The single Eddie Van Halen never wanted to release: “I was really bummed”
No rock band can always claim to be on the same page. It’s one thing to have a common goal in mind when everyone’s starting out, but there comes a point where everyone has a different definition of what success means and will try their best to do what they think should be their future. While it’s hard to argue with someone like Eddie Van Halen in a band literally named after him, the guitarist never felt that comfortable with their immortal cover of The Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’ being pushed to the radio.
Because, really, it’s just basic logic. Since everyone wants to put their best foot forward when making a musical first impression, starting things off with a cover song doesn’t really give fans the big picture of what you stand for. If anything, all it does is put the musician’s influences at centre stage, almost like they know that any of their original material doesn’t compare to someone else’s song.
But Van Halen didn’t necessarily need to worry about quality control. They had spent years fine-tuning their live set, and most of their debut became the blueprint for what Los Angeles would sound like for the next decade, especially when Eddie decided to break out his lead chops on songs like ‘I’m the One’.
Then again, covering groups wasn’t out of the question in the band’s early days. Throughout their time on the club circuit, Van Halen would throw in riffs from legends like Black Sabbath and ZZ Top to more obscure bands like Montrose, who had a young up-and-coming singer named Sammy Hagar.
‘You Really Got Me’ wasn’t even the only Kinks piece that Van Halen played, but Eddie knew that bringing out the song as one of their first singles was bound to be a risk, telling Brad Tolinski, “[Producer] Ted [Templeman] to on the phone with Warner Bros and they decided to send ‘You Really Got Me’ to radio stations as soon as possible. I was really bummed they did that because I wanted one of our own songs, like ‘Jamie’s Cryin’, to be our first single.”
It’s not like Van Halen did a cheap version of the 1960s classic. Although Ray and Dave Davies were credited in some circles with starting hard rock with their trademark hit, Eddie took what was essentially a garage rock tune and brought it into an arena, taking those five chord stabs and giving them the power of a musical jet engine.
And while Eddie didn’t get any of his original compositions out first, the radio ended up making a little bit of a compromise when playing his solo spot ‘Eruption’ as a prelude to the song when it came on classic rock stations. For all of the effort that the label put into the Kinks cover, no one was talking about it once they heard what Eddie could do.
Once everyone heard that solo, though, the rock world had gotten a new guitar hero and would spend the next half-century dissecting every one of his licks. ‘You Really Got Me’ is a good jumping-on point for Van Halen’s party band image, but ‘Eruption’ is where fans got to see Eddie as a musical god.
