TRIBUTE TO VAN HALEN – Best Of Both Worlds

The reason why I am spending my time on writing a review on this album is because you then won’t have to waste your time on listening to it.

It is hard to see why MTM has released this album. It won’t sell. It won’t sell because none of the bands/musicians on it bring anything new or fresh to any of the tracks. Nothing interesting at all is added to the original compositions. So why then bother?

Calling it a tribute to Van Halen is a bit strange, since less than half of the tracks are Van Halen numbers. The rest is covers of Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth solo stuff.

In David Lee Roth’s scary excellent autobiography, “Crazy from the Heat,” he brags about there’s probably one Van Halen tribute band in every city in America. Well, if he’s right, it should be possible to put together a better record with the same purpose as this one. American Dog, who covers “Take your Whiskey Home” sounds groovy, but most of the other bands sounds flat and dull. Really, if you can’t combine singing a classic Roth-era Van Halen tune without making it sound like you’re having fun, you should not, I repeat NOT!, record it.

There’s not a whole lot of well known names to find here, although there’s a few. Good old Enuff Z’Nuff adds absolutely nothing to Roth’s “Yankee Rose,” and Jimmy Crespo (who replaced Joe Perry on Aerosmith’s 1982 Rock in a Hard Place) dresses “Panama” with a dull blue-collar shirt and keeps it to the floor. Duty work.

But by all means, it’s impossible to make “Panama,” “Ain’t Talking ‘bout Love” and “There’s Only One Way to Rock” sound weak. But there is really only one way to approach these classic tunes: play the originals!

However, if you really want a Van Halen tribute album (or actually, if you need just any tribute album!)you should go for Eagle Record’s release called ,Tribute to Van Halen/2000. It’s brilliant. Here you’ll find great musicians such as Jack Russell, Dweezil Zappa, Mark Slaughter, Billy Sheehan, George Lynch and John Corabi, among a lot of others (including Eric Singer and Joe Lynn Turner, of course. Those guys seem to love playing on tribute albums,)who are all having a great time in the studio, and the sound has really got an edge. None of these guys add new elements to the old Van Halen songs, but they treat them with FUN! And fun, that’s Van Halen to me.