The lyric Eddie Van Halen wanted to be remembered for: “Lets write something real”
The hard rock that dominated the 1980s was paved virtually single-handedly by Pasadena’s Van Halen.
While Quiet Riot’s ‘Mk I’ with a pre-Ozzy Randy Rhoads offered a little stiff competition, Eddie Van Halen’s flashy axe shredding and frontman David Lee Roth’s cartoon aerobics laid the groundwork for the hair metal that would explode across MTV. Dropped in 1978, their eponymous debut album offered a shimmering escapism away from California’s punk fury, packed with songs about partying, the power of rock, and girls, appealing to those left cold by new wave nihilism.
Orbited by the more glam-oriented Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard, Van Halen would steam ahead across rock’s rapidly shifting terrain into the 1980s as one of the era’s premier rock acts. Adding massive Oberheim synths to 1983’s ‘Jump’, the Hot 100 number one and the success of its 1984 album briefly saw the band as America’s biggest act. Several months earlier, Van Halen entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the ‘Highest Amount Paid to an Act for a Single Performance’, receiving a cool $1.5m for US Festival ‘83’s headliner slot.
Yet, despite the world seemingly in their hands, Roth was already eyeing up a solo career, releasing his Crazy from the Heat EP only a few weeks before his departure. Minus a singer in 1985, Van Halen recruited former Montrose frontman Sammy Hagar to step behind the mic, scoring the following year’s mammoth-selling 5150 featuring the global ‘Why Can’t This Be Love’ smash, and ushering in the era affectionately dubbed “Van Hagar” by fans.
Van Halen’s second hurrah would be tested. Alongside flared tensions over managerial and financial disagreements, the 1990s’ rapidly shifting rock climate saw the band enter a very different decade than how they entered, amid the grunge and alternative explosion dominating the era’s rock charts.
Gone were the synths and pop sheen; in came a grizzled and more downbeat studio effort from the former Pasadena glam metallers. The last to feature Hagar, 1995’s Balance, attempted to pursue a more earnest sonic direction, if never quite abandoning the hard rock bombast they’d built their careers on. Eddie was serious about pushing the record away from good-time lyricism, however.
“There was a song on Balance called ‘Feelin’ and one of the best lines in the song was, ‘If I were you and you were me, which one would you rather be’, and that was something I wrote,” Eddie recounted, as documented on 2021’s Eruption interview collations. “It’s cool to get people off in a party way, but not all the time. I just start thinking, ‘Hey man, lets write something real’.
While critically mixed, Van Halen would still score another US number one with Balance, selling multiple Platinum as they had ever done, despite the impressions the rock world had of them during the Lollapalooza era. Van Halen would still enjoy chart success for another two albums with Gary Cherone and Roth’s return until Eddie’s death in 2020, but Balance, for many, was their last roll of the hard rock dice.
