Three Weeks in ’86: Remembering Eddie Van Halen. By Tal Bachman.

Even better, this was the eighties — you know, when the world was still fun. There was light. There was laughter. There was big hair and acid-washed denim, just because, dammit.

You could still make jokes without a Twitter mob destroying your life forever. You could try a backyard bike stunt without your friend videoing your subsequent crash on his smartphone, then uploading it on to YouTube for your grandchildren to watch fifty years later. Even with its occasional dips, the Reagan economy boomed along.

Girls were still mostly cheerful and cute and sexy; they weren’t the lost, hard, paranoid, alternately self-loathing/self-worshipping communist nihilists they are now. It was clear even then — not just in retrospect — the world was in a pretty fun phase. Hell yeah, I wanted to go.

Yep.

Big hair, too: