The AC/DC song that Eddie Van Halen loved
During one of his final interviews, Eddie Van Halen made a ludicrous claim. While sitting down for his discussion with The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and Zócalo Public Square for the event ‘Is Rock ‘n’ Roll All About Reinvention?’, Van Halen conferred with his son Wolfgang and confirmed that the last album he bought with his own money was Peter Gabriel’s So. Van Halen might have stopped buying music in the mid-1980s, but he always found the time to listen to AC/DC.
Specifically, Van Halen had a love for guitarist Angus Young and the band’s 1978 album Powerage. Released just two months after Van Halen I hit store shelves, Powerage was in the perfect sweet spot for when Van Halen was still an impressionable young guitarist but was also starting to make a name for himself in the rock world. When it came to a specific song, Van Halen always came back to the album cut ‘Down Payment Blues’.
Van Halen continued to talk up ‘Down Payment Blues’ well into his later years. “One of my all-time favourite AC/DC songs of an album called Powerage,” Van Halen confirmed to Billboard in 2015 about ‘Riff Raff’. “Just the power. The sheer… it just engulfs you. You just feel it. It makes you vibrate.”
Young also confirmed that Van Halen had discussed ‘Riff Raff’ with him before the guitarist’s untimely death in 2020. In an interview with Forbes shortly after Van Halen’s passing, Young discussed the friendship between Van Halen and the members of AC/DC. Specifically, Van Halen wouldn’t stop pestering rhythm guitarist Malcolm Young to add ‘Down Payment Blues’ to the band’s setlists.
“I remember that time because Eddie liked hanging out with Mal and Brian and Cliff. They liked going out and having a drink in the bar and stuff,” Young explained. “But Malcolm used to say, ‘Eddie keeps going to me all the time, ‘You gonna do ‘Down Payment Blues’?”
“He loved that song. In fact, the last time I saw him was when we were touring,” Young added. “Brian said, ‘Come down to the shows.’ And that is the first thing he said, ‘You gotta do ‘Down Payment Blues?” He liked a lot of, ‘Riff Raff’ and tracks like that”.
Check out ‘Down Payment Blues’ down below.
