Went downtown to see the Van Halen show last night here in the ATL...was'nt impressed. I've been a Van Halen fan from the beginning, have seen them 3 times in Europe, twice in the US, and they have'nt gotten a bit better. When the lights went down around 8:30, of course the crowd of some 30,000 went wild, Ed's guitar broke out with screaming tremolo and harmonic dive bombs, accompanied by Alex's thundering drums backing up the intro that lasted some 45 seconds, then the spots and set lights exploded and the band broke into "You really got me". The lead vocals were extremely distorted, and Dave, as usual, was singing half a note off, and showing zero respect for the lyrics. They played quite a few numbers from the original album, women and children first, mean street, the second album, and 1984 of course, some you could'nt really recognize until well into the song. Alex did a fantastic drum solo, and poor little Wolfgang did a respectable job, considering his age. Eddie's guitar solo started out the same as the "live without a net" tour, with few changes. About half way through his solo, he lost all of the house amplification, and the only sound was coming from his 16 strong EVH 5150 stacks on the stage, which cut the volume to below half. He made this painfully obvious by throwing his arms in the air, and yelling at people on stage right, who you could see scurrying about trying to render the situation. Someone finally plugged something back in, and all was well, but Eddie is not one to try to cover up anything, for sure. One encore of "Jump", complete with canned keyboards, that were about 1/4 step out of rhythm, and the show was what my brother called, a "complete train wreck"....I have to agree, DEFINITELY not worth the $240 we paid for 2 tickets...
