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10 Seconds to Love: Walking Van Halen's "Mean Street"

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 January 12 2012 at 06:23:58 PM


Cuidado. Somewhere along the way, our California boys lost the beautiful girls and plundering beach beer-blast plot. Tequila sunrise sunset on the first two feel-good records. “You Really Got Me,” and “Women in Love” eerily replaced with “Mean Street” and “Dirty Movies.” Gone is all roller-skating pussy gliding the airbrushed boulevard. It’s all gangs and broken-bottle streets. Chicanos. Nunchaku. Ben Davis shirts, top-button affixed, firecracker fuse mustaches, whoopass can crushed open and giving the vibe to anyone there to feel it. Like rats adjusting to the maze, they run the gutters while prey staggers the sidewalks, all bourgeois pastel linen and espadrilles, clicking heels and staggeringly moronic giggle via much Napa bubbly. Good luck, fuck. What awaits ain’t ready to “Feel Your Love Tonight.” This is home, fucker. This is Mean Street.

Edward steps far over the line with Robert Fripp intro, two tomcats pulled from the dumpster and burned alive, shrieking, hissing, popping, within the roiling oilcan fire, permanent landmark for ironweeds, grapeheads, Manny and MaryJane Rottencrotch. Alex and Michael fuck Funkadelic, hi-hatting out hardcore jollies for dance floor skeez and Edward joins them, all dumb stoned smiles and never-ending Chuck Berry shtick. When David Lee comes breezing though, reeking of cunt and Coppertone, his delivery is more Bronx tough than Borscht-Belt. Same ol shit. Same faces, same talk. The end, the dead ahead. Painter/self-mutilator/off-his-nutter William Kurelek, whose painting “The Maze” psychically informs Fair Warning much less adorns its cover, invoked here, among other places, essentially the band’s talisman willing the FM bubblegum shun, and welcoming an underbelly seen mostly in humid lockup daydreams.


Boiled strings and echoplex mighty blow. Edward runs riff factory with nicotine-stained picking fingers. “They’re dancin’ now, look! Out on Mean Street. Dance, baby!” Gyrating pelvises mark time. Dew dripped bush. Heavy lipsticked lips. It’s all tanlines and stretch marks, where a fiver gets you five minutes of disinterested dry hump. That Hostess Pie rubbing twee Aladdin’s Lamp. Pimps do the step n’ fetchit, bartering with the rats for gawks; David Lee ponders “Dirty Movies” and “Sinner’s Swing” and wonders where the rainbow-shitting unicorns have gone. Strip off the Body Glove, come get ya sum. Alex and Michael are just happy to have regular work. Copious Schlitz Malt Liquor and Jack Daniel’s doesn’t hurt either. They may be playing five-card stud on a felt table littered with crisp hundreds, but there’s a nagging want for the lust-starved strange, panty sniffing pup-tented degenerates bent on Lysol and street candy.

“Mean Street” isn’t just the opener. It’s the tone-setter. The sword-swallower. The seven-titted circus freak offering value packets of Astroglide to passersby. A big black dick in the eye to the soft-focus fuckup radio audience. It was three years until David Lee would declare, “I’m black…” but the rest of the band was tarpitted in early 70s ennui, where anxiety gassed a trillion crime blotters worth of barbaric rapes and wanton homicides. There was too much glitz to begin with. We were only a year into the Technicolor decade, and Van Halen, the Beach Boys with a wall of Marshall stacks, were down thumbing the zeitgeist, offering caution in a most koan-like way: “Somebody said ‘Fair Warning,’ Lord… Lord strike that poor boy down.”

Van Halen
“Mean Steet”
Fair Warning
1981

[Stewart Voegtlin]


Comments (4)

  • 1 comment
    Matt G
    8:55 AM on Jan 13, 2012 // reply »
    that's a great description of a dark, dark song- exactly what set van halen apart- the rawness and the filth, pushing through the good times until it turned into the fucking bad times
  • 378 comments
    stewvee
    11:27 AM on Jan 16, 2012 // reply »
    Thanks, Matt G. You've got a good head on your shoulders, son.
  • 9 comments
    Nekromantis
    3:25 AM on Feb 05, 2012 // reply »
    One of the top five if not the BEST Van Halen song. Thanks for the great walk-through Stewart.
  • 378 comments
    stewvee
    8:21 AM on Feb 06, 2012 // reply »
    Gracias.

    Def top five for me too. Shares space with "Unchained," "Cradle Will Rock," "DOA," "Romeo Delight," and dueling instrumentals "Sunday Afternoon In the Park" and "INTRUDER!"
 

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