Illegal Foreign Object

The older kids called it “the Tree”. It was, as you might have gleaned, a tree. More precisely, it was a massive oak tree with long, low-hanging branches that snaked in all directions, offering a humongous circumference of coverage. It was a beautiful tree (and the perfect place to hide in plain sight).

Scumbags, miscreants, outcasts, and ne’er-do-wells congregated there during lunch breaks to sneak a smoke, listen to music, and sip on a little something that they borrowed from their dad’s liquor cabinet.

I was a high school freshman, new to the school, trying to find my way in this new world. I loved sports and loud music, but my old man put the brakes on me playing football, and baseball season didn’t start for another several months, leaving me with one group of kids with whom I could connect: the misfits down by “the Tree”. The only problem was that the freshman class wasn’t welcome unless you wanted to act as an errand boy for upperclassmen, spending most of your break walking back and forth between the hangout and the row of soda machines lining the wall outside of the cafeteria. With limited options, I became an errand boy, spending the first month of the school year fetching snacks and drinks. As far as hazing goes, it was pretty bland.

After serving my time, I was welcomed (well, kind of, but that’s a tale for another day) by a group of fellow burgeoning outcasts to their home away from home.

Someone always had a boom box down around “the Tree” (and it was always playing something heavy). On December 4, 1991, the day after Van Halen blew the doors off the Hirsch Memorial Coliseum in Shreveport, Louisiana, on the unofficially named “F.U.C.K.’n’ Live” tour, I heard the For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge album for the first time. Well, Side A, anyway. I wouldn’t hear Side B until I five-fingered the cassette a few days into the new year.

Still, I remember that day under that old oak tree being a blast. Two guys had gone to the show the night before and were sporting tour t-shirts. As they regaled us with tales of Eddie Van Halen’s acrobatic six-string assault and Sammy Hagar’s banshee vocals, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge (or F.U.C.K.) played in the background. I dug it and all but stopped listening to the dudes talking.

The album that gave fans “the drill song” (“Poundcake”) is arguably the best thing the band recorded during the Hagar Era. That’s debatable, of course (what opinion isn’t?), but it’s the one album Van Halen released with Hagar on vocals that bothered to bare its teeth. I have nothing against OU812 or 5150, but those were Charmin-soft albums — not what I wanted from Van Halen — and Balance is what a rock dinosaur sounds like when it dies a slow, miserable death. For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, however, got back to what I’ve always believed Van Halen did best: uptempo, monster riffs that fuel the party, not end it.

“Poundcake” is the sexiest thing the band released during Sammy’s time on the mic. It grooves and slithers around like classic-era Van Halen. The second single, “Runaround” continued the conscious attempt to show fans that the band was back to basics. Gone were the pop synths and keyboards that fueled far too much of Van Halen’s previous efforts. The change in sound was by design — when the band went into Eddie Van Halen’s home studio in the spring of 1990 with producer Andy Johns, they did so with a plan in mind. Johns remembers drummer Alex Van Halen playing the producer a part on Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven” and asking him to “make him sound like that”.

The studio sessions were anything but smooth and didn’t wrap for 15 months. Producer Ted Templeman came in to help Van Halen whittle down a double album’s worth of material into a single disc (and record Hagar’s vocals — the singer refused to work with Johns). The result of those efforts became the disjointed For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.

When Van Halen’s F.U.C.K. gets it right, it’s a barn burner. The aforementioned “Poundcake” and “Runaround” are great rock tracks. “Judgement Day” and “Standing On Top Of The World” are quintessential arena rock songs with huge choruses. “Right Now” is a catchy mid-tempo “message” ballad, which was all the rage for aging rockers looking to show they thought about more than chicks and cars in the early-’90s (see Bon Jovi’s “Dry County” and Scorpions’ “Winds Of Change”). Unfortunately, the rest of the For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge is pretty marginal. “Spanked” is one of the most adventurous things the band recorded with Sammy, “Pleasure Dome” is a prog-fueled romp, and “The Dream Is Over” has some sweet interplay between the Van Halen Brothers, but “In ‘N’ Out” and “Man On A Mission” are trite, standard issue cock-rock. There isn’t a single bad song on the album — there just aren’t very many that don’t feel entirely forced and by the numbers.

I still enjoy the album to this day, but if I’m honest, it sounds unfocused — like a great idea left uncompleted. It’s unsurprising to learn that this was when all the infighting within the band began. You can hear it in the sound. For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge was the album where Van Halen became more of an enterprise than a band — when serving the songs began to take a backseat to serving their individual egos.

Tracklist:

1. Poundcake 10/10
2. Judgement Day 8/10
3. Spanked 7/10
4. Runaround 10/10
5. Pleasure Dome 7/10
6. In ‘N’ Out 6/10
7. Man On A Mission 6/10
8. The Dream Is Over 8/10
9. Right Now 8/10
10. 316 6/10
11. Top Of The World 8/10

Grade: 76