'I hate the word maturing,' singer David Lee Roth once said. 'I don't like the word evolving - or any of that bullshit. The point is to keep it as simplistic, as unassuming, and as stupid as possible.' In keeping with Roth's sentiment, Van Halen: Exuberant California, Zen Rock'n'roll follows the band's pursuit of the art of artlessness, and describes how they characterize what historian Kevin Starr terms 'Zen California' - a state of mind and way of being that above all celebrates 'the now'. In rock'n'roll terms it stands for the unregulated expenditure of energy, for a youthful exuberance that seems destined to extinguish itself.

Author Biography

John Scanlan is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University. He writes about cultural aesthetics and the philosophy and sociology of time, and is the author of On Garbage (Reaktion, 2004).