The one band Eddie Van Halen thought started it all: “There was nothing like them”
With rock music, it’s normally a fairly straightforward task to draw a line through time to decipher the acts that came before each band to make their sound possible.
Most, if not all, great bands won’t sound like a carbon copy of another act that rose to prominence a few years earlier, and originality should be a prerequisite for any group fostering ambitions of relevancy. Yet, even when a band have constructed a new sonic archetype, they typically leave a subtle trail of influences in their wake.
The best acts are the ones that manage to hide their influences and carve out a sound that feels like it’s been shaped in another universe. A prime example of this feat is Black Sabbath; they did more than merely turn the volume up by a few decibels, but birthed an entire genre and cultural movement that is still going strong more than 50 years later.
Without Black Sabbath, it’s near impossible to picture heavy metal as we know it. In fact, it might not have existed at all. Out of the smog and clatter of Birmingham’s grey 1960s, Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Bill Ward and Geezer Butler cobbled together something that felt like dark magic, a noise so destructive and unholy it rewired rock music forever.
Countless musicians owe the entirety of their careers to Black Sabbath, and one person who never allowed himself to forget this undeniable fact is the late Eddie Van Halen. Although his band were cut from a different cloth than Sabbath, they were the forefathers of the scene, and for that, Van Halen was eternally grateful.
“There was nothing like it before them,” the late guitar god once said during an interview with the Biography Channel in 2010 (per Rock and Roll Garage). He continued: “They came up with licks instead of just strumming the guitar, it wasn’t your typical songs with a chorus. I thought it was funny that they called Led Zeppelin heavy metal (when much of their) stuff was acoustic. Rock ‘n’ roll today wouldn’t exist without them (Black Sabbath).”
Another reason why Van Halen’s heart was full of nothing but love for Black Sabbath was a personal one. They took a chance on his band in 1978 when nobody else would and offered them a chance to be their support act, which was a wild full-circle moment for the guitarist.
Of his band’s pre-fame days, he told Guitar World in 2013: “We played just about every Black Sabbath song. I used to sing lead on every Black Sabbath song we did. Things like ‘Into the Void,’ ‘Paranoid,” and ‘Lord of This World’.”
Within a few years, Van Halen went from jamming with Black Sabbath because they didn’t have their own material to sharing a stage with their heroes, which was also their first-ever tour.
The run of dates also won them a fan in Tony Iommi, who once said of his reaction to being first exposed to Van Halen, “I must have heard the record knowing they were on tour with us. But God, he was an amazing guitar player. I’d never heard anything like it. Like, ‘Bloody hell, what’s this?’ Well, he was the first to do that. As a band, they were so alive and fresh. They were so good.”
Van Halen didn’t just bag the chance to open for the band he worshipped, it was a crash course in the dark art of live performance. Better still, it kicked off a bond with Iommi that proved to be worth its weight in gold.
