The 1969 album Eddie Van Halen fell in love with: “Takes you for a ride”
No other artist really seemed to have the same kind of drive that Eddie Van Halen had for guitar.
There are definitely artists who have had a love affair with their instrument whenever they played a song, but when you look at what Eddie did for the entire guitar community, he wasn’t just looking to make a bunch of songs that had the same kind of intensity that he heard on his favourite records. He wanted to go that one step further so that everyone else could make something heavy, and that came from him listening to some of the greatest mavericks of guitar that came before him.
Then again, not all of the guitar virtuosos of yesteryear were always at the top of his list. He was a diehard fan of Eric Clapton every time he played along with Wheels of Fire, but he did have more than a few moments where he didn’t have the same love for people like Jimi Hendrix. He knew that Hendrix did things to the guitar that no one else could, but he wanted to make the kind of music that could leave anyone else in the dust whenever he played.
And that didn’t always mean playing the guitar, either. While many people like to talk trash about how Van Halen suddenly became bad when they started working with keyboards, the fact that Eddie could put together a song like ‘Jump’ or even ‘Right Now’ later on was proof that it wasn’t just a fluke that he could play the ivories. It was all the same language, even if he needed to switch instruments, and the same thing applied when bands like The Beatles were making their masterpieces.
When the moptops first crashlanded on American television, though, Eddie wasn’t as much of a diehard for them. He liked the Dave Clark Five because they had a bit more power behind their music, but no one was going to be able to keep up with what the Fab Four did when they entered the Sgt Pepper era. They took the quantum leap into different territory, and even though their next few years would be some of the most tumultuous times they ever had, Eddie could still hear the genius at work when he heard Abbey Road.
The band was fracturing around this point, but getting the best out of everyone was what made Eddie fall in love with the record when he first heard it, saying, “That whole album takes you for a ride. And ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ takes you for a ride within that ride. Those monster riffs seem to go on forever and then suddenly drop you off a cliff.”
“Lennon’s vocals are just so passionate. He hated his voice, as Hendrix hated his. I think the fact that they weren’t typical singers made them even more expressive.”
Eddie Van Halen
If you look at what Eddie was doing in Van Halen, though, you can draw a straight line between a song like ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ and what he would be doing later. Lennon had created a tune that could hold its own next to the first heavy metal classics, and while Led Zeppelin gets the credit for helping invent metal, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to realise that The Beatles’ classic gave birth to Tony Iommi’s brand of heaviness, which in turn made Eddie want to make heavier music.
More than anything, the real lesson that Eddie learned there was the mentality that all of them had when working on their music. He liked the idea of not having any real rules around what he could make, and whether he was working with David Lee Roth or Sammy Hagar, he was going to make music that he felt sounded the best, no matter what the market told him was the best hit single of the time.
He knew that it was better to follow his heart than have to worry about what everyone else was doing, and given his status in the guitar community, Eddie seems to at least have a similar reputation among guitarists as The Beatles do among musicians as a whole. Neither band might be universally beloved beyond a shred of doubt, but you can tell that everyone who has come after them has been defined by what they have done.
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