The one opening act Eddie Van Halen was terrified to follow: “I love them”
There is a fine line between a rock ‘n’ roll audience and a baying mob. So, imagine how terrifying it must be when you can sense the switch towards the latter while you’re shuffling about the wings, and you fear that you might be the reason for this fearsome transition.
There are tales over the years of Mick Jagger dreading sharing a stage with James Brown in the early days of rock ‘n’ roll, and there are rumours of Mother’s Finest being hated by every headliner. But you don’t envisage Van Halen would have had such problems.
They were a band renowned for four things: technical excellence, energy, attitude, and pomade usage so indulgent it kept the hair gel industry in business. The first three facets, and even to some extent the fabled fourth, usually make for a bulletproof live act. However, there was one gig where Eddie Van Halen feared that they might not be enough. It was 1978, and his rising group were fresh from opening for Black Sabbath when a lucrative offer came their way.
Eddie figured things were going swimmingly. On the Sabbath tour, without the slightest possibility of a sound check and a mere 30-minute slot, with six Marshall heads stacked high, they played loud and “just blew people’s minds”. Word was getting around about their ferocity. The group themselves were confident that they could replicate it on a big festival stage. And even Black Sabbath were growing uneasy.
“We had an offer to play Day on the Green, which was Bill Graham’s annual festival thing, and I think that was Aerosmith and Foreigner playing,” Eddie recalls. With that in mind, they left the Sabbath tour behind and ventured towards the huge Day on the Green crowd. Things looked set for the next chapter for the group. It was destined to be one where they dominated the live circuit of rock ‘n’ roll, kickstarting a bumper payday for anyone involved with pomade.
They confidently nestled into this mindset backstage. “We played at high noon following AC/DC and I’m onstage watching AC/DC,” the guitarist recalled. “80,000 people in the crowd were just jumping up and down because they got that infectious sound.” Suddenly, the first prangs of nerves that the group had felt for a long time began to flutter: how do you follow a band like AC/DC?
“I love ‘em and Angus [Young], they’re all good friends, and Brian [Johnson], and Angus’ brother, we went and saw them when they played L.A., they’re great guys,” he told Forbes. But that mattered not back when Van Halen was relatively inexperienced on the festival stage, and with strict simplicity and swaggering attitude, AC/DC had the audience under their charming spell.
“I’m going, ‘Holy shit, we gotta follow these guys’. So we didn’t blow them away,” Eddie conceded. However, not blowing them away was almost his intent. AC/DC weren’t trying to show off or come across as virtuosos, they were tapping into the trance-like sentiment of the old West African crux of rock ‘n’ roll—one filled with simple rhythm and the exultation it can inspire.
In fact, Eddie figured that was always part of Van Halen’s appeal underneath the hammer-ons and flashy flair anyhow. “They are in a funny way very basic as I am, they’re no frills really, except that I do crazier things on my guitar maybe with the techniques,” he surmised. But ultimately, it’s just good old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll, as Angus Young said, aimed at teenagers or else the big kid in all of us.
EVH is also not the only acct to have been bowled over by AC/DC’s simple salvo of searing, spuky, spirit, either. Keith Richards might have loathed Prince, a noted genius, when he opened for the Rolling Stones, and he’s written off a fair few others, but he greatly admired AC/DC, and that’s like a drill sergeant actually complimenting a soldier. For Richards, their charm was undeniable. As Charlie Watts once explained, “They’re great at festivals, they are probably the best at it, I think. I know Keith has always liked AC/DC.” It’s because, like the Stones at their best, they knew exactly what they were about, and delivered it with glee, night after sweaty night.
