Van Halen blasts lid off 1984 time capsule

It was the very first song, and already David Lee Roth was smiling as widely as his tight flesh would allow, his mouth round and agape, like a cross between a yawning crocodile and a basketball hoop.

It was a knowing grin, the sly smirk of a kid who's just escaped from the candy store with pockets loaded with stolen contraband.

"With this reunion, I believe in miracles," beamed the cocksure Van Halen frontman, the ultimate hard rock huckster, who recoils from understatement like it was a rattlesnake.

At the MGM Grand on Friday night for the first of two shows at the venue -- the band also performs tonight -- Van Halen's core lineup harnessed all their hard-charging pomp and bluster in Vegas for the first time in close to 21/2 decades.

"I know this town like I know the roof of my mouth," Roth boasted at one point. "I even got fired from this hotel once.

"What job have you ever been fired from?" he taunted. "Burger King?"

Never one to miss the chance to pound his own chest, Roth bounded about the stage like a dude who's spent the past 25 years locked away in a charisma deprivation tank, determined to make up for all that lost time in a single night.

He's a never-ending series of dramatic gestures -- the trademark leg kicks, busted out early during a heated "I'm The One;" the banshee wails, that upper register still well-preserved after all these years; the wild twirling of the mic stand, done with the manic energy of a cheerleader with chest hair.

Van Halen's songs mimic Roth's flamboyance: this bunch is defined by their instrumental peacockery and their rare, enviable gift for grounding such a high level of musical proficiency in concise, fist-in-the-air tunes that arenas full of revelers can chug beers to.

Live, nearly every move the band makes is awesomely overwrought.

Perhaps the only thing known to man that's somehow chattier than David Lee Roth is Eddie Van Halen's guitar. The shirtless, rail-thin rocker filled any and every opening in the band's vast repertoire with frothing solos and impressively dexterous finger tapping exercises.

"You got a little extra for free tonight," Roth announced after Van Halen buffered "Romeo Delight" with several extra minutes of fret board acrobatics.

Later, Roth would scat with Van Halen's guitar lines during an extended "Everybody Wants Some," with Roth attempting to mimic vocally the wild sounds screaming from Van Halen's six-string.

"I can't beat that," he eventually relented as Van Halen made something that resembled whale calls spring from his instrument.

Of course, any time a band has been apart from one another as long as these guys have, there's bound to be some signs of rust, and the group wasn't immune to the occasional stiff moment.

They opened with a lumbering take on their popular cover of The Kinks' "You Really Got Me," and two songs later, still seemed a little over-starched during a slightly plodding "Runnin' With The Devil," which was more of a stroll than a gallop.

Notably absent through it all was sparkplug bassist Michael Anthony, replaced by Eddie's teen son, Wolfgang.

The fresh-faced rocker doesn't possess the kinetic stage presence of Anthony, but he still turned in a poised, sure-handed performance, anchoring the bottom end with the incredibly concussive rhythms of drummer Alex Van Halen, who utilized four double bass drums to approximate a herd of buffalo stampeding through every tune. When he launched into his signature percussive intro to "Hot For Teacher," you half expected chunks of the ceiling to rattle loose and start raining down on the crowd.

As for Anthony's trademark backing vocals, they were handled capably by Eddie and Wolfgang, and it was hard to detect much of a discernible difference between the way songs were originally delivered and what they sounded like on this night.

It was like 1984 all over again, sans Ronald Reagan and Punky Brewster.

Well, sort of.

"Nothin' stays the same," Roth howled during a heart pounding "Unchained," and of course, he was right.

But as this show demonstrated, the pleasures of group air guitar and singing along to tunes about drinking beer from the back of an ice cream truck remain largely immutable.