The singer Eddie Van Halen thought should’ve walked away: “I would have stopped doing it”
From the moment he took his first breath, Eddie Van Halen seemed to live music every single day of his life.
While he was taught to play piano by his parents before he even heard of a guitar, he was born to explore the fretboard once his brother Alex came home from school and started toying around with his drum kit. His musical mind was always on the hunt to find that next great guitar lick, but Eddie understood why a lot of musicians would have wanted to walk away from the industry for good.
To put it bluntly, there aren’t that many people who see their music as a commodity the same way that the industry does. Eddie sure as hell didn’t think that he was getting into a business when he first started. He wanted to have some fun playing the best music that he could, and when a bunch of middlemen started to come into play, there were bound to be a few times when he felt like the fun had slowly been sucked out of the room.
But even when he had a few miserable years, he could always find ways to bounce back. No one expected the band to have such a renaissance with Sammy Hagar behind the mic, but when he started working on 5150, it felt like a completely new band had emerged from the ashes of David Lee Roth. That was all well and good with the glam-rock scene still in high gear, but things were about to change in the 1990s.
Then again, Van Halen adapted pretty well to the next decade. For one thing, they got one of their all-time classic albums out before the alternative wave kicked in, but even if ‘Right Now’ sounded a lot different from anything that the Seattle scene was putting out, that didn’t mean that Eddie couldn’t respect what the new kids were doing.
Most people with functional eyes and ears can see that someone like Kurt Cobain wasn’t anywhere near the same skill level as Eddie, but that never mattered in rock and roll. What was important was the attitude that you brought across, and while Eddie loved what Nirvana brought to the table, the fact that Cobain couldn’t take the pressures of fame was something that always got to him.
After all, Cobain didn’t want to be this glamorous rock star when he first started writing music. He liked the idea of making a living doing what he was doing, but if he could have written the greatest anthems of all time and remained completely anonymous, he would have been fine with that. So when the pressures going on around him led to him taking his own life, Eddie couldn’t help but feel that the whole thing was a waste.
Cobain clearly had a lot going for him, but Eddie said that the grunge icon was better off not releasing any new music than leaning into his own celebrity, saying, “As much as I loved the music Kurt Cobain made, and as sad as it is that he’s not with us anymore, I can’t help thinking that if what you’re doing caused you to kill yourself, I would have stopped doing it. It ain’t worth it. I loved his voice and his songs. It came from his heart. It was real.”
Then again, that’s all that Cobain wanted to do when he got to the end of his life. Dave Grohl had remembered that there were plans for Nirvana to break up or at least take a break by the time they finished all of their touring commitments, but even if they had taken their foot off the gas, there’s no telling whether Cobain would have released any new music or retreated into obscurity after one too many tabloid stories about him.
While many of us would have loved to have heard what Cobain would have made in his 30s, it’s understandable why Eddie would have had strong feelings about the grunge icon. Here was someone who had the potential to shift the musical world on its axis, and while he was free to do whatever he wanted to do, there’s no telling how many people he could have helped by continuing to write.
