“It flipped me out”: The 2012 song Eddie Van Halen found difficult to play
Eddie Van Halen wasn’t the kind of guitarist that you’d see struggling all the time.
Even though there are more than a few moments in Van Halen’s career where he wasn’t at his best playing-wise, his off days as a guitarist were still miles better than anything that any other guitarist could hope to come up with. But when he finally cleaned up his act and managed to get his head straight towards the end of his career, that didn’t mean that he couldn’t still learn from what he had been doing on some of his other records.
Granted, it’s almost impossible to expect someone who’s been playing for decades at a time to recall what the third song on the second side of their first record was supposed to be. It’s ‘Feel Your Love Tonight’ for those of you who were wondering, but was Eddie really going to spend time getting that granular about what he had played? No. He just wanted to have fun, and a lot of the time that he spent with his guitar was more about making riffs than actual fleshed-out songs.
If you think about it, David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar were really the songwriters of the band whenever they joined. Eddie didn’t like the idea of them having too much control over everything they did, but even if his name was on the band’s banners whenever they played, it took ‘Diamond Dave’ and ‘The Red Rocker’ to dictate what the style of the song was going to be. So when Roth came back, you’d think he’d slide right back into the songwriter slot, right? Well, no, not really.
Because A Different Kind of Truth wasn’t the kind of album that needed to be laboured over as much as their last records. Wolfgang Van Halen had already found a bunch of demos and riffs that his old man had laid down in the 1970s, so it was just a matter of recording some of them and maybe fleshing out a few more songs in the mix to fill out the track listing. Compared to everyone else, Wolfie was the one who was calling the shots sometimes, but ‘She’s The Woman’ was the kind of tune that even managed to throw Eddie for a loop.
It’s not always easy for someone to go back to a song that they wrote when they were in their 20s and expect to know every detail, but Eddie tripped up by the new music that was added in. Wolfie didn’t want to keep relying on the same bluesy riffs that they had done, so the new chords that he added underneath the breakdown of the riff were a lot more musical than Eddie was prepared for.
You have to remember that Eddie was a blues rocker in the vein of Eric Clapton when he started, so he was going to be put through his paces when he had to leave his trademark blues licks behind, saying, “It took me a couple of days to figure out what notes worked against those chords. If I don’t hit these particular notes [plays solo] it wouldn’t work. It flipped me out. When we did the demo, Matt punched me in, and I just sat there going, ‘Goddamn. This doesn’t work!’ [laughs] You can’t just noodle your way through those chord changes. You have to hit the right notes.”
The old dog could still be taught new tricks, but that doesn’t mean that everyone was exactly happy with the changes, either. As much as the album serves as a great final bow from Van Halen when it was first released, the fact that Roth has since tried to forget about it and blocked it from being featured on streaming services at least tells you that it’s not exactly his favourite performance, especially when he sounds more than a little bit squawky on a few of the tracks they wrote back in the day.
But those notes that Roth is self-conscious don’t really matter in the context of this record. This was just a way to make sure that Van Halen III wasn’t the last album that they ever made, and even if they weren’t quite as mind-blowing as they were in their prime, it’s better for them to have closed things in their own way before time ended up catching up with them.
