The one album Eddie Van Halen said was completely pointless: “Jumping on the bandwagon”
There was no better advocate for old-school rock and roll than Eddie Van Halen.
Plenty of artists weren’t strangers to the idea of plugging in a guitar and hearing whatever came out, but what Eddie did behind the fretboard opened up doors that most people thought would have been closed for any mere mortal guitarist. But if you have that many ways of twisting a guitar into different shapes whenever someone plays, why the hell would anyone else want to disrupt a good thing when they had it?
Then again, Eddie knew that rules were made to be broken whenever he played around the studio. There were a million opportunities for him to make countless songs revolving around his tapping licks, but once he heard what he could get out of the keyboard, it was much easier to make that transition when working on ‘Jump’. At the end of the day, it was all just music to him, but that might not have been what everyone else wanted to hear.
Granted, it’s safe to say that most of those naysayers back in the day were talking out of their ass. ‘Jump’ may have been a shakeup for the group around the time 1984 dropped, but there was no point in anyone trying to make a big fuss when the song itself was as good as anything that came off of their debut record. But Eddie also knew not to stray from their central sound too much, either.
After all, he was a fan of people who had some passion behind everything they played, and if he felt that he wasn’t giving that same kind of effort, it wasn’t worth going down that road for very long. His heroes had all been playing from the heart, but even if he had stopped listening to Eric Clapton, he wasn’t exactly thrilled seeing one of his guitar gods neutering his own hits when he reached the 1990s.
If you look at where Clapton was at the time, though, it makes sense why he would have wanted to do a more toned-down concert. He had lost his son, Conor, and while ‘Tears in Heaven’ gave a great sense of catharsis whenever he played it live, it was always going to be a little bit disappointing for people wanting to hear the original version of ‘Layla’ and getting the coffeehouse treatment instead.
Van Halen had grown up a great deal at that point, but that didn’t dissuade Eddie from disliking Clapton’s new turn, saying, “I like playing loud. He had a big success with it, so now everyone else is jumping on the bandwagon. What’s the point? If that’s the way I wanted the music to be, I’d have written it that way.” And it’s not like he doesn’t have a fair point in that regard, either.
If you look at Van Halen’s music, no one’s going to want to hear a muted version of ‘Hot For Teacher’ or see a song like ‘Right Now’ or ‘Dreams’ get turned into elevator music. They were about packing a punch, but Clapton does at least change things up in the right way. ‘Layla’ does feel like the most logical conclusion to the Derek and the Dominos version, and the covers like ‘Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Out’ are the best acoustic blues anyone could have asked for.
So while the unplugged trend may have been something that needed to be done on a case-by-case basis, it’s not like Clapton didn’t adapt to the medium well. It was great while it lasted, but anyone interested in hearing what a reimagined version of ‘Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love’ sounded like was going to be in for some bad news.
