Running with the Demo

Dr. X posts this from Diamond Bar:

"Some groups can barely play when their first album breaks, some can only play a couple of songs passably well and have to go to school to live up to their new reputation. Then there was Van Halen. Here is the original demo version of 'Running With the Devil', produced by Gene Simmons. (Simmons dropped his involvement after his business manager explained to him that Van Halen had no chance of making it big.)

"A little like the Beatles, Van Halen had played together for a long time before their first record broke. They had been together four years when they cut the demo, and six years when their first album was released. Which makes this ... a little more advanced ... than the usual band demo.

"Which reminds me of the time Wittgenstein came back to England. The Tractatus had run ahead of him, and the British academic nobility was literally there to meet him at the station. (Keynes said "well, God has arrived, I met him on the 5:15 train.")

"There were some technicalities. They realized they couldn't let him teach until he had a degree. Russell noted that Wittgenstein had put in enough hours to qualify for a doctorate before the war, and proposed that they treat the Tractatus as his thesis. Moore's reaction: 'In my opinion, this is a work of genius; in any case it is up to the standards of a degree from Cambridge.'

"So it was when I first heard Van Halen. Just as Wittgenstein had rescued western philosophy from its profound semantic confusion, Van Halen squarely faced the American cultural question. The answer, of course, was rock. But no one could seize the heights. The punks were interesting, but too edgy for the mainstream. The Dead were tasteful, sensitive, brilliant, but really, who cared? Queen, Bowie, and the Stones were, with their glam pretensions, part of the problem (and this demo put them on notice - everyone: just fucking fire your guitar player).

"It was Van Halen that beat some sense back into America. And 'Running with the Devil' was their cricket bat (Largo, MD '82 here; Buenos Aires '83 here; some random festival '83 here).

"Chuck Klosterman (the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig's Institute for American Studies) delivers the definitive (btw, if you care about American music at all, read everything Klosterman has written): 'This band should have been the biggest arena act of the early 80s, and they were. They had the greatest guitar player of the 1980s, and everyone (except possibly Yngwie Malmsteen) seems to agree.' They have sold 56 million albums so far.

"The effect on the youth of the 1980s cannot be overstated. I spoke with a group of prominent attorneys last week, and to a man they attributed their success to this song."