of VH's early success. "Now I make enough money." 

In the same way that President Obama will have difficulty rectifying the excesses of his predecessor, it seems fair to say that no one who could have filled Roth's big shoes when he exited Van Halen, given DLR's reputation for creative debauchery both on and offstage.  Rolling Stonecalled him "the most obnoxious singer in human history," and he seemed to revel in the characterization, riding enormous inflatable phalluses, screaming and yelping like a bluesy banshee, and appearing to enjoy every sort of rock profligacy the pre-HIV rock age afforded.  "Money can't buy you happiness," he said, "but it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it."

In 1985, while President Reagan and George W's dad were trading arms to Iran in exchange for American prisoners and funding an another ill-advised war in Central America, Roth trumpeted his solo career with two kitschy videos that became MTV classics, "Just A Giggolo" and a cover of the Beach Boys' "California Girls" in which he danced in the sun alongside an endless array of posed models.   Even with Zappa-trained guitar gawd Steve Vai as his new foil, Diamond Dave's solo career never quite scaled the heights of rock that Van Halen did, so Roth went to scaleactual rocks in Mali, or Bali, or some place like that.

Meanwhile, the second iteration of the group -- let's call it Van Hagar -- still featured the Van Halen brothers and bassist/backing vocalist Michael Anthony while Hagar sang, played some guitar and co-wrote the songs.  "I don't want to talk about negative, dark things," said Hagar, and he didn't. The music was loud, simplistic, and calculated.  They were now the band that caused young boys to drink too much tequila at rock concerts and hurl in their mom's station wagon.  The hits were "Why Can't This Be Love," "Dreams," and "Right Now."  Sample lyric:  "Only time will tell if we stand the test of time." They were the soundtrack to the hugely successful war on drugs.

Improbably, Van Hagar remained successful, at least from a commercial standpoint.  But the party the new Van Halen party was throwing proved as different from the old as the neocons were from Goldwater conservatives. While the extent of Sammy Hagar's youthful rebellion was that he couldn't follow the new national speed limit, David Lee Roth  was runnin' with the devil.  Van Halen did explosive cover versions of songs by The Kinks; Sammy Hagar's songs were covered by Rick Springfield and Van Hagar covered, um, Sammy Hagar.  And while Dave was kayaking in Cuba, pursuing a second career as an emergency medical technician or getting busted for pot like a rock star should, Sammy was doing a joint venture with Skyy vodka for his boutique line of tequila.  

There were other singers, botched reunion tours, facelifts, toupeés, rehab.  While U2 and REM were busy being born, Van Halen was busy dying.  David Lee Roth may not have been a great singer in the strictest sense of the word, but one simply must prefer his likable swagger and knowing lyrical sense to Hagar's strained squawk and sloganeering.  The Van Halen/Roth pairing yielded some raw, spirited bursts of rock with cool guitar solos that embodied both tradition and possibility, while Van Hagar rendered generic, predictable junk (also with some cool guitar solos.)

Now Sammy Hagar is taking his good times/bad vibe to the masses again (along with the venerable Charlie Daniels Band, who, yes, will also appear at the 2008 GOP convention.)  In 2004, Hagar and his wife made the maximum legal donation to the Bush/Cheney 2004 campaign. For some, his presence will signify the halcyon days of Halcyon, the drug George Bush Sr. was taking when he threw up at a state dinner in Japan. 

"I want to enlighten people," Hagar once said.  If McCain represents enlightenment, why is he regurgitating the foreign and domestic policies of the Bush administration? 

Will the senator from Arizona know Sammy's work any better than he knew Paris Hilton's? 

Creative types tend to swing left.  Why does the guy who subverted the brash spirit of the world's foremost party rock band swing right?

Will Americans support the candidate who launched his party's campaign on the anniversary of Dr. King's "I Have A Dream" speech, or the candidate who voted against honoring Dr. King's memory with a national holiday?

Van Halen, or Van Hagar? 

David Poe is a singer-songwriter and composer. Visit him at www.myspace.com/davidpoe. And download the "Gun for a Mouth" MP3!