The 1970s band Eddie Van Halen claimed ”rock ‘n’ roll today wouldn’t exist without”
Rock ‘n’ roll has survived the brink of death more times than James Bond. Almost every five years, a new act emerges amid the concentric circles of guitar music and is hailed as the latest saviour of the hardy genre’s unfurling lore. Eddie Van Halen and his searing guitar is one of the many who have met with this lucrative title.
His band broke onto the scene during the cold February of 1978. They grabbed the reins of rock ‘n’ roll and spun it out into a frenzied direction, forming the purist counterpoint to subversive punk in the process.
He was virtuosic and happy to brag about it. “I’m not saying that all the things I come up with are genius-brand riffs, but neither is punk,” he explained. “Punk’s like what I used to do in the garage.” The more polished brand of guitar music that Eddie was peddling, he claimed, was closer to the classic chops of rock.
In an innovative way, he saw himself as a fresh chapter in the lineage of a story that started with Little Richard and the likes. But in the long-haired maestro’s bold view, the genre he was defibrillating with the fresh introduction of hammer-ons would already have been a thing of the past if it hadn’t been for one band that came along when the 1960s came to a close.
Instead, they ensured that the counterculture’s parting gift wouldn’t wilt; it would mutate into some unholy speed freak beast. Enter the racket of Black Sabbath, the most fitting saviours the 1970s could’ve asked for.
The times weren’t all that pretty when the ‘70s crept into view like the Grim Reaper in the rear view mirror of a car whose brakes had just failed. Charles Manson had dealt a deathly blow to the ideals of hippiedom. Meanwhile, the dark plumes of smoke and simultaneous redundancies in the heavy industry of Black Sabbath’s native Birmingham, England, left the notion of ‘flower power’ seeming frighteningly out of place. Nevertheless, the band had come of age adoring The Beatles, and they certainly didn’t want to see those magic songs go to waste.
So, Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward set about an apt reinvention. As Eddie Van Halen explains, “There was nothing like it before them, Black Sabbath was like…” the typically verbose guitarist’s appraisal on the Biography channel then falls short of words, and he is forced to mime a form of mind explosion with his nimble hands.
It’s an expression that captures how a lot of people felt when they first encountered this strange new force on the rock ‘n’ roll scene. Kirk Hammett of Metallica perhaps came close to articulating this expression when he recalled, “Horror and music came together for me when I first heard Black Sabbath. It was quite a thing for me. I remember I was 16 years old, and I was with a bunch of friends, we went out camping. It was at night around the campfire, someone put on the first Sabbath album, and I’d never heard it before.”
He continues, “And I actually got scared. I couldn’t believe it! I was like, ‘This is like a horror movie!’ It was all dark, there was a fire. Everyone got silent.“ That certainly captures the effect, but it does little to delve into the actual mechanics of the music behind this impact. In fact, in the aftermath, the focus on the spooky pantomime has almost glossed over the band’s innovation. The impact was so vast it obscures the technical brilliance behind it.
Unlike much of the psychedelic movement that came before, the songs were deeply rooted in guitar moves. As Eddie Van Halen explains, “They started the whole riff thing, you know. They came up with licks instead of just strumming the guitar, it wasn’t your typical songs with a chorus.” Even Geezer Butler was a guitarist, drafted in as a bassist out of necessity, but he continued to write riffs on the four-string all the same adding the melodic power.
Melodies were driven by mood and innovative variations on the blues. It ensured that the roots of rock ‘n’ roll lived to see a brooding new chapter during a period when an assortment of other styles were looking to assert themselves and wave goodbye to the past entirely.
As the ‘Hot for Teacher’ musician concluded, ”Rock ‘n’ roll today wouldn’t exist without them.” He got the genre right, too. As Butler proclaimed, “Initially, we were a blues band with jazz inflections, playing Hendrix and Cream covers.” In truth, they didn’t move much further beyond that classical core. But they did find a thrilling way to keep it fresh for the next generation.
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