Today’s “Best Songs Ever”: Van Halen “Running With The Devil”

By Tim Duffy

Everyone is talking up Van Halen and I suppose I cannot resist. For my money I’ll take the first self titled Van Halen record over anything the cock-swingers in Led Zeppelin ever dished out. Something about that bass throb that opens up “Running With The Devil” the explosive and totally wonky borderline unnecessary nature of all of Eddie’s guitar fireworks, and most of all the weirdness of David Lee Roth at the center of it all, they just seem funner. The whole thing might have been a put on, it might still be. If that is true they have of course traveled far too deep into the worm hole to ever crawl out and give us the wink and that makes the whole thing better.

“Running With The Devil” is the best cock-rock song of all time. In it David Lee Roth “evolves” the way a rock singer is supposed to vamp from the Robert Plant origins into something less sexual and more theatrical. The band are a well greased machine, pounding and pummeling where so many other bands might have found something blacker in the music like a groove. Basically Van Halen’s contribution to rock was to suck all of the blues and black culture out of Zeppelin. By doing so they made something more honest than Zep could have ever imagined.

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