The one artist Eddie Van Halen called his “long-lost brother”
There’s no way to quantify great chemistry within a band. As much as people like to fantasise about their favourite artists, there’s sometimes a lot of tension that goes into making some of those classic records sound great. And while Van Halen were pretty much indestructible no matter which era they found themselves in, there were always going to be some problems that made them put a little more elbow grease into their records with Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth.
Then again, Eddie’s issues with both frontmen were for opposite reasons. Roth always wanted to be the glamorous singer that you couldn’t take your eyes off of, but when Hagar brought his down-to-earth mentality to the group on 5150, it took the same amount of time for Eddie to get tired of ‘The Red Rocker’ when working on the song ‘Humans Being’ for the album Twister.
But it’s not like either frontman was going to affect the chemistry between Eddie and Alex. They were joined at the hip musically on pretty much anything, and even when they argued about how the records should be made, it always left a strong impression when people heard it. It was going to take some big shoes to fill the role of both Roth and Hagar, but bringing in Gary Cherone from Extreme was definitely a strange choice.
On paper, though, Extreme wasn’t all that different from what Van Halen did. Nuno Bettencourt was a guitar hero on par with what Eddie could do, and Cherone could certainly write melodies over his riffs, but when talking about making Van Halen III, Eddie’s process of making every song felt like taking the exact opposite approach than before, with him writing music to Cherone’s lyrics first.
The feeling in the studio may have been different, but Eddie only saw that as a good thing, saying, “[Gary’s] like my long-lost brother… If you think about it, he actually looks more like Alex than I do! This record, more than half the songs were inspired by Gary handing me lyrics. His lyrics just – tell a story. I’m not knocking the past, there’s a 20-year history here, you know, you can’t deny that… We had a lot of good times with Dave and with Sammy, but they both quit, they went their own way, but you know, Gary’s lyrics, they tell a story, they’re not just about female body parts, so to speak.”
Van Halen may have needed that change of pace, but since no one was there to structure the songs, Van Halen III only comes across as scatterbrained. There are pieces of it that seem halfway to finished, but when listening to tracks like ‘Fire in the Hole’ or his own vocal debut ‘How Many Say I’, it seems like they had half of a song finished, and to get it across the finish line, Eddie threw in every single idea that came into his head.
And at the risk of committing heresy, Van Halen III was the most apparent reason why Eddie didn’t run the group. The whole thing was meant to be a democracy, and since Roth and Haggar helped dictate the style of the tunes when they were at the helm, all that we’re left with on this record are songs that are trying to have grand ambitions but get crushed underneath the weight of them every single time.
While Van Halen might have one of the most solid catalogues in classic rock history, Van Halen III doesn’t really merit being included in that sort of company. As much as Eddie poured his heart and soul into it, this feels like a zany Eddie Van Halen solo project, and if it had been marketed that way, it probably wouldn’t have received nearly as harsh a flogging as it eventually got.
