The Van Halen song Billie Joe Armstrong said sounded like “demons from Hell”
Billie Joe Armstrong will be the last to tell you he’s the punk rock answer to Jimi Hendrix. Throughout his time with Green Day, Armstrong was a songwriter before anything else, and hearing him play a solo was usually pretty rare back in the days of Dookie and Insomniac. Armstrong did have a few guitar heroes that he still looked up to, and when he heard Van Halen play on ‘Mean Street’ for the first time, he immediately needed to know what it was.
In fact, most of Armstrong’s upbringing involved hard rock before he even knew what punk rock was all about. He may have been born and raised in the same local scene that gave birth to Operation Ivy and Crimpshrine, but Armstrong, as a kid, was more attracted to what he was hearing from everyone from AC/DC to Ozzy Osbourne.
If anyone lived in California around the late 1970s, though, chances are they couldn’t escape Van Halen if they wanted to. They may have come from the seedy streets of West Hollywood, but when people heard Eddie Van Halen tapping his way through ‘Eruption’, it was almost like they unanimously voted him the greatest guitar player of his generation.
Any guitar player will want to push themselves after their debut, and the rest of Van Halen’s career saw Eddie go down even weirder directions. While Women and Children First may be the heaviest album they ever made, the opening of Fair Warning with ‘Mean Street’ sounds like absolute chaos.
Since Eddie was known as much for his rhythm playing as he was for his lead playing, it wasn’t that hard to believe that he found a way to combine both of them. Rather than just tapping licks, the beginning of the song is the sound of him playing the drums on the guitar, constantly tapping on the fretboard to get different harmonics while still playing chord extensions with his left hand.
No one had heard anything like this before, especially Armstrong, telling Louder, “When I heard the beginning of ‘Mean Street’, and the way that he [Eddie Van Halen] plays that guitar solo at the beginning, I was like, that sounds like… the demons from hell are rising right now, and I felt like I was being possessed or something, I had a crazy reaction to it. To this day, still, when I listen to that solo, it just blows my mind.”
Even though you were never going to see any tapping licks in Green Day songs, it’s not hard to see how Eddie had an impact on those kids. Armstrong certainly had his guitar hero moments on some of Green Day’s earlier material, like ‘Dry Ice’, but there was a way to combine the heavy and melodic sides of each genre under one roof.
Although Van Halen had long since gone on hiatus by pop-punk’s rise in the 2000s, artists like Sum 41 and Weezer had been proud of doing their guitar homework, blending different guitar hero lines and making them a bit sweeter for rock radio. Van Halen played fast and loose for what a traditional heavy metal band should sound like, but the heaviness Eddie created from just one song may have been a blueprint for what the next generation of guitar players could do with the instrument.
