The album Eddie Van Halen was never satisfied with: “Not what they had in their mind”
Any serious artist who aspires to be taken seriously artistically needs to be their own harshest critic.
It’s the only reason they can keep themselves from complacency or continue to reach new heights. Even if everyone else thinks they’ve made a masterpiece, maybe even especially then, the artist needs to find any faults in the work in order to keep their hunger alive. It’s always been the case. It was true for The Beatles back then, it is true for Sabrina Carpenter right now, and, in between, it was true for Van Halen, too.
Perhaps the time when the artist needs to be most careful in guarding against complacency is following a successful debut record. When their dreams have just come true and everyone in the world is most excited about their talents, when everyone in the industry is starting to lionise and champion them, or manipulate and exploit them, for the first time and making them feel like they’re set for life. Fans and executives alike are cruelly fickle, and second albums are notoriously tricky to make.
With debut releases by Television, Talking Heads, Sex Pistols, The Clash, and Elvis Costello, 1977 saw some serious talents taking their first steps into the hearts and minds of rock fans the world over. The bar was set high for 1978 to clear, but up stepped an 18-year-old Kate Bush with her monumental debut masterpiece, The Kick Inside, and Devo with Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, The Police with Outlandos d’Amour, and Van Halen with Van Halen.
The power-rock Van Halen album might sound very much of its time to us now, but it must have sounded like it had been beamed in from some far-off, distant future when it came out. With its huge, thundering and lightning-fast guitar lines, stadium-ready chorus, and full-throttle drums, the album was a portent of everything to come in the near future of rock music writ large. In their cover of The Kinks’ classic ‘You Really Got Me’, Van Halen really showed just how far the way that rock was played and produced had come since the song was originally released a little over ten years before.
Revolutionary in its own time for Dave Davies’ aggressive, over-driven guitar playing, The Kinks’ version of ‘You Really Got Me’ ushered in a much heavier, fuzzier, earthier, far-out style of playing the guitar. It’s so fitting, then, that Van Halen chose to cover this song when starting a musical revolution of their own on the instrument.
Across the album, lead guitarist Eddie Van Halen can be heard utilising his two-handed tapping technique on the fretboard, unleashing a rapid-fire flurry of notes on the listener and assaulting their senses with what feels like a million sounds a second. Before long, it was common for every guitarist to think that to improve their playing, they needed to play more notes than ever before, and all that faster than a speeding bullet, no less.
It wasn’t just fellow guitarists who were excited about the album. Racing into the top 20 when it came out, the album has been a consistent seller, with over 10million units shipped and a Diamond certification to its name. The record was well received by fans and critics alike at the time it came out, and has established its place as one of the most well-regarded and favoured debut albums of all time. But, there was one critic who didn’t love everything about the record.
“I talked to Eddie Van Halen before he died”, said Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready. “I got to meet him once when we were doing the Lightning Bolt record. I just happened to be listening to Van Halen’s first record as I was driving to the studio that day.”
Adding, “He was there, and I was like, ‘Hey, dude, I was just listening to the first record. It’s incredible. I got it when it came out,’ blah, blah. And he was like, ‘I didn’t really like how that record sounded.’ And I’m like, ‘It’s amazing! How did you not like it!?’”
Though Van Halen didn’t make their dissatisfaction with the sound known during the recording process for their first album, they did let their producer, Don Landee, know what they wanted, eventually, ahead of their sixth release. “They were disappointed; it’s not what they had in their mind when they came in to do the record”, Landee concluded. “But Al [Alex Van Halen, drummer] told me we got it later on. What we got on tape for ‘1984’ was much more to his liking”.
