The one singer Eddie Van Halen always wanted to work with: “I love him”
When an artist gets to be as big as Eddie Van Halen, it feels like they can work with anyone they want to. It may have been hard for Van Halen to hold onto a singer for more than a few years, but there’s a good chance that anyone would love the opportunity to create music with the guitar legend if they could get in a room together. Although David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar suited the band’s music perfectly, Eddie always wanted to work with Chris Cornell up until his death.
Which is strange considering everything that Soundgarden stood for in the broader context of rock and roll. Van Halen was the band that created what is known today as hair metal, so why would Eddie want to collaborate with one of the groups that ultimately led to people forgetting about the LA rock scene?
Eddie never saw the hair metal scene as anything that special, though. He was always interested in raw musical ability, and the fact that so many copycats were now showing up trying to tap the same way he did got on his nerves more than a little bit. If he couldn’t compete with them on guitar, he would move into different textures, eventually working on the keyboard into pieces like ‘Jump’ and ‘Love Walks In’.
Cornell always had a similar type of bent to his songwriting. Although he could have made a decent living playing the same groove-based hard rock tracks that Soundgarden was known for, he was always more interested in seeing what he could do outside of his wheelhouse, which is probably why his first solo record sounded like an acoustic Zeppelin project.
According to Cornell’s guitarist Pete Thorn, the pair always had a great deal of respect for each other and even had the idea of making a few tunes, recalling, “They were buddies back around the late, I believe it’s like kind of the late ’90s, early 2000s, and Eddie always wanted to do something with Chris, musically. He loved his voice and he used to be like, ‘Man, I love him.’ We were always talking about doing something together.”
By that time, Cornell already had another guitar hero to work off of in Audioslave, trading in the wild sounds of Kim Thayil for Tom Morello’s endless amount of effects. At the same time, could the argument be made that Morello wouldn’t have had all those effects and technical flash if Eddie didn’t come first?
The idea of having both Eddie and Cornell on a song together feels like a marriage made in heaven. Eddie was already the best in his field before he had even gotten to his third record, but since Roth wasn’t really known as a Freddie Mercury-type, hearing Cornell wail like a banshee over his riffs would have been a case of everyone winning.
Even though their schedules may have lined up now and again, any chance of them getting together was snuffed out when Cornell took his own life in 2017. All we have left is the music that Eddie and Cornell gave us when they were still among the living, but had they decided to stay in touch long enough for a full record, the album they could have walked away with may have been a bit too intense for words.
