Eddie Van Halen always believed that Kurt Cobain pushed himself “too far”
Eddie Van Halen never got into the business to be a rock star.
He was always a musician before anything else, and he was perfectly happy to play his music for anyone who would hear him when Van Halen made it big. But fame can play tricks on people, and Eddie could realise when a handful of his contemporaries went in the wrong direction once they officially hit the big time.
But it’s not like Van Halen passed with flying colours when they eventually started their rock and roll journey. Eddie might not have thought that much of their debut record when it was first recorded, but once it set the entire rock and roll world on fire, none of the members were prepared to go on the roller coaster yet. They were on a constant cycle of making an album and going on tour, and while that can be fun for a while, David Lee Roth was already starting to wear on them a bit.
Roth chased after that kind of rock and roll stardom, and while it was fun for a while, the Sammy Hagar-led version of the band was a much different animal. Whereas Roth could sing about the biggest party anyone had ever seen, Hagar was more interested in writing complex songs with more mature themes behind them. In other words, they leaned into their dad-rock habits, but that’s hardly a bad thing.
If nothing else, it’s arguably what saved them from being killed when grunge came in. Anyone that was still singing about sex, drugs and rock and roll didn’t really have a prayer once the Seattle scene started taking over the world, but Van Halen had moved on to inspirational songs by that point. A band like Warrant made it big around the same time, but there was not as much staying power for ‘Cherry Pie’ as there was for ‘Right Now’.
After the grunge bubble burst with the death of Kurt Cobain, though, there was a lingering sense of melancholy around all of rock and roll. Kids simply didn’t know how to process the fact that one of their idols was gone, and while Eddie could certainly empathise on songs like ‘Don’t Tell Me What Love Can Do’, he felt that the Nirvana frontman really needed to take a break long before he decided to end his life.
Eddie had already seen the ups and downs of what stardom was like, and he felt that Cobain was better off taking a step back from the rock and roll lifestyle, saying, “Put it this way: if fame had Cobain crazed to the point where he offed himself, then he went too far. He should have stopped. It actually pissed me off when he did that. He wrote great tunes, and if nothing else, he deprived a lot of people of what he could be doing in the future.”
Then again, it’s not like Eddie’s comments couldn’t be taken the wrong way as well. As much as people missed Cobain at the time, the initial draft of ‘Don’t Tell Me What Love Can Do’ was much more poignant before Eddie made Hagar change the lyrics because he thought they needed a little more attitude. That might work when listening to a kickass rock song, but for a tune meant to be a tribute to a fallen icon, it doesn’t really matter how much attitude is in it. Something heartfelt will suffice.
And while we’ll never know what Cobain’s music would have sounded like had he been able to survive his own demons, the same could be said about many of the demos that are in the Van Halen vault as well. It’s up to Eddie’s estate whether any of his jams are going to see the light of day, but it’s better to have the music that they made as a salvo of the musical stars that they always were.
