The 1981 song Eddie Van Halen will never forget: “That’s great”
Being in a band like Van Halen is a lot more complicated than it looks from the outside looking in.
Eddie was the grand wizard who was turning the guitar inside out whenever he came out with something new, but part of getting the band sound of the band usually came from all of them working together to create a tune that was going to stand the test of time. And while a lot of that came down to whichever singer they were working with at any given time, Eddie did admit that he had to remember some songs for the wrong reasons as well.
After all, Eddie was already a bit wary of calling the band’s debut a masterpiece, so it’s not like he was trying to recapture anything that he did before. A lot of the biggest tunes of their career were simply an example of them trying to capture what they were doing live, and when you listen to the way that they interacted with each other onstage, it’s not like they were trying to reinvent the wheel all the time.
All Eddie wanted to do was sound as heavy as possible, and by the time they reached Women and Children First, the rest of the world had a better idea of what he wanted the band to sound like. The rest of them hadn’t always been in love with them, making a heavier record, but even if David Lee Roth was a little bit unhappy, Eddie wasn’t going to roll over and take whatever new pop tune that ‘Diamond Dave’ wanted to cover. He had other plans, and as far as guitar effects go, Fair Warning is one of the true masterpieces of his career.
The rest of the band are in fine form throughout most of the album, but you can definitely hear Eddie coming into his own as a genius. He already had more than his fair share of classics in the back catalogue at this point, but this is where he starts taking cues from more eclectic guitarists. You can hear bits and pieces from people like Allan Holdsworth and even some songs where he doesn’t even sound like he’s playing a guitar, but ‘Push Comes to Shove’ was one of the few songs that felt a little bit off to him.
The album was already short on a few singles, and while ‘Unchained’ became one of the greatest tunes that the band would ever write, ‘Push’ seemed like the kind of musical experiment that Roth was used to working with. The band was already going for a bit of a reggae groove on the song, but Eddie felt that the solo left a bad taste in his mouth when he was finished.
Everything seemed to go according to plan, but after being told that his best wasn’t good enough, the fact that the producer ended up loving his solo after playing it for so long pissed him off to no end, saying, “I’ll never forget that one. We were sitting in the studio with our producer, Ted Templeman, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I must have played that solo over 20 times, and Ted kept saying, ‘No, it’s not good enough.'”
Adding, “So, I said, ‘OK, but I don’t understand what you want.’ So, we just called it a day. Later that night, I came back and played the same solo that I played 20 times that day and left it. The next day he heard it and said, ‘That’s great.’”
And while the solo itself is pretty great, it’s not like the rest of the song is going to go down with the all-time classics that they have made. Some of the biggest pieces of their catalogue have been when they sounded gigantic, and even compared to some of the more pop-friendly stuff they made with Sammy Hagar, this is the kind of tune that would have been destined to be an odd or an end on Diver Down had Eddie not thrown that solo together.
It took a while for him to be able to make something that worked that well, but even if it wasn’t that smooth sailing, it’s not like it was affecting the music all that much. Because if this is the same band that can make an album like 1984 when under the greatest pressures that anyone has ever gone through and still make a masterpiece, there was nothing stopping them when a little tension flared up.
