“It was so silly”: the gimmick Eddie Van Halen hated doing in concert
Any great rock and roll show is supposed to be more than a few guys getting up on a platform and jamming. While acts like the Grateful Dead could pull that off effectively, there’s a fine line between creating a hypnotic groove with the music and having people sit there watching you musically masturbate for the better part of an hour. Although that kind of guitar wankery was normally allowed whenever Van Halen put on a show, Eddie felt that one part of their show was completely unnecessary.
Then again, looking through every one of their shows, half of their appeal was about everything but the music. Despite having God’s gift to guitar players at the side of the stage, David Lee Roth was born to entertain a crowd, whether that meant rapping with the crowd or swinging around a samurai sword halfway through the show.
Granted, he wasn’t the greatest singer in the world, but listening back to their live shows, it still sounds like the greatest party that anyone had ever thrown. When you’ve hit the ceiling, though, they were going to need to take things one step further once everyone else started copying their moves.
Although Roth had already picked up a fair bit by listening to artists like Jim Dandy from Black Oak, Arkansas, he knew things needed to go larger than life once they hit the arena circuit. So, if a big curtain reveal wasn’t enough, then why not try to skydive into the gig to give everyone that extra adrenaline rush?
While the idea might have worked in theory, you have to consider what that looks like for the musicians in the crowd. They had only come to hear the music, and now they were watching their favourite band put on the kind of pretentious spectacle that may as well have given Axl Rose the idea to go over the top on Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion tour.
Even though the band hired professional skydivers to stand in for them while they wore the same gear, Eddie would have rather skipped the entire thing, saying, “There we were, wearing these crazy heavy outfits, sweating our balls off, waiting for the skydivers to come down so we could jump on stage. It was so silly. I guess that’s why Dave’s in Vegas. He saw playing music as show biz, and it’s not show biz to me.”
By the time most of the group had their gear off for the show, Eddie’s brother Alex was almost out of commission before he even played a note. They weren’t kidding about the suits being heavy, and in trying to get everything off, Alex nearly broke his foot and then was expected to drum for the rest of the show while still trying to nurse a wound.
While it takes more than a few onstage gimmicks for a band to give up on their singer, this kind of stunt is one of the fundamental reasons why Eddie and Roth were considered polar opposites for a long time. Eddie knew to prioritise the music at every concert, but ‘Diamond Dave’ seemed more concerned with giving their fans a trip to the rock and roll circus instead.
