I first picked up the guitar in 1988 at the age of 12, and at the time I was just getting into rock and metal. The first tab book was Iron Maiden’s ‘Seventh Son of a Seventh Son’ which my dad bought me as a present one day and I thought it had the most amazing guitar playing ever, I still love that album and I still think the guitar playing on it is great but something happened which changed the way I thought and played… my friend lent me a video called ”Live Without a Net” a live concert of Van Halen in their 1986 Sammy Hagar early days. At this point I had heard ”OU812” and thought it was quite good. This video introduced me to some earlier Van Halen material and gave me some of the best guitar lessons I’ve ever had. I studied Eddie’s playing for hours and hours, learned vibrato and the tapping part of eruption by the end of the year and was well on my way to becoming a EVH clone, I didn’t even realise at this point that David Lee Roth was anything other than a solo artist with the guy out of crossroads! Anyway I soon looked up the old Van Halen but I was 12, the new stuff sounded pretty good to me and “Eat ‘em And Smile” was one of my favourite albums.

As I got older the early Van Halen soon became my favourite era and with the recent news of a Van Halen reunion tour with Diamond Dave announced there could be no better time for the release of a book like Everybody Wants Some - The Van Halen Saga. I was really excited when the book arrived I immediately played Van Halen 1 in iTunes to get me in the mood. I knew that there had been a lot of disruption in the band over the years and I knew that DLR was a bit of an egomaniac but it is really interesting to actually get a background of what really happened from year to year. Its amazing that they are still alive considering how much Jack Daniels and beer was consumed (Eddie I’m looking at you...) mind you Sammy has apparently become a bit of a Tequila monster in recent years!

The book written by Ian Christe chronicles the lives of Van Halen from the beginning and I’m talking straight off the boat from Holland kind of beginning. There is so much to cram into one book that it understandbly moves along at a pretty fast pace, personally I could have read the unedited version happily! The first section starts off in the early Whisky a go go years as the guys worked the club circuits continually in LA and built a solid foundation of support, it then moves along to the Van Hagar era and the ups of downs of touring with an alcoholic guitarist in full flight and then moves through the Cherone erm, well not era, detour, and then through the last few years of rumour and speculation up to the present day just before the tour was officially announced.

I don’t need to go into detail you know the ups and downs of Van Halen, the squabbling between Roth and Hagar and more recently Eddie and Hagar and poor Michael Anthony… I feel sorry for the guy he always got the raw end of the deal and now he’s been replaced by a 16 year old! Well okay it is no ordinary 16 year old is it, Wolfgang Van Halen is set to be a star of the future according to his dad apparently they have been writing material in 5150 for years!

Even if you aren’t a Van Halen fan, if you ever liked “Runnin’ with the devil”, “Unchained”, “Panama” or even “Poundcake” you have to have to read this book, I’m recommending it to all my friends, I enjoyed it as much as “Motley Crue - The Dirt”! If it wasn’t true it would be a great fictional story and thats what makes it so good, Van Halen has been going for nearly 30 years and its a true rock ‘n’ roll story of excess and debauchery, one of the longest running soap operas in rock history!

I guarantee you’ll be listening to “eruption” within minutes of opening the book!