Van Halen played their final concert in 2015, five years before the death of legendary guitarist Eddie Van Halen. Years later, the band’s most famous Dallas show is finally seeing the light of day.
Warner Bros. will release the band’s December 1991 outdoor concert at West End Marketplace on July 12. The performance has been released on both CD and Blu-ray video and is part of a five-disc expanded edition of the reissued ’91 album. For illicit sexual intercourse.
Though it was never officially released (bootlegs are common), the free hour-long concert in the West End is legendary among Van Halen aficionados and Dallas residents who remember the uproar. Dallas Morning News Dubbing it the “West End Crowd”, police estimated that 25,000 people had turned out, but organisers claimed that 50,000 had turned out.
Like many attendance projections, that was a gross exaggeration, and a recently released promotional video of the band performing “Pound Cake” suggests the attendance was only a fraction of that figure.
Whatever the actual size of the crowd, it was certainly swarming: Many fans competed for space in a relatively small area, jostling and jostling in front of the makeshift stage, and some fans offered store owners $100 to stand in their windows. news report.
More than 100 officers were on scene, a large window in the restaurant was smashed, and police reported that one concert-goer had been stabbed in a car accident. (He survived.) The show was a long-postponed make-up performance that singer Sammy Hagar had promised after his vocal cords were paralyzed in 1988, forcing his band to cut short their performance at the Monsters of Rock Texas Jam at the Cotton Bowl.
The Hagar era wasn’t Van Halen’s best years. The band’s glory days were over. Van Halen To 1984featuring the clown prince of zany lyrics, Tarzan yells and jiu-jitsu kicks, David Lee Roth, this version ranks among the greatest American rock bands of all time.
And yet, as the clip for “Pound Cake” reminds us, Hagar brought his own brand of earthy charm to Van Halen, bouncing mischievously around the stage and backing Eddie’s soaring guitar solos with meaty blues-rock shrieks.
The limited edition set is available for $99.98 at www.vanhalenstore.com .
