“I wasn’t sure”: the accident hidden inside a classic Van Halen song
Some of the greatest musicians of all time get to the point where they don’t even feel human anymore. As much as people like the idea of anyone being able to pick up a guitar and write a classic, surely there must be a god who is speaking through some of the best artists, telling them what to put out into the world. Although the jury’s still out as to whether or not Eddie Van Halen was actually a guitar wizard, he admitted that he wasn’t prone to a few mistakes on record with this tune.
Then again, Eddie was already a legend before the 1980s had even started. While any band should be accounted for unintentionally birthing the concept of hair metal band, there was no way that imitators like Poison or Mötley Crüe could have ever managed to do what Eddie did so naturally, whether that was performing his signature tapping licks or leaving enough room onstage for David Lee Roth’s signature schtick.
But the stage was nothing compared to the damage he did in the studio. Throughout the 1980s, Eddie kept trying to push his sound into weird directions, and when listening back to songs like ‘Spanish Fly’, he was equally as capable of showing his stuff on an acoustic as he was on an electric guitar.
The first two albums may have been fun, but Eddie knew he wanted to get much heavier on Women and Children First. There had been a handful of heavy moments on the last albums, but listening to the stomp of ‘And the Cradle Will Rock’ or them dialling up the tempo on ‘Loss of Control’ told everyone that they weren’t going to suddenly turn themselves into a pop band on a whim.
Of all the songs on the record, though, ‘Fools’ is one of the stranger cuts. Being one of the longest tracks from the Roth era, Eddie takes some time to spread out during his solo, but sometimes that kind of experimentation leads to some solos that aren’t always the most linear from start to finish.
Even though Eddie was proud to keep everything live, he did admit that one piece of the solo featured a glaring mistake right in the middle, saying, “They’re just freak things. On ‘Fools’, I accidentally made this weird noise, and to my ears, it sounds like I’m slipping off the fretboard. At first, I wasn’t sure whether I liked it or not, but now I love it.”
A lot of that ramshackle spirit only enhances the rest of the album. Even when the band starts messing around with the acoustics on ‘Could This Be Magic’, it feels like the strange detours that you’d hear on a late-period Zeppelin album, especially once they start making tracks like ‘In a Simple Rhyme’ to close out the record.
But Eddie’s ability to leave some mistakes in and still sound flawless is the mark of any great artist. They might not claim to be perfect, but they have mastered their art so well that even their foul-ups become a part of their musical vocabulary.
