Album: Fair Warning
Year: 1981
. . .
The third and final time I saw Van Halen was on June 18, 1981, which capper of a two month spree where Tim & I saw nearly a dozen shows from artists ranging from, well Van Halen to the long-forgotten DB Cooper, who actually released a couple of albums on Warner Bros. (So I just went down a DB Cooper rabbit hole on Discogs, AllMusic and YouTube and it turns out he was like an Elvis Costello / Graham Parker guy and I even recognized his “Forever Rock ‘n’ Roll”).
Of course, that 1981 show was the fourth time Van Halen had played Fresno. For whatever reason, I’d missed their 1980 jaunt, and all of the other ones after that. And once again, I witnessed a Fresno crowd totally decimate an opening act for Van Halen. This time, it was The Fools, whose Talking Heads parody “Psycho Chicken” was half-funny the first time, and whose album Heavy Mental, I had no use for. Maybe it was good. In any event, it was yet another mismatch.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1936: Van Halen – “Unchained”