The rock classic Eddie Van Halen said was ruined for him: “It was a real bummer”
Most people never forget the music that first turned them on as a kid. Artists may come and go in the business, but there’s always something about those few tunes that hit a nerve with someone and take them back to the days when they first discovered music. For Eddie Van Halen, that musician was always Eric Clapton, but after learning about the ins and outs of Cream, he said that he could never revisit the song ‘Crossroads’ the same way again.
Although Eddie has a signature sound that no one can duplicate, it’s easy to spot a few bluesy phrases taken from Clapton. Despite playing like a madman across most of Van Halen’s output, a handful of his signature tapping licks tend to be running down a traditional blues scale in between the composed pieces like ‘Eruption’ or ‘Spanish Fly’.
But Clapton was born for a completely different kind of shredding. Unlike artists who assault their instruments whenever they play or do their best to get any weird sound out of it, Clapton used his guitar as a way to speak, with every bend usually sounding like his instrument was crying out in pain as he played.
When he got together with Cream, though, ‘Crossroads’ became one of the most enduring live performances ever committed to tape. Yes, the song has gone through many different open mics since its inception and will probably fade into the realm of dad rock to most listeners, but what Clapton did on the final version is absolutely spellbinding.
Since the group got off track halfway through, Clapton remembered being ashamed of the solo at first because he felt out of tempo with the rest of them, eventually getting himself back on track in the final leg of the solo before dropping out for the breakdown with Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce leading the charge.
That kind of brilliance was perfect as far as Eddie was concerned, but his teenage heart shattered when he heard that it was carefully constructed that way, saying, “I was really bummed when I heard from [producer] Andy Johns that Cream’s ‘Crossroads’ was put together from different shows. That ruined it for me. I thought it was one performance, but it wasn’t. I don’t know if anybody else has put out a live album that is really, truly live.”
Then again, Cream is far from the only one to find out how to cut pieces of a show together to capture the best experience. Over half of Kiss’s breakthrough record, Alive, was put together in the studio, and even Van Halen’s fellow hard rockers like Judas Priest ended up putting together pieces of Rob Halford’s vocals in the studio as one performance when the tapes got lost for the album Unleashed in the East.
While there’s nothing with being able to sweeten up some of the harmonies behind the scenes, that was never what Eddie was interested in. He kept his best moments for the stage, and if some of them happened to sound rough, that just happened to give the record a little bit of character.
