Van Halen- OU812- Alex & Eddie, Sammy Hagar, Michael Anthony

OU812  by Van Halen topped the US sales chart in Summer 1988, the band’s second with this line-up in what eventually would become a string of four Billboard #1 albums in a row. It was a boom time for Eighties hard rock popularity, and the period is captured like a Polaroid snapshot in my time capsule of a classic rock interview featuring the late Eddie Van Halen, Alex Van Halen, Michael Anthony, and Sammy Hagar, returning for his second round with America’s most popular hard rock band then as lead singer/songwriter with Van Halen.  A lot of tequila has run under the bridge since then, but even the wallop of thirty-five year old mescal can’t alter the fact that these guys were having too much fun at that point. Van Halen  fans were selling out football stadiums coast to coast and gobbling up more than 4,000,000 copies of OU812,  containing “Black and Blue”; “Feels So Good”( suffering under a dated ’80s keyboard arrangement and begging now for a revisit); “AFU” (fabulous guitar licks from Eddie Van Halen, reminding me why we hold the late Van Halen sibling in such high regard ); “When It’s Love”; “Cabo Wabo”;”Finish What You’ve Started”, and “Mine All Mine”. –Redbeard