Three things about Van Halen haven’t aged: Eddie Van Halen’s virtuosic guitar skills, singer David Lee Roth’s million-dollar smile and the greatness of some of the best hard rock songs America ever exported.

More than four decades after the group formed, the Van Halen that played Saturday at San Manuel Amphitheater in Devore wasn’t the same band that closed heavy metal day of the 1983 Us Festival on the same spot in the foothills of Glen Helen Regional Park.

Back then, Van Halen was arguably the biggest band on the planet, with the then-unheard-of $1.5 million Us Festival fee garnering the group its own entry into the Guinness Book of World Records as the “highest paid band of all-time.”

While current bassist Wolfgang Van Halen, Eddie’s son, who replaced founding member Michael Anthony in 2007, wasn’t even born when the band played the Us Festival, the backing vocals he and his father provided Saturday were among the brightest spots in the band’s flashy two-hour-set.

For the modest number of fans in attendance, seeing the members on stage smiling and having fun must have been special enough on its own, considering their tumultuous past, not to mention a set with some deep cuts.

Opening with “Light Up the Sky” off “Van Halen II,” they also included lesser-known gems such as “Dirty Movies,” “Drop Dead Legs” and “In a Simple Rhyme.” (Obviously there were no entries from the years featuring Fontana’s native son Sammy Hagar.) “She’s the Woman” and “China Town” were the only cuts from “A Different Kind of Truth,” the band’s 2012 album with Roth.

His hair may have gone gray and his eyes have crinkles, but Eddie Van Halen can still play the guitar like a teenage prodigy, whether it was the melodic rolling riff of “Beautiful Girls” or a lengthy guitar interlude that channeled everything from Flamenco to “Eruption” before leading into the band’s cover of the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me.”

Likewise, his brother, drummer Alex Van Halen, still has his deft drum skills, able to switch from delicate to thunder at any given moment. Even better than his drum solo – which oddly had Latin horns as one of the backing tracks – was the opening to “Hot for Teacher,” with drumming as iconic as Eddie’s scale-climbing riffage that follows.

Roth has never been known for his vocal prowess – he’s the showman, the smiling, campy Vaudevillian who somehow ended up on the Sunset Strip and gave it jazz hands.

At multiple points during Saturday’s set Roth struggled with the notes or just opted to not sing the words, but he got better as the set progressed, and Eddie’s and Wolfgang’s backup vocals helped smooth over the roughest spots. However, when it came to the wild ows and yeahs, Roth was as on point as ever, smiling, contorting his hips and changing into a variety of shiny, bright and sparkling jackets throughout the evening.

But it was when he took the stage solo with an acoustic guitar and harmonica to do “Ice Cream Man” and tell the truth behind the legend of the band’s famous “No brown M&Ms” rule – according to Roth, the band threw it in the middle of a huge technical-driven rider as a litmus test to spot the places that didn’t follow the full document – that was one of the best moments of the night.

The set ended with the two biggest hits of the Roth era – Panama” and the lone encore song “Jump,” and while the set wasn’t perfect, it was still a fun ride.

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