My brother and I sat down in the otherwise empty upper pews of the Xcel Energy Center, a 20,000 seat arena in Saint Paul, Minnesota. We had forgone sitting in the seats indicated on our tickets, which were smack dab in the middle of a row filled with paunchy, sweaty middle-aged rock fans, and headed towards four rows of seats that were currently unoccupied. We had paid $70.00 each for the privilege of sitting in this, the very highest section of the arena which, if it were a few feet more vertical, would send us plummeting forty stories to our deaths. Consequently we didn’t feel compelled to follow the dictates of the strips of cardboard in our pockets and sat down, preparing to leave as soon as the rightful seat bearers showed up - and do so quickly if they were really big. Fortunately, those people either didn’t exist or found better ass-warmers themselves, as the four rows would remain ours for the rest of this concert -- one chapter of the 2004 reunion tour of Sammy Hagar and Van Halen.

Mind you, our good fortune in getting this much space to sit in was not a surprise, as The Brother and I were by now old hands at attending concerts and finagling ways of getting more comfortable, if not being able to get close to the stage. In the past twelve years, The Brother and I had gone to roughly eighty shows, a third of them at venues comparable in size to the Xcel. Most of the bands we saw were of the “classic rock” species - that is, groups of hairy, obese men in their fifties who had not had a chart hit since the Carter Administration. Be assured that the vast majority of these war horses gave some seriously full-blooded sessions of loud and (reasonably) fast rump kicking.

But some, I admit, were downright terrible. John Kay and Steppenwolf’s weary grunt-and-groan session before a sea of trailer trash in Cadet, Wisconsin had to be one of the most ghastly things I’ve ever witnessed. George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, hauling their dead asses before a crowded biker bar in Minneapolis, redefined the word “endless.” And George Thorogood and his Decrepit Destroyers, though their set was fine, played at a casino filled with wheelchair-bound refugees from nursing homes staring into perpetually wailing slot machines while gasping from oxygen tanks. The experience was made all the more gruesome by the lunch of soggy fruit cocktail and stale rolls we had before the show at the casino’s buffet room, a vomit-green, windowless tomb filled with more twilight people attached to machines of a non-gaming variety.

If we learned a lesson from that experience, it was to have pre-concert snicker doodles at an eatery far away from where the music was to be played. So, on the night of the Van Halen 2004 show, The Brother and I met up at a chain restaurant-bar filled with reality-dating-show twenty-somethings. The place was located a few doors down from The Love Doctor, a sex shop that had recently opened in the area, and in front of which several senior citizens of a more healthy variety were solemnly pacing back and forth, holding placards that read “No porn in our neighborhood!” This, I felt was a good indicator that we were in for a kick-ass good time that would at least evoke the spirit - if not the actual presence - of Van Halen’s own Love Doctor and original lead singer, Diamond David Lee Roth.

Like a lot of - if not most - VH fans, I’ve always been partial to Diamond Dave as the voice of the band, and regretted never seeing a live performance during his ten year stint with them. Of course, I hardly knew who Van Halen were before the last album he recorded with them came out and its big hit “Jump” became part of the Top 40 vocabulary. Even then, it took a few years for me to absorb all the great music cut by the Diamond and Company, and to realize that Eddie Van Halen beats the pants off of Hendrix, Page, Clapton and the rest as the Greatest Guitarist Ever. By the time I came to this conclusion, though, Dave had gone on to a solo career that was well on its way to tanking and Red Rocker Sammy Hagar had taken his place in the fold. Though I liked the solo songs Red did about mental masturbation and his inability to drive the speed limit, I wasn’t too thrilled with the sluggish and syrupy ballads about unrequited love and soaring eagles he churned out with Van Halen. It would be a good several years before I would be convinced by The Brother, who thought “Van Hagar” was every bit as good as “Van Roth”, to see what would turn out to be their last concert tour for nine years.

Partly because the set relied so heavily on those damned ballads, and also because the venue we saw them at, Minneapolis’ Target Center, was so packed we were forced to honor our tickets and sit dead center in a row jam-packed with frustrated thirty-somethings, I did not come away from that 1995 show with much enthusiasm. Since then, as fans know, Sammy left the fold, Dave came back for five minutes, and that poor goof from Extreme took the lead for about ten. There were also numerous solo tours by Sam and Dave and that inspired double-header they did in 2002. I regretted not being able to make one of the stops on that tour, but I did watch Dave give a sky-dropping, earth-quaking show at a wife-beater bar in 2001 that proved he is without a doubt still the Best Rock Frontman of All Time - if not the best manager of a constipated career or incontinent ego. I also saw Sammy give a free concert at what used to be a parking lot - but is now a neon-drenched entertainment behemoth - in downtown Minneapolis in 1999. Thanks to a set that included the meatier tunes he did with Van Halen plus solo cuts old and new, I enjoyed the show enough to give Old Red another chance when Eddie returned to the spotlight after a five year bout with cancer, divorce and playing golf with the LAPD.

So, when the banks of 100,000-watt lights that dangled threateningly from the ceiling of the Xcel Energy Center flamed on -- a process which, if the weather was as hot as it was one day before might have caused a city-wide power outage -- and the strains of “Jump” regurgitated from the skyscraper high amps on either side of the stage, things looked promising. In fact, when the four tiny, multi-colored insects that were the band bounded out on stage and greeted the 15,000 screaming banshees in the half-mile wide cage, it was clear my seventy bucks were well spent.

Indeed, the next two and a half hours consisted primarily of the get-drunk-get-laid-eat-your-guts-out-and-ask-for-seconds rockers that were once Van Halen’s staple. Bassist Michael Anthony, despite being built like a bar bouncer (or, from the way he was guzzling a jug of Jack Daniels, a guy eighty-sixed from a bar) wailed such an angelic, near-falsetto voice - especially as he took lead on “Somebody Get Me a Doctor” - that it made me wonder if he should have been the band’s main vocalist all along. Drummer Alex Van Halen, who was as shirtless and emaciated as his guitar-slinging brother, pounded the fleshies with the same gusto he did in the days when Diamond Dave was driving him crazy enough to want to pound him.

And Sammy, though he could have used some fashion tips in dressing more like a rock star instead of like a pyjama-clad homemaker, proved himself up to the task of belting out Roth-era hits like “Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love” and “Unchained” and his own era’s “Runaround” and “Poundcake” - the last of which was accompanied by a video on two enormous screens that starred enough scantily clad babes to finally make me realize that the song was most definitely not about baking. The only number that harked back to the dreary proceedings of nine years before was Sammy’s solo spot, which involved him strapping on an acoustic guitar and singing a soapy dirge that might as well have been titled “Okay, Guys, You Can Go to the Bathroom, Now.” Unfortunately, the snicker doodles I had before the show would not demand exit from my bowels until Eddie’s solo, a medley of recognizable riffs from his long career that was loud enough and grooving enough to serenade me as I searched for a rest room that had an unoccupied stall in which I could defecate with impunity.

And like that evacuation - akin to the “meditation” that inspired Eddie to write “Panama” one of the songs on the set list - the evening was a truly satisfying event, and may very well have been the best concert going experience I and The Brother had in twelve years of pumping fists with drunken mullet heads and shaking butts with ailing seniors. And, as the sign over the shop those other old-timers were protesting in front of said, The Love Doctor was definitely IN.

And Diamond David Lee Roth is definitely OUT.