Friday, October 25, 2013

Rocktober Video #19: "Runnin' With the Devil" by Van Halen

We've arrived.  It is now one of the best weeks of the year:  Halloween Week.  Until the end of the month, all Rocktober Videos will have some sort of macabre, devilish, dark, or Halloween-related subject matter.  Since this is Hair Band Friday, the first video will be from the band that kind of pioneered the hair band genre, Van Halen.  This is the first song off of their first album, and it announced their arrival as much as any song this side of "Eruption" (which was the second song) could do.  It climbed all the way up to #84 on the Billboard charts in 1978 –- a modest chart position for what would be voted by VH1 in 2009 as the 9th greatest hard rock song of all-time.  This video is from a 1982 show in Largo, Maryland.  If nothing else, it highlights that Michael Anthony was a great backing vocalist and early '80s video cameras were pretty terrible.  As an added bonus, I'm including the promotional video for the song, but someone took out all the tracks except the vocal tracks and Eddie's guitar solos.  And a kazoo.  It's pretty cool.  I've heard it before, but not synced up with the video.

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