Proof that these guys are DONE.

[MilesColtrane]

An unfortunate version of "Jump" by the new (old) version of Van Halen.

The carnage starts about 50 seconds in.
Eddie eventually figures it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjx_GjyXCs4&eurl=http://warmowski.wordpress.com/2007/10/05/jump-in-pitch/

[WCGreen]

1. It's like he's playing a completly different song...

Maybe he should go back to the drugs...

[Bennyboy]

2. Well that was pretty awful....

Nothing like seeing a buch of geezers singing aobut High School...

[Wapsie B]

3. Oh god how the mighty have fallen.

Next stop, Branson, Mo.

[TK421]

4. I love Van Halen, but that was really embarrassing

REALLY an embarrassing performance

[Connonym]

5. I couldn't watch the whole thing

it made my ears bleed

[GoddessOfGuinness]

6. He can't hear...

If he could, I'd think he'd use his "bendy bar" thing to pull the pitch up, then keep the solo simple. He's still a good guitar player, I'm sure. This has got to be a tech problem...maybe with his monitor?

[Oeditpus Rex]

7. Man, I would've hated to have been on the audio crew after that

Somebody probably had to go to the hospital with 30 or 40 new assholes.

[Nostradammit]

8. I think it's instructive to view songs from that same concert

that they'd played earlier. There is a reason the crowd goes bat-shit crazy for them at the end of this clip.

The guitar tech probably handed him the wrong guitar for the song, so he starts off in the wrong tuning.
I'm sitting here with my friend's 12-string guitar in my lap and it's tuned in some funky tuning and I'm glad I'm not in front of 20,000 fans while I try to figure it out (I think it's a D sus4).


Van Halen is meaningless cock rock, for sure, but if you want to see some professional musicians tearing it up, watch other clips from this show.

There's a reason Frank Zappa publicly thanked Eddie for re-inventing the guitar.

[BeyondGeography]

9. Unreal

Un-real.

[regnaD kciN]

10. That video has been posted before, with an explanation...

They didn't have a keyboard player this tour, so they were playing along with a digital tape (presumably DAT) of the keyboard part. The problem is that the tape was recorded with a 44.1 sampling rate, and got played back at 48.(Most DAT decks have a switch to choose between the two.) That effectively made the keyboard part 1.5 semitones sharp -- in other words, in a "key" nonexistent in Western music. That meant that the band couldn't even transpose to match it, as it lay between two notes on the fretboard.

Embarrassing in a Spinal Tap sense (I was waiting for a 10" replica of Stonehenge to descend from the rafters), but more a technical flub by the crew than anything the band did. I'm no fan of Van Halen, but this was not their fault.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

11. Thank you...

I'm not really into them either, but what they do, they do well...given the right circumstances.

[Dr. Strange]

12. Nobody knows who they were...

or what they were doing...

[MilesColtrane]

13. Could have been avoided by hiring a keyboard player.

When you play with tracks it's just a matter of when something will fuck up.

Didn't they learn anything from Ashlee Simpson?