The band Eddie Van Halen wanted to remembered like: “This may be too pompous to say”
There’s no accurate way of explaining what Eddie Van Halen brought to the world of guitar playing.
Jimi Hendrix had shown millions of players what the guitar could do if someone was playing with pure passion, but what Eddie did with tapping restructured what a lead guitar player could be. And while there is no shortage of people who have tried to copy his style ever since that first album came out, Eddie knew that he wanted to aim for something more than a standard band from Los Angeles.
Because, really, Van Halen never fit on with the standard hair metal bands of their day. Everyone from Poison to Winger were trying to copy their style every time they played their gigs at the Troubadour, but outside of David Lee Roth’s over-the-top performance style, Eddie was never that interested in the glamour behind everything. He was in the business to write great songs, and the proof really is in every single song that he wrote for the group.
Both Roth and Sammy Hagar may have had the responsibility to turn Eddie’s riffs into actual songs, but even for all of the virtuosos out at the time, what Eddie was doing was on a completely different level. There are the riffs that we all love, like ‘Panama’ and the beginning of ‘Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love’, but there are also beautiful guitar pieces that are almost impossible to define, like at the very beginning of ‘Hear About It Later’ or the luscious chords that open up the song ‘Little Guitars’.
Not all of it was necessarily rock and roll, but that’s because Eddie didn’t want to be known as a rock and roll guitarist. Van Halen always had a lot of power behind them, but when looking at their biggest inspirations, Eddie felt that they had more in common with what the original hard rockers like Led Zeppelin were doing compared to every other wannabe hair metal band that followed them.
If the guitarist had his way, he would have been happy to go down in history the same way that Zeppelin has, saying, “This may be too pompous to say, but I hope [our music] conjures up sort of what Led Zeppelin did when I was younger. We’ve been around a long time, and we’ve been very consistent in making good music. I hope we’re a classic band to young kids.” And that’s more than casual lip service on Eddie’s part.
Aside from Jimmy Page accidentally inspiring Eddie to use his legendary tapping technique, both Van Halen and Zeppelin were content to not make the same album twice. There are definitely records that Eddie would have much rather not made, but for every album where he was unsatisfied like Diver Down, there are records like Fair Warning that serve as a guidebook to what made him tick every single time he picked up his guitar.
And while there’s no proper way to copy what Eddie did, there are more than a few times where they manage to match Zeppelin’s power on their records. Women and Children First is far from the most popular Van Halen album by any stretch, but it’s the closest in spirit to what Zeppelin was able to do, from the acoustic ditties like ‘Could This Be Magic’, the strange experiments like using a keyboard on ‘And the Cradle Will Rock’, and the massive harmonies that close out everything on ‘In A Simple Rhyme.’
But when Eddie talked about going down in history the same way Led Zeppelin did, it was always about more than following their musical trajectory. Because when people look through what hard rock meant to millions of fans in 100 years’ time, they’re going to be studying what Eddie did with the same level of detail that they look at Page’s strange tunings and production techniques.
