The band Eddie Van Halen got bored listening to: “It hits a wall”
It’s important for every rock and roll band to learn one crucial lesson: not everyone is going to like you. For all of the hard work that bands put themselves through, no song is going to be for everybody, and Eddie Van Halen readily admitted when songs didn’t sit well with him.
But before Van Halen officially took off, it’s not like Eddie was listening to every single thing that came off the radio and trying to learn it. The flavours of the day when he first started coming up with riffs was the beginning of disco and the fading strains of punk, and listening to a song like ‘Eruption’, it’s not like he was going to forget everything he ever learned or trade in his legato licks for Nile Rodgers-style strumming.
What he did need to be unique, but a lot of his greatest moments came without ever needing to get too technical. He had already modelled his own version of what a guitar could sound like for his Frankenstein, but outside of turning his amps up as loud as possible, he never relied on effects to get him all the way there. Despite the phaser being a primary part of ‘Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love’, Eddie could still sound badass even when working even if he had any pedal turned off.
And for a band that cut their teeth in the late 1970s and became superstars in the 1980s, the idea of a guitarist that was used to making live guitar tracks was unheard of. Every guitarist was trying new and exciting effects around the same time, and while a band like U2 benefited from having discovered the wonders of delay, Van Halen’s debut also had some company on the charts when The Police released Outlandos D’Amour.
Neither band were in danger of stepping on each other’s toes from a musical perspective, but when listening to Andy Summers, he was a much different kind of guitar hero than Eddie had hoped to be. Both of them grew up listening to people like Eric Clapton, but Summers was into creating vast landscapes of sounds whenever he played. Eddie could certainly respect that, but it didn’t make most of their albums much fun to listen to.
As much as Eddie appreciated Summers’s sound, he had to admit that he got bored after a while of listening to The Police’s records, saying, “Andy Summers sounds like all he uses is a phaser and a flanger all the time when he plays chords, which sounds nice. But, when you hear a whole album of that same sound, it hits the wall. But at the same time, I get the same sound through the fucking records too.”
For someone listening exclusively to the guitar, it can get a bit monotonous hearing the same kind of tricks being used, but it was always about where Summers would place them in the mix. Being in a power trio often involves pulling off a deft balancing act, and in between Stewart Copeland’s stellar drum fills and Sting’s melodies, Summers would always create space and sprinkle in the perfect ear candy, like the guitar line in ‘Every Breath You Take’ or the twinkling notes on ‘Wrapped Around Your Finger’.
Even if they weren’t Eddie’s cup of tea, he knew that it was never about trying to put any guitarist down in rock and roll. Everyone reacted to music differently, and given how the guitar god could appreciate records like Peter Gabriel’s So, there were bound to be possibilities for him to like music well beyond the traditional hard rock sphere that he started in.
