The song that made Eddie Van Halen play rock music: “We immediately said ‘Enough piano'”
It seems legendary now, but Eddie Van Halen was destined to reinvent the rock guitar. Though he began by piecing together a few licks like any other guitarist, within a few short years, his innovations appeared almost alien to aspiring musicians. Eddie often credited Eric Clapton as a major influence on his musicianship, but it wasn’t until he discovered the Dave Clark Five that he began to take the medium more seriously.
When Eddie and his brother, Alex, first moved to America, though, the music they were known for making was as far away from rock as anyone could imagine. Since their father was trained in playing piano and also an accomplished woodwind player, a lot of their time spent on the boat coming from Amsterdam to America was spent playing tunes, borrowing a lot from the standards of the day rather than Chuck Berry.
At the same time, rock and roll was going through its first big change. Berry and Little Richard helped get the ball rolling, and Elvis Presley turned the entire operation into a spectacle, but the biggest acts of The British invasion were putting a sophisticated spin on the genre. While it’s hard to say that The Rolling Stones were one of the most sophisticated acts in the world, The Beatles ushered in a new way of thinking about music, and it didn’t take long for Dave Clark Five to respond in kind.
Hailing from the States, the group all but embodied the sound of garage rock when they first started out. The dynamic was already strange with Clark seated at the back of the group behind the drums, but the minute he opened his mouth, fans got someone who, while not the greatest singer, had mountains of attitude and was willing to take no prisoners whenever he sang.
The first wave of rock and roll was just fun, but Eddie knew that he wanted to be that kind of musician later in life, telling Billboard, “We were training to be classical pianists, and then we heard Dave Clark Five, and we heard ‘Glad All Over’. We immediately said, ‘Enough piano’. Then there was a fight over who got to play drums.”
While Eddie originally wanted to play the drums himself, fate took a massive turn when Alex started getting behind his kit, leading Eddie to pick up the guitar almost out of spite. Well, that little sense of brotherly competition would eventually turn Eddie into one of the greatest drummers and guitarists of the modern age.
And despite not hearing Dave Clark Five in the roots of Van Halen, the way they modelled their band is a lot similar than you’d think. One could argue that Dave Clark Five was responsible for bringing hard rock to the mainstream, and getting someone with that amount of charisma behind the kit was replaced with another dynamo named David Lee Roth.
The rest of the garage rock scene was bound to follow in Dave Clark Five’s footsteps, but the seeds had already been sown for something different. It was not just a matter of when Eddie would be able to wreak his havoc upon the world.
