POP MUSIC REVIEW : Blissed Out With Van Halen

You’d have to go back to the days of the Maharishi to find a bunch of rockers more blissed out than Van Halen was during its four-man lovefest Tuesday night at the Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa.

There was Sammy Hagar, calling Eddie Van Halen “my best friend in the world.” There was Eddie, saying the feeling was mutual. And there were the four of them, hugging and laughing and mussing each other’s hair about as often as NBA players trade high-fives. After a while, one began to wonder whether Leo Buscaglia had taken over as the band’s manager.

This display of bonhomie on the first of Van Halen’s two sold-out nights at the Pacific was refreshing after the grumpiness we’ve seen lately from top-of-the-line hard rockers. You get scowls from Metallica and snits from Axl Rose, while the running subtext in Jane’s Addiction often seems to be “we don’t talk to each other, and anyway we’re gonna break up.” Rock band as fellowship--what a concept.

The only thing not right with the Van Halen world, apparently, is the existence of rap music. “We ain’t no rap band,” Hagar proclaimed. “That is some sad (expletive).” That attitude is just metalheaded (maybe one should say meatheaded) McCarthyism: Find something different, declare it alien and heap scorn on it, so we can all feel good about being in our own superior club together.

Hagar’s other self-serving fantasy for the night was benign: Playing in the L.A. area gives Van Halen the jitters. “This is the town that I fear the worst,” he said early in the show. By the end, Hagar was able to proclaim that, despite the presence of all those hard-to-impress critics, musicians and record industry people, Van Halen had managed to relax and have fun. Again, it was the old metal ploy of inventing an obstacle, a mission to accomplish against the odds.

In any case, Van Halen made enough boisterous music to back up the mood of happy self-congratulation surrounding the show. At peak moments, the four members rocked freely and powerfully, dispensing with the band’s smoother pop side and emphasizing a loud, roughhouse, heavy-rock approach. For the ballads, “When It’s Love” and “Why Can’t This Be Love,” Van Halen dropped the synthesizer arrangements of the album versions and emphasized gritty guitar riffing.

The chief obstacle to a free-flowing, momentum-gathering concert wasn’t any L.A. jitters, but the band’s insistence on padding its two-hour show with long bass, drum and guitar solos. But once those were out of the way, Van Halen did its best work at the end. “Dream Another Dream” stood out with its dark, urgent tone and its alternately angry and yearning lyrics about the collapse of the economic security underlying the American Dream. Van Halen aptly followed it with the buoyant defiance of “Jump.”

By cutting the lard out of the show and adding more of the emotionally stormy material it has begun to attempt on its latest album (such as “Pleasure Dome” and “In ‘N’ Out”), Van Halen might have made the entire concert as expressive and cohesive as the last half hour, without sacrificing its prevailing mood of good cheer.