“You never got to see the big picture”: The show Eddie Van Halen was never impressed with
It was going to take a lot for any band to match the intensity of what Van Halen produced in their live shows. Although Eddie never had the same kind of stage charisma that David Lee Roth had whenever he played live, it was never that much of a problem when he started showing off his tapping licks midway through every setlist. Those kinds of chops can only come from watching the best, though, and while Eddie was always a diligent student of the rock and roll titans, he was never shy about when he thought that some bands couldn’t cut it live.
But by the late 1970s, there were tons of bands that used the studio as an instrument rather than the live stage. The Beatles were never that concerned with touring the material they made in the latter half of their career, and it was going to take a small orchestra of people for Queen to pull off anything close to what they did when they were making ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ a live staple.
Before their contemporaries started to make waves on the scene, though, both Eddie and Alex were children of the 1960s generation. There was no question that Eric Clapton was the best guitarist out there as far as Eddie was concerned, and even when hippies were putting flowers in their hair, there were bands like Led Zeppelin and The Who flying the flag for what rock and roll could be in a live setting.
While there were technicians in the field, all roads pointed to Woodstock when Eddie was first discovering rock and roll. No one expected to have their life changed because of one concert, but listening back to the Woodstock played there, it truly felt like every musician was trying to find some sort of peaceful utopia somewhere in the middle of that open field as Jimi Hendrix played the national anthem.
It wasn’t even down to political matters, either. Many people may have been using the concert as a way to fight back against those supporting the Vietnam War, but Eddie and Alex only wanted to hear some rock and roll, so when they eventually saw the film version of the concert later, Eddie remembered being massively underwhelmed at what was captured that day.
As Alex remembered in his book Brothers, he and Eddie felt that the entire show was not the kind of massive experience that they had been hoping for, saying, “I remember two things. First: no Led Zeppelin? Second, I was into Michael Shrieve’s drum solo when Santana played. Both Ed and I were frustrated because our eyes had to follow the camera’s lens–we couldn’t see the stuff we were actually interested in. [Ed said], ‘They had so many close-ups of things but you never got to see the big picture of the bands performing.”
In fact, this exact problem is probably what made Neil Young so agitated when he first started playing at Woodstock with Crosby, Stills, and Nash. They may have been one of the foundational acts that day, but Young made it clear that anyone who decided to light him strangely or shove a camera in his face was going to meet the business end of his guitar pretty quickly.
Although those changing camera angles fall into the same kind of wild attention span that Roth was good at working with, that never mattered to the brothers. They were there for the music, and anything that stood in the way of that wasn’t exactly going to get a glowing review out of them.
