The 1982 guitar solo that ruined Van Halen’s relationship: “He had gone”
No other band seemed to have the same kind of animosity towards each other that Van Halen seemed to have.
Eddie seemed to be happy enough playing his music for everyone, but there was always that certain kink in the armour that caused every member of the band to turn recording studios into sparring sessions every other time they played. And even if David Lee Roth was made to be a rock star when he first debuted, there were more than a few times when he could get a little bit agitated when Eddie started overstaying his welcome when he played guitar.
Then again, ‘Diamond Dave’ shouldn’t have really been complaining, either. The name of the band was taken from Eddie’s last name, so why the hell would anyone be coming to the show for anything else? They were meant to see him tear up any fretboard that came his way, but there were a few times when Roth felt that he was using his solos in the wrong way. There was a lot of flash to what he did, so why the hell was he bringing in the keyboards on some of their records?
The tracks were absolutely fine on their own, but 1984 really was the tipping point for the band’s relationships with each other. Eddie didn’t like the idea of being told what to do every time Roth wanted the typical rock and roll songs, but a lot of what enraged Roth was knowing that Eddie was giving away a lot of his greatest solo songs to people like Michael Jackson for free whenever he guested on Thriller.
If you want to be generous here, though, Eddie could have been keeping up the branding in the R&B world as well. There was no chance that anyone who consistently listened to MJ was all of a sudden going to go out and buy a Van Halen record, but thanks to that one solo on ‘Beat It’, Eddie became the kind of guitar hero that could transcend virtually any genre. And Roth never let him forget about it, either.
Roth was already having a few problems with Eddie, but the fact that he never bothered to tell the singer what was going on deeply hurt their relationship, with Roth recalling, “I heard the guitar solo and thought, now that sounds familiar… Somebody’s ripping off Ed Van Halen’s guitar licks. It was Ed, it turned out and he had gone and done the project without discussing it with anybody.”
There was nothing wrong with Eddie making some new friends in the music world, but if he tested the waters by playing with ‘The King of Pop’, Roth was about to do the exact same thing. Crazy from the Heat was a decent way for him to let off some steam in between making the band’s new record, but if you look at the way that they were working, it was clear that Roth was already looking for a way out of the band.
It’s one thing to be annoyed at Eddie, but if you were in the guitarist’s position, you’d be crazy to do what Eddie had done for free. No one would have guessed that the record would slowly become one of the biggest albums on Earth, and even if Eddie had decided to take a single point from that one song alone, it would have been enough to buy him a goddamn spaceship if he wanted to.
But even if the band fractured after making the record, that didn’t mean that Eddie was about to stop blowing people’s minds. Van Halen weren’t defined by one singer, and with Sammy Hagar in tow, Eddie was determined to prove to everyone why the band didn’t need to get counted out just because one of their frontmen decided it was his time to leave.
