This was sad. Van Halen had mattered. Every few years a Roth rumor would fire up and I d get an excited e-mail from a friend with a subject usually along the lines of The Mighty Van Halen! I didn t care. I d moved on. I was older. My life was more complicated. The world was more complicated. I was looking for artists who addressed that. I got deep into Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and a whole host of singer-songwriters and confused poetic romantics.

Van Halen became a memory that occupied the back end of my alphabetized CD collection, because someone had to come before Tom Waits and Warren Zevon.