Push Comes to Shove

Van Halen is an American rock band formed in Pasadena, California in 1974. They have enjoyed success since the release of their debut album Van Halen (1978). As of 2007, Van Halen has sold 80 million albums worldwide and have had the most number-one hits on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart…

Beyond Description (1973-1989) is a companion set to 2001's 12-disc box The Golden Road (1965-1973), which collected all of the Grateful Dead's albums for Warner Bros, adding bonus tracks to each album, along with a double-disc collection of early pre-Warner recordings called "Birth of the Dead" for good measure. Beyond Description picks up the story after the Dead started their own label with 1973's Wake of the Flood and runs all the way to 1989, when they released their last studio album, Built to Last. Like The Golden Road, each album here is enhanced with bonus tracks, running the gamut from as little as three (on Built to Last) to has many as 16 (a full-length bonus disc added to 1980's live acoustic Reckoning), but there's nothing quite as enticing as "Birth of the Dead." Indeed, "enticing" is not a word that's frequently associated with the albums in this collection.

During the hair-today-gone-tomorrow eighties party, Hollywood heavy-on-image rock groups were a dime-a-dozen. Every label scrambled to sign what they thought would take-off like the next Guns N' Roses…

Mike Slamer remains one of the unsung and criminally underestimated guitar heroes of rock. Much like fellow peers Michael Lee Firkins and Reb Beach, he is one of those guys with amazing chops, touching all sorts of work over the course of a career and never quite realizing the credit they deserve. He has been the guy behind some of the most amazing melodic hard rock releases of the past 20 years. The list includes, but is not limited to, Steelhouse Lane, Seventh Key, Slamer, and Terry Brock, and we can’t forget his work in the 80’s with Streets (featuring Kansas singer Steve Walsh) and the 70’s with City Boy…

Of all the early Van Halen records, Fair Warning often gets overlooked – partially because it's a dark, strange beast, partially because it lacks any song as purely fun as the hits from the first three records…

Of all the early Van Halen records, Fair Warning often gets overlooked – partially because it's a dark, strange beast, partially because it lacks any song as purely fun as the hits from the first three records. Because of that, there were no hits from Fair Warning that turned into radio anthems; only "Unchained" and, to a lesser extent, the grinding opener, "Mean Street," rank among the group's best-known songs, and they're not as monumental as "And the Cradle Will Rock," from the preceding album, Women and Children First…