BY PAUL EVANS

It seems Van Halen’s mission in life is to prove just how engaging arrogance can be. With four boomboom LPs, they’ve confronted us with the smugness of a muscle boy showing off his peers. In 77, when the Punkers snarled out of London and New York, there were reasons - this was the anger of the dispossessed, often overtly political, always the ultimately understandable arm-flexing of the underdog. VH’s brashness is different - more akin to Elvis’ Cadillac sneer, John Lennon’s swaggering “We’re more popular than Jesus”, the Stones’ proclamation, “We piss anywhere, man”. The Greeks used the term “hubris” to describe any mortal prideful enough to liken his powers unto those of the divine… Van Halen’s assurance is The Insolence of Gods!

Heavy metal’s hardy vine, on which Van H. blooms as the fullest and perhaps final flower, twists back ultimately to the Who. Some would say the Yardbirds (PageBeckClapton), but those boys were still too occupied with melody and experimentation. They also had ace wimp Keith Relf as vocalist and heavy metal demands a tougher sort, preferably an Aryan bull with pumped lungs and pumped chest. And a case could be made for Eddie “Summertime Blues” Cochran as patron saint - the first to elevate White Boy brass over love song, the first guitarist to pour forth the saving grace of racket. But when the Who proclaimed “I can go anywhere!” and Townshend played feedback, Daltrey played dumb Apollo, Moon played percussion’s mini-Wagner, then mamapapa hid and the Adolescent Boy had found a voice - a stuttering self-discovery in music clumsy and simple and Big Enough to sound fury in the high school cafeteria, an anthem for athletes, dumb and impervious.

Heavy metal is something rock n’ roll isn’t. It moves but doesn’t swing. In answer to Ellington’s dictum, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing”, the metal men embrace meaninglessness with the same pride they take in their militant 4/4 stomp. Its links with Black music are hardly reverential - where the young Jagger studied Otis as if before an altar, Beck’s or L. Zep’s blues are determinedly unfaithful. They bend authentic forms the way Ludwig Van used folk melodies, blowing them up into bombasts of genuis like covering relics in Day-Glo paint. Rock n’ roll aims much of its message at Sweet Sixteen (“tight dresses and lipstick”) and though the heavy metal redbloods are no less girl happy, this is music for Boys (the hunter not the hunted) - T-shirt, fast car, tape player blaring an affirmation of teen tuffness with the subtlety of sonic boom. Heavy metal - party music with a vengeance - is rock for people who think themselves winners, it’s the guitar that kills the fatted calf.

Like rock n’ roll, like music, like life, 90 per cent of heavy metal is useless. Some peaks above the murk include Zep’s first two LPs, early Beck, Alice Cooper’s “Eighteen” (the best “I AM” song since “My Generation”), Blue Öyster Cult’s appealingly titled On Your Feet Or On Your Knees, most AC/DC and Paul “Bad Co.” Rogers’ mastery of the grunt. Though Mott were too wise, too deft for real heaviness, they defined the stance in their version of Bowie’s “All the Young Dudes”. Verse after bleak verse nails down the Big Mess that’s tough guy adolescence, but Ian Hunter affirms it all, crowing at each chorus, ‘‘I’m a Dude, man!”

Zep’s gone, Townshend’s troubled, Aerosmith’s in Limbo,“ so the torch is passed to, nay, seized by Van Halen. If Tyler and Perry were Aerosmith’s mini Mick’n’Keith, then VH has a youngblood Plant and Page in David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen - a singer who’s a big blonde beauty, confident as Mr. Wrestling II, potent as one of Picasso’s minotaurs, and a darker axman who can play both lithe and leaden, an adept at what BÖC call “Stun Guitar”. Add a bassist who’s 30 times more cheerful than the grim Mr. Entwistle and a drummer who’s at least cuter than John Bonham and VH emerges as BOOGIE MACHINE.

What sinks most metal outfits under their own brontosaurus weight is a world view as ponderous as their dinosaur chords. Not so with the Vans who, perhaps due to California (America’s Playland) roots celebrate appetite and a fuck-you friskiness with the cheerfulness the Beach Boys might’ve had if they’d progressed from surfing to Drink ‘n’ Drugs instead of Maharishi.  D. Lee is one of few metallic crooners who chuckles through half the lyrics and their de rigeuer concern with horniness, and headbanging is handled with bravo humor that’s neither condescending nor simplemindedly accepting.

The records are produced with ramshackle perfection. Picture a Phil Spector who didn’t bite his nails producing a party rather than his Pop Parsifals. Ted Templeman works the knobs and imagine his delight in the studio with these guys after sweating it out with the Doobies (Michael “I think Burt Bacharach’s a genius” McDonald) or Nicolette “I can sing just as well as Linda” Larson.

Fair Warning is VH’s fourth LP, and it’s neither their best nor breaks much new ground. But, as in other well-defined genres (reggae, C & W, rockabilly), little profit comes from experimentation; what counts is how true the work remains to form. In this the album succeeds: the strut’s intact, once again it’s “Eddiepus Rex” on Bombing of Dresden guitar, and again David Lee bears up under another case of satyriasis.

“Push Comes To Shove” is a pass at funk that succeeds the way the Stone’s quasi-disco “Miss You” does, or Zeppelin’s ersatz reggae “D’Yer Maker” does, all cases of White Boys using ethnic forms and freeing them, rather than poor Bloomfield pretending to be Albert King. Though there’s nothing as strong as the third LP’s “Everybody Wants Some” (which could be subtitled “Triumph of the Id”), new delights include “Hear About It Later” where the drummer pounds something that sounds like a drainpipe 48 successive times, as if Orpheus were banging on the Underworld gates. And the deceptively titled “Sunday Afternoon in the Park” that consists of Edward’s Stratocaster vomiting for a full two minutes.

The cover of Fair Warning continues - or actually introduces - the basic heavy metal conceit with a cartoon of Krazy Kat-like mayhem - a Saturday morning slugfest. Once more, it seems the boys are well aware of what they perpetrate - essential heavy metalness that’s a Marvel Comic of mainstream rock n’ roll - “You like loud guitar, I’ll play till we’re all deaf! You like tough vocals? I’ll scream all the time!”

Though generally culinary comparisons in music reviews are distasteful, there’s no better way to compliment Van Halen than by dubbing them the big bronco Burger on the pop music menu. Take a bite of this beef and see why the Dead Boys, the Feelies, the Dickies and The The never stood a chance in High School USA.