The bands Eddie Van Halen never wanted to sound like
Eddie Van Halen never tried to play up his rock star chops whenever he started making waves in rock and roll.
He was more than happy to play his songs and be recognised for his chops rather than strutting across the stage like David Lee Roth, but not every musician is really born that way. Some people like to soak up the attention, and when others started riding Eddie’s coattails, he had no problem looking at other bands and going in the complete opposite direction from what they were doing.
Granted, it’s not like Van Halen didn’t have a few inspirations that they wore on their sleeves. Eddie would have been the first person to tell anyone that Eric Clapton was one of the greatest guitarists he had ever seen, and while there were a lot of avenues for him to go down that weren’t necessarily rock and roll, he knew that there were pieces of Allan Holdsworth’s technique that he knew he wanted to steal for himself.
But even on that inaugural tour opening for Black Sabbath, no one was going to mistake Eddie for Tony Iommi at any point. What Eddie created would have required four hands for most other people to pull off, but when looking at the other technicians working at the same time, there’s a good chance a lot of people were jealous of what he was doing when he started working on pieces like ‘Eruption’.
He could definitely sniff out when the biggest stars in hair metal were trying to tap their way through every single solo they played, but something about the greatest acts of the time seemed almost too perfect. You have to remember that Van Halen came out in the era of AOR rock, and while those bands certainly had their place in history, there’s a good chance that he didn’t want to have those massive-sounding records that sounded like they were destined to get on the radio.
Bands like Boston were among the finest acts of their time, but that’s not where Eddie’s head was when he got the ball rolling, saying, “What we did was apply our live show, our live performance, to plastic, whereas people like Boston and Foreigner, they do it the opposite way. They work it out in the studio, and then when they have to go out on tour, they have to rehearse to make it happen live, and it’s obvious. With us, actually, there’s more mania and more feel and more excitement live, because that’s where it’s based.”
But it’s not like those bands were completely without merit, either. Tom Scholz was guilty of copping a few licks from Eddie when he started to see what he was doing, but his ingenuity in creating different pedals would come to define how a lot of rock guitar sounds were supposed to be when the 1980s finally kicked in.
And it’s not like Eddie didn’t eventually come around to that line of thinking, either. While that approach to playing might not have worked well in the David Lee Roth era, it worked like a charm getting Mick Jones in to create the sounds of 5150. It was all still Eddie’s playing, but you could definitely feel a certain electricity in the air by having another guitar hero in the room with him half the time.
Then again, that also comes down to the way that Eddie was thinking about his music back in the day. He was a follower of people like Sabbath much more than Peter Frampton, and if he was going to put his name on something, he wanted to have as little gloss on the final product as possible.
