Van Halen at Sprint Center

Van Halen

Better than: Valerie Bertinelli’s weight-loss blog.

A crowd roughly the size (and appearance) of Independence, Missouri, poured into the Sprint Center last Friday night to worship at the altar of once-lusty ’80s guitar rock kings Van Halen, fronted this time around by original bitch-on-the-mic David Lee Roth.

Side note: I would not go see Van Halen unless Diamond Dave was there. I’m pretty sure that man was the main reason my parents wouldn’t let me watch MTV in the ’80s. His persona was so lecherous and trashy that him simply dancing around, doing the scissor kicks in a pair of tights and what not, mooching at the camera, etc etc inspecting women… hell, him just being himself was an affront to moral living. His successor, Sammy Hagar, on the other hand, to me, was just a chubby red dude with a porcine howl. By the time For Unlawful Carnal Kabbage and its flagship video Poundcake came out in 1991, my parents didn’t give a crap what I watched. VH and all those other bands had become so ineffectual by then that watching them made kids hate rock and roll. (Hence the rise of gangsta rap.) So, all that’s to lament how Friday night at the Sprint Center, I made the mistake of expecting Dave to be entertaining — or even really part of the show — but more on that in a minute.

Fan footage of the night’s show.