Eddie Van Halen’s five most underrated guitar solos
Eddie Van Halen was an inventor, at least that’s what Tony Iommi thinks.
When the tap-happy guitarist passed away, his friend, tour companion and fellow six-string aficionado was quick to tell the world how much he admired him. “What I like about Eddie, he was always an inventor,” said Iommi, “He’d always want to come up with something new. He worked hard to develop his own amplifiers. And he’d work on his own guitars as best he could to make them feel comfortable to him. He was always very much an innovator with a bunch of things.”
The Black Sabbath lead certainly had a point, as not only was Eddie Van Halen an inventor when it came to different amplifiers and effects, but he also introduced the public to new ways of playing the guitar. His tapping technique blew minds all around the world, and his discography is flooded with excellent guitar solos that showcase his exciting new way of playing.
The issue is, when the majority of your career is made up of excellent solos, there are going to be some that get overlooked by fans, and that’s exactly what happened with him. He played on so many solos where if any other guitarist was responsible, they would be hailed as pieces of genius, but in the presence of everything else Eddie did, they become a footnote.
So, here’s to those solos, as we go through five of the inventor’s most overlooked pieces of work.
Eddie Van Halen’s most underrated guitar solos:
‘Drop Dead Legs’
This is arguably one of Van Halen’s most popular tracks because it has a rhythm section which exists outside of what a lot of fans would consider the band’s norm. Their energetic and upbeat style was replaced with something a bit slower and with more of a groove, with a lot of fans comparing it to the likes of AC/DC.
Given the riff is so recognisable and such a deviation from Van Halen’s original style, people tend to fixate on that, rather than the solo. It means that despite the song being pretty popular, the solo is frequently overlooked, and that’s something which needs rectifying. Eddie’s use of melody on this burst of guitar excellence is difficult to ignore and should be listed as one of his best offerings.
‘Little Dreamer’
It’s hard to truly contextualise just how much of a big deal Van Halen’s debut album was. It introduced the world to a band who were a brand new force to be reckoned with, as a rock sound which was established and loved by all was torn up and reimagined in a way nobody had thought of prior. It was a real moment in time, one that rock historians look back on and recognise for its grandeur.
Of course, the issue with having an album where every song is noteworthy is that a lot of tracks are overlooked. This was the case with the track ‘Little Dreamer’, as if this song were put on any other record, it would have been a standout; however, it faded into the background on an album like Van Halen’s debut. The overlooked nature of the song trickles down into the guitar solo, as this is a stellar piece of instrumentation that needs more attention.
‘One Foot Out The Door’
While there are a lot of songs Eddie Van Halen has provided solos for which might trump ‘One Foot Out the Door’, the means with which it was recorded goes a long way to highlight just how good a guitarist he was. He didn’t need a run-up to be brilliant, and instead, he was able to put together amazing pieces of instrumentation on a whim.
The song is about a man becoming anxious as he has an affair with a married woman. It was a last-minute addition on the band’s Fair Warning album, so much so that they didn’t record it until the very last minute. The entire recording was done in one take, and Eddie largely improvised the solo, which sounds pretty killer considering it was done so quickly, but that’s the magnitude of the axeman.
‘5150’
It’s never fun for a band to lose their lead singer, but Sammy Hagar was a welcome addition to Van Halen, and ‘5150’ is a track he put together with the band that was about someone who escaped from a correctional facility. Read into it however you want, but the song was named after the studio that Van Halen built for themselves a few years prior.
There was certainly a period of transition needed when Hagar joined the band, but it worked out for the best, as both Eddie and he entered a new period of experimentation within their music. It made for some of Van Halen’s best work, but Eddie did slightly take his foot off the gas when it came to playing guitar solos. That being said, there were a few great exceptions that crept through the cracks, and one of them was ‘5150’.
‘Eruption’
OK, I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right, this isn’t really that much of an underrated solo; in fact, it’s one of Eddie Van Halen’s most popular. The majority of guitar lovers will have tried to learn this solo at some point in their playing career, and the majority will have given up because of the sheer impossibility of it. It’s recognised as a masterpiece, so why have I called it his most underrated?
Well, while it’s known to be a great piece of music, I don’t think people quite appreciate what it did for guitar music. The solo was never the same after this piece was released, as a new way of playing was opened up to onlookers. It’s one thing to be good at an instrument; it’s another thing to look at the way people play it and think, “We can do better than that”.
The audacity is astronomical. The year was 1978, so by this time, we already had Jimi Hendrix, Tony Iommi, Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, and Eddie Van Halen managed to expose what was somewhat of a shortcoming in all of them with this piece of music. The fact that he managed to do all of this with a song which was only 90 seconds long is completely unfathomable. This isn’t just a solo that people should consider good; it should be a preserved piece of rock history, with books written about it and statues erected in honour of it. Until there is something the size of the Statue of Liberty put up to commemorate this piece of shredding brilliance, the solo will be underrated.
