The 1981 song Eddie Van Halen impressed himself with
There aren’t many pieces of the electric guitar that haven’t been covered by Eddie Van Halen at some point.
Even though he was one of the finest guitarists to ever walk the Earth, he tended to be more of an inventor when it came to his greatest tunes, whether that was finding the right sound for ‘And the Cradle Will Rock’ or doing away with the guitar altogether when making the song ‘Jump’. There was no real limit to where he could go, but there were a few songs where he had to take a step back and realise that he had outdone himself on one of his riffs.
But when you look at the backstory behind a lot of Van Halen’s classics, it’s a lot more ramshackle than you would probably expect. Their debut is looked at as one of the best debuts in all of rock and roll history, and yet, according to the band, the whole thing was put together as a way of capturing their live show. No one’s getting that kind of lightning-in-a-bottle energy ever again, but that didn’t mean that they couldn’t try to touch the sky one more time on every one of their next records.
They had always been able to bring a party atmosphere to nearly everything they did, but there was also some homework for every guitar nerd in the audience as well. ‘Eruption’ was already one of the finest guitar solos anyone had ever worked on, and while most people could try and explain away Eddie’s techniques whenever he used effects, the fact that he was able to do the same thing on acoustic on ‘Spanish Fly’ left everyone with their mouths on the floor.
If you’re looking for the Van Halen that’s specifically for guitar geeks, you can’t go wrong with Fair Warning. Every single song has a piece of ear candy that makes you wonder how the hell Eddie even thought of putting together, like the beginning of ‘Mean Street’, but maybe the reason why the whole thing worked out in his favour was because of how much of the record revolved around him.
Because it’s not like the rest of the band was giving him too much of a lift whenever they started working in the studio. Everyone was fried after spending too much time on the road, and while Eddie treated the studio like his second home a lot of the time, one of the saving graces behind the record was being able to walk away with the song ‘Unchained’ once it caught steam on the radio.
The song has all the makings of a Van Halen classic, but the riff is where Eddie felt he impressed himself, saying, “On the whole album I was angry, frustrated and loose. It’s like the solo in ‘Unchained’. I love that song. It’s rare that I can listen back to my own playing and get goose bumps. But that’s one of them.” But the guitar riff is only one piece of a greater whole when looking at every great moment in the tune.
Michael Anthony might not have been doing that much on the low end of things by any stretch, but everything about the Van Halen swagger is accounted for on this one song. Alex is in rare form behind the drum kit, and while David Lee Roth was never the most flexible singer in the world, hearing him hold court in the middle of the song and the producer interrupting him was the sound of a band on fire.
Nothing could have stopped the band at this point, and even if they ended up fracturing only a few albums later, no one needed to worry about them imploding once ‘Diamond Dave’ left. Because if Eddie could make a song that sounded this great nearly on his own, chances are he could have made an entire solo album in his prime of only instrumentals, and it still would have sounded fantastic.
