The last song to feature Eddie Van Halen on guitar
It’s a shame that we didn’t get as much Van Halen music as we could have during this lifetime.
Eddie Van Halen was a legend among all rock and roll musicians, but even if he had lost the momentum after Van Halen III, the fact that we only got one more album before his untimely passing is insane, considering how many riffs he would come out with on a daily basis. There are countless finished tunes that are still in the vaults, but the final song to ever feature his talents went far beyond his usual wheelhouse.
That is, if Eddie actually had a “wheelhouse” to begin with. Sure, he had his fair share of licks he inherited from the likes of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, but you could never put your finger on where he was going next on every album. Some records he would be making some of the heaviest tunes ever made like on Women and Children First, and the next he would be breaking out the keyboards and making ballads that could break your heart.
Eddie didn’t know the first thing about what a hit single was supposed to sound like, but that didn’t matter. It was all about the way he made people feel every single time he strapped on his guitar, and while those songs didn’t come without a few messy moments with David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar, Eddie was more than willing to fly solo whenever he got the chance to perform with his friends.
Then again, he wasn’t always practical when it came to everything he played on. If he had bothered to ask for a single point on Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’, chances are he would have been one of the richest guitarists in the world, but that wasn’t how he looked at it. He wanted the chance to play with any genre that he wanted, and while he did have his moments performing with people like Allan Holdsworth, hip-hop would have been the last place most people would have expected.
But if Van Halen fans don’t typically like hip-hop, hip-hop certainly likes them. Even in the earliest days of the genre, people like Tone-Loc were sampling some Van Halen songs to set up some of their grooves, but when looking at everything that Eddie released during his lifetime, one of the final songs that he ever played on was an LL Cool J track called ‘Not Leaving You Tonight’ from the album Authentic.
While most younger music fans know LL Cool J as the guy who wears the hats at award shows, it’s not like he forgot how to throw it down every now and again. He always had his hard songs to fall back on when people labelled him soft, but pairing an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo with a vocal break from Fitz and the Tantrumz is one of the most delightfully weird pairings of the 2010s. Michael Fitzpatrick isn’t the first person most people think of when it comes to rock and roll, but his soaring register actually works surprisingly well for a song that’s all about building tension.
And while Eddie’s job here was only to add the occasional lick to the solo, you can hear all of his signature sounds from the moment his guitar comes in. From the whammy bar dive to the massive sustain that all of his notes have, there’s a sonic fingerprint here that reminds everyone why he was one of the most identifiable guitarists of his generation.
The rest of the world might not have the luxury of hearing the actual final songs that Eddie made with his brother in the vaults, but even if this was the last song that we ever got to hear from him, it was still a great solo to round out his career. It’s not trying to do anything too flashy compared to his own band, but in an era where the guitar seemed to be dead, this was his way of showing everyone what a giant he still was.
