The most authentic album Eddie Van Halen ever made
The art of making a great Van Halen was never as simple as it sounds.
Despite their debut album being a near-flawless recreation of their live show when they first began, Eddie always felt that there were pieces of their sound that were never given the proper time of day that they deserved. And if he had his way, the perfect Van Halen record would be the one that put away all the gimmicks and focused on the one thing that everyone should care about: the music.
If you look at Eddie’s track record, though, there’s a good chance that he could have made a riff tape of all of his classics and thrown it onto an album and still have it sell millions. He was one of the few guitarists who could be engaging with only an amplifier and a couple of volume controls, and even when they were making half-assed records like Diver Down, he was still going against the grain and making the kind of sounds that most people would have never thought could be done on guitar.
Then again, talking about early Van Halen also means dealing with the ego battles between Eddie and David Lee Roth. It’s no secret that Roth brought something great to the band with his wacky stage persona, but every single time he seemed to take his schtick one step too far, Eddie was always there to reel everything back in and remind everyone that they were actually a rock band and not a cheap sideshow.
And while 1984 does get a lot of the praise despite it being one of the most tumultuous times in the group, the middle period of the Roth era is where the band really shines. Women and Children First is one of the heaviest records they ever made, but while it does have some stellar tunes on it, the guitar nerds were always going to flock to what Eddie was doing when working on Fair Warning.
Eddie would have been the first to say how pissed he was that the rest of the band weren’t giving it their all behind the scenes on the record, but that gave a lot more wiggle room to play. A song like ‘Mean Street’ has one of the most off-the-wall intros of any Van Halen tune, and while a solo on a track like ‘Sinner’s Swing’ teeters on the line between chaotic and brilliant, it’s not to see the band taking a chance on something and see what happens with it.
Although it didn’t have one hook after another, Eddie felt that it was the best encapsulation of what the band were all about, saying, “To me, Fair Warning is more true to what I am and what I believe Van Halen is. We’re a hard rock band, and we were an album band. We were lucky to enter the charts anywhere. Warner Bros wanted singles, but there were no singles on Fair Warning. The album wasn’t a commercial flop, but it wasn’t exactly a commercial success, either.”
At the same time, any Van Halen fan would be a fool to ignore the song ‘Unchained’. While the tune was far from the commercial smash that ‘Jump’ would be a few years later, those four minutes is the best of what Van Halen was all about, featuring one of the greatest riffs Eddie ever wrote and Roth hamming it up just the right amount when producer Ted Templeman interrupts the song for a quick second.
Fair Warning is far from the first Van Halen album you should show a newcomer, but anyone who’s even remotely interested in Eddie’s playing is in for a treat when they reach this point. This was the sound of him in his natural habitat, and if he had more time to stretch like this, maybe the Roth era wouldn’t have imploded so quickly.
