Cold truth

Tuesday was enlightening; refreshing in the way a pleasant memory reminds us of who we are and from where we come.

“Stay Frosty.” It’s a tune on the new Van Halen effort, “A Different Kind of Truth,” which was released Feb. 7.

“Tattoo” will be the first single to climb the charts, but the 11th track, “Stay Frosty,” best captures the historical essence of the various incarnations of Van Halen. It becomes clear when David Lee Roth advises, “God is love, but get it in writing” — “It” being the wild-eyed, what-truths-and-rules-may-we-next-dismantle? attitude that didn’t begin to dissipate for some of us until the full cost of living was no longer subsidized by mom and dad.

It also was the circle of Karma come round to revisit the long-ago memory of cutting the box top labeled “KEEP COOL” from a package full of product destined for coolers in a pre-non-hyphenated Wal-Mart supercenter. The stocker stared back as if I had strolled into Buckingham with a mason jar full of Newton County squeezins’ and slapped the Queen on the royal bottom with a rolled up issue of Playboy.

The classic finger strutting of Alex and cheeky lyrics from Roth, one of the ultimate rock-n-roll smartasses, carries us through various religions (“Far and wide, as far as you can ramble, trust in Allah, but tie up your camel.”) but returns to the message of staying frosty.

Preachers and philosophers and other similar BS artists have and continue to make millions pontificating and pestering the common folks with clever messages that fail to come close to the wisdom of “Stay Frosty.” Keep cool.

The Van Halen crew have kept cool. The newest, and long-awaited, full album from the reunited Van Halen (sans bassist Michael Anthony) is a time machine for anyone who entered their teen years between the late 1970s and the late 1980s.

More to the point, if you ever enjoyed a few parties during the teen-age years or snuck a toke or two or enjoyed a make out session with the cheerleader or football star you didn’t belong to, this is the music that fed your energies. It’s the electricity of string and voice and California percussion that pushed you through man-made entanglements tossed about like a tuna net by any number of Southern faiths.

This is the music of an Eddie Van Halen fully returned from a bout with cancer. It’s the lyrical return to roots of repressed inhibitions by a David Lee Roth recovering from management that convinced him to do all those bad Vegas shows. To be sure, the Ice Cream Man returneth.

The group returns to a truth theme they began to push in 1996 before stepping away from plans to reunite. In the 1996 release of “Best of Volume I,” the band pushes an original song, “Can’t Get This Stuff No More.” In that effort, Roth messages: “I don’t need so much to remember. That’s how it is when you tell the truth.”

“A Different Kind of Truth” has the off-the-street ragged edge and experimentation of “Women and Children First” and “Diver Down” and the less edgy commercialized juice of “1984” all wrapped into one tidy package. It is as if the God of Rock-n-Roll knew we needed David and Eddie to inject a youthful and re-energizing siren into our musical lexicon. In this time of extended economic uncertainty and when it seems we are on the throats of each other politically, staying frosty — aka keeping cool — is, unfortunately, a different kind of truth.

Eddie and David and Alex are doing as many of us attempt to do when life hands us problems and/or opportunity well past the mid-point of life expectancy — find a way to recapture the energy, innocence and devil-may-care attitude of youth.

And that’s this new album.

“This could damage your reputation … Mistakes make people, isn’t that what people say? Let’s not play in the moment, dance the night away,” Roth speaks in “The Trouble with Never.”

Which brings us back to the possibility of the different kind of truth they push. Folks who say you can’t or shouldn’t recapture youth, or that you must act your age are wrong. Or partially wrong. Maybe the new truth is disassembling the old truths, or, at a minimum, dissecting the conventional wisdom of chronological limitations.

The forever young Van Halenistas also provide a simple recipe for staying frosty.

“If you don’t want ‘em to get your goat, don’t show ‘em where it’s hid.”

Or maybe there is no message within “A Different Kind of Truth.” Maybe it’s just a good rock and roll album crafted to be loudly played rather than quietly interpreted.