Eddie Van Halen on the weirdest album he ever made
Nothing that Eddie Van Halen ever touched could be considered normal. Even if there was the occasional lacklustre track on a Van Halen record, two notes of any of Eddie Van Halen’s guitar solos turned what could have been a mediocre song into something no one had ever heard before. Although the guitarist was known for having his own lane as a guitar player, he admitted that Women and Children First was one of the strangest undertakings that he had ever taken on.
When Van Halen first started to gig around Los Angeles, there was no real plan for what they were going to sound like in the studio. After settling on Ted Templeman as their producer, the band thought the best way to capture their live sound would be to run through a handful of the tracks they were playing live, leading to one of the most explosive debuts out of 1978.
As opposed to the heavy metal that was out at the time, the guitarist’s flashy guitar skills, alongside David Lee Roth’s lyrics, made hard rock sound like a party again…a party that had some serious chops behind it. While Van Halen II pretty much served as a companion piece to what their debut was, the band had plenty of wiggle room when working on their next handful of records.
Compared to the good-time jams of the first two records, Women and Children First has a much darker tone than before. Considering the band’s background in hard rock, this is the closest to a pure heavy metal release they had ever made, featuring a handful of licks Tony Iommi would have killed to have written like the instrumental, ‘Tora Tora’.
Eddie also had a new toy in the studio this time: the keyboard. Getting more comfortable playing the piano on the record, the first noise heard on the album is from an overdriven synthesiser, which introduces the sounds of ‘And the Cradle Will Rock’. Eddie’s signature tapping licks hadn’t gone anywhere, though, serving as the backbone to rapid-fire numbers like ‘Loss of Control’ and the borderline Led Zeppelin worship of ‘In A Simple Rhyme’.
When talking about his catalogue, Eddie Van Halen would even look back at Women and Children as one of the wildest left turns the band ever made, telling Guitar World, “I thought Women and Children First would strike people as adventurous because of songs like this and ‘Could This Be Magic’ and ‘In a Simple Rhyme’. Everybody says Fair Warning was a weird album, but I think this one is weirder”.
The lessons from this album would also carry over onto the next album, Fair Warning. Whereas Women and Children First was the heavy metal experiment, their next outing was the closest to art-rock as they ever got, with massive songs with unconventional structures like ‘Sinner’s Swing’ and ‘Mean Street’.
While Eddie had more room to stretch, his introduction of the keyboards would lead to the first era of the band falling out. After letting his guitar take a back seat on albums like 1984, Roth would be out the door, only for rock superstar Sammy Hagar to replace him for the band’s massive comeback album, 5150. Van Halen’s debut might get more love out of anything else in their catalogue, but Women and Children First is what happened when Eddie was allowed to do whatever he wanted in the studio.
