The one album Eddie Van Halen never wanted to learn: “There’s not a lot of guitar stuff on there”
There was never any piece of music that Eddie Van Halen couldn’t translate into something brilliant.
He had his moments when he could acquiesce to whatever David Lee Roth or Sammy Hagar on one of their songs, but a lot of what he was doing came down to making the perfect guitar riff or a piano line that stopped someone in their tracks whenever they heard it. That might have come from years of practice, but Eddie felt that a handful of the greatest albums were best left untouched.
Then again, a lot of guitar players tend to have a few of those records in their arsenal. When someone has been playing for that long, they sometimes forget about listening to an album for pleasure every now and again. It’s easy to get too in your head about what one of your own songs are supposed to sound like, but tuning out the world and letting the music carry you to some other place tends to be a lost art once people reach the big time.
But the ones who stick around usually know what they’re dealing with. Keith Richards was more than happy to explore the world of country music when he started to get records from America during the first few Stones tours, and even Jimi Hendrix was listening to what Bob Dylan was doing, and Eddie did the same by doing a deep dive into every other guitar virtuoso he hung out with.
It’s not even that hard to hear a lot of it rubbing off on his playing on a few Van Halen records. He was going to be a student of Eric Clapton until the day he died, but outside of working on his favourite Cream licks, you can hear him going through a period of listening to people like Allan Holdsworth when making Fair Warning or getting more interested in soundscapes when he first drafted in Sammy Hagar for 5150.
Of all the music that has come out since his prime, though, it’s very telling that So by Peter Gabriel was one of the last records he ever bought. Whereas he was interested in expanding the vocabulary of guitar, Gabriel had been out of Genesis for years and was now willing to give the world some of the most accessible prog-rock music that anyone had ever heard on records like ‘Big Time’ and ‘Red Rain’.
Even though Eddie kept the album close to the chest, he never bothered to figure out how to play any of the songs, saying, “On Peter Gabriel’s, there’s not a lot of guitar stuff on there. I just get off on the whole vibe of it all, like on ‘Red Rain’. It’s such a bitchin’ tune. I really get off on that kind of stuff.” And if you ask his son, Wolfie, it was far more emotional for his old man to listen to a lot of those tunes.
Since Elton John claimed to be healed when listening to a song like ‘Don’t Give Up’, it’s not a shocker that it had the same effect on Eddie, who was moved to tears on multiple occasions listening to it. But compared to any of the ballads Van Halen made or even the best crooners of all time, Kate Bush’s voice is so comforting on that particular tune that it feels like it could be prescribed for anyone that thinks that their life is hopeless.
So, really, the idea of Eddie keeping this album off to the side as something not to be touched is a lot more telling than if he were to cover one of the songs. Because if a performance is as perfect as what ended up on tracks like ‘In Your Eyes’ or ‘Don’t Give Up’, why the hell would you ever want to mess with that?
