​The first time I saw Van Halen perform live, the band was colloquially known as Van Hagar. Guitarist Eddie Van Halen, drummer Alex Van Halen, and bassist Michael Anthony had just reunited with their second frontman Sammy Hagar to promote a greatest-hits package titled Best of Both Worlds; I bought floor seats about ten rows back from the Meadowlands stage and in a direct line of sight of Eddie's quicksilver fingers from a guy with connections. Having been a Van Hagar fan for quite some time, that night was a thrilling culmination to all those adolescent years spent in my bedroom air guitaring, air drumming, and (yes) air bassing. I commemorated the evening by buying a bootleg t-shirt in the parking lot.

Eight years later, I stood in Madison Square Garden for yet another Van Halen live performance, except this time, the once even-more-estranged frontman David Lee Roth was handling vocal duties. The foursome, experts on the art of Reunion, were back together in support of an album of new (well, sort of) material titled A Different Kind of Truth. As anyone who is still paying attention to the band will admit, it's a return to form, bluesy and bombastic, debauched and lecherous, vintage sounding and also hopelessly dated. New songs like "She's The Woman" and "Tattoo" fit seamlessly into the set list, which featured staples like "You Really Got Me," "Jump," and "Dance the Night Away." Rock and roll, mission accomplished.

But while I had a drunkenly exceptional time, thanks in part to the Garden's newly instituted 1:1 bartender-to-ticketholder ratio, during Roth's improvised "Panama" banter, I realized something that I had always suspected, but never felt truly comfortable saying aloud.

I'm just more of a Van Hagar guy.

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​After all the lousiness and anger and general grey clouds that persisted throughout 2011, I've decided to adopt a more cheerful outlook for 2012—because in the face of a crumbling world, not to mention a thousand pounded-out posts and anonymous commenters screeching that 99% of everything sucks, it's even more important to burrow down and unearth the good in this planet's people, places, and things. To that end, here's the new feature Keeping It Posi, a sincere attempt to find the good in what the Internet has deemed truly unworthy, or at least crappy enough to get angry about for five or so minutes. To christen this feature, I'll examine two recent entries from rock bands who have traveled bumpy roads: "Drive By," the new single by the San Francisco bubblegum-rock outfit Train, and "Tattoo," the new single from the re-Rothified Van Halen.

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@spins/Instagram

​Van Halen
Cafe Wha?
Thursday, January 5

Better than: Listening to David Lee Roth's Spanish-language version of "That's Life" at home alone.

The crowd drawn to Macdougal Street in advance of last night's Cafe Wha? show by the reunited-once-again Van Halen—David Lee Roth on vocals, and the Van Halens Eddie, Alex, and Wolfgang on guitar, drums, and bass, respectively—was large enough to require multiple police barriers up and down the block. People huddled in the cold, hoping to catch a glimpse of the now-40-year-old band; security was tight enough that the fan club members, industry types, and journalists entering the building had to have their hands stamped twice, instead of once.

Inside, the room was humid and packed, with waitresses maneuvering drink-filled trays around the elbows and heads of people craning their necks and waving their cameraphones in order to get a glimpse of the action on stage. There was an excitement in the air—both inside and outside—that felt strangely old-school, like the sort of fervor that would arise in advance of a Midnight Madness sale at Tower Records. Rock stars, even in this age, can do that to people.

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This week in Internet news that should up the online world's overall quotient of "bozedy bozedy bop"s: David Lee Roth has joined Twitter and Facebook. So far all that the accounts have on them is a lot of teaser text and a link to the Van Halen singer/former radio host's official site, but a look at the source code reveals a couple of things! Alas, none of them seem to be a plan to launch DaveTV (as seen above in the all-parody-everything video for "Just A Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody") on some digital tier of a cable system... at least not yet.

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