The legendary Van Halen song that was recorded by “mistake”
Very few artists in the rock music field can hope to compete with what Eddie Van Halen achieved.
Even though he may have been known for his pioneering techniques behind the fretboard, Eddie’s songwriting talents were even more critical, creating complicated musical passages that would become a foundation for what modern hard rock would sound like. Although Eddie’s calling card has always been his guitar solos, one of his trademark instrumentals almost didn’t see the light of day.
As Eddie began working out songs on his own, he was initially drawn to songs by Cream. Loving the sound that Eric Clapton got out of a standard Marshall stack and an overdriven tone, Eddie thought that the next best thing would be for him to put his extensions on top of it. Even though he may not have had the resources yet, Eddie would notice the sounds of Jimmy Page when he started incorporating his signature tapping licks.
When first seeing Led Zeppelin play, Eddie would recall Page playing with his hand up in the air, which sparked an idea to use both hands on the guitar neck. As he recalled to The Smithsonian, “He’s got his hand up in the air. So I start thinking. I just moved the nut. So everything played is just an extension of this hand. From there, I just started to develop little pieces like ‘Eruption’.”
Often cited as one of the most celebrated guitar solos in history, ‘Eruption’ would be a game-changer for many guitar players. In just under two minutes, Eddie would reshape what the modern guitar hero figure was supposed to be, taking the basics of rock and roll and putting speed, dexterity, and even classical music influences into his presentation.
When the band decided to lay the song down in the studio, Eddie initially didn’t even know that they were recording. Rather than lay it down behind the glass, much of the solo was recorded when Eddie played during soundcheck, saying, “I was just rehearsing, and [engineer] Donn Landee happened to record it. It was never planned to be on the record. So the take on the record was a total freak thing. It was just an accident. He happened to be rolling tape.”
Even though everyone in Los Angeles was looking up to Eddie after recording the solo, even the guitarist admitted that there were a few bum notes in the final mix, which haunted him afterwards. Once he took to the stage to start playing in front of an audience, though, David Lee Roth had a system for trademarking Eddie’s licks.
Rather than playing up his looks for the crowd, Roth recommended that Eddie turn his back to the audience every time he launched into one of his solos so that no one could see what he was doing. While Eddie initially had reservations about his performance, that didn’t stop him from trying to top himself repeatedly on record.
For the rest of Van Halen’s career, Eddie’s instrumentals would become one of the high points for the album, from doing the acoustic equivalent to ‘Eruption’ on the song ‘Spanish Fly’ or using different effects to make his guitar sound like a violin on the song ‘Cathedral’. Regardless of what his guitar was filtered through, that happy accident that got recorded in 1978 is still the benchmark of what tapping finesse is supposed to be.
The impact of Eddie Van Halen’s new stylings is unprecedented. Jas Obrecht wrote of the technique: “The technique of tapping the fingerboard had been around for decades, but it was sparsely practiced, and almost always as a novelty. Eddie brought finger tapping into mainstream rock’n’roll.”
“His impact was enormous,” Obrecht added. “Within six months of the release of the first Van Halen album, young guitarists all across the country and in Europe – and especially Japan – were sporting copycat guitars and playing pale versions of ‘Eruption.’ But no one surpassed the original, because the real genius of Eddie Van Halen has always been in his hands and his imagination. I saw this myself one day in 1980, when Eddie showed me how he plays ‘Eruption.’ He did this with an unplugged Strat, and you know what? The whole song was there.”
The sheer brilliance of Van Halen on ‘Eruption’ is dizzying. It is one glorious racket that many have tried and failed to imitate, owing to the late legend’s unmatched technical ability.
