The “most powerful band” Eddie Van Halen ever saw
Eddie Van Halen didn’t make music that was supposed to make people kick back with a drink in their hand.
From the minute that Van Halen debuted, it was about going for the throat at every single opportunity and making sure the audience didn’t even know what hit them when they were finished. But even with all the power that he had at his disposal when he started his tapping licks, there was nothing that beat a great rock and roll riff whenever one of their songs started.
While Van Halen were known to play a lot of notes, it never got to the point where it felt over-indulgent in the 1980s. Their prime years were all about focusing on making the song better than droning on for minutes on end playing solos. That was reserved for the live stage, and there was no point in trying to get away with the kind of tunes that would have made for a more technical Grateful Dead tune.
And it’s not like Eddie didn’t know how to keep his tunes compact, either. Roth and Sammy Hagar would later be in charge of turning his ideas into songs, but the licks to tracks like ‘Mean Street’ and ‘Little Guitars’ already lend themselves well to the typical verse/chorus formula that everyone knows and loves. But that didn’t mean Eddie couldn’t stretch things out when he wanted to.
After all, his favourite bands were people like Black Sabbath, so it wasn’t out of the ordinary to take his time when opening up the record or building a sense of atmosphere before one of their tunes started. If Sabbath taught him to throw away the rules, though, AC/DC taught him that it was no use wasting time whenever writing a tune.
Because when working with the Young brothers, there was no room for messing around. Angus had already had his fill of the jam bands that had started infesting rock and roll like Deep Purple, and while he could definitely stretch out his solos if he wanted to, it wasn’t about trying to be the best guitarist on the planet when they got onstage. It was finding the right riffs for each song and playing them as loud as possible to anyone within earshot.
And when seeing them for the first time, Eddie said that he was blown away by the sheer force that they played with, saying, “We had just done a tour with them the year before. It was us, Motley Crue and AC/DC in ’83, in Europe, and just the power of those guys blew my mind–the constant ‘boom, boom, boom.’ They play the same song over and over, but it’s a great song. AC/DC was probably one of the most powerful live bands I’ve ever seen in my life. The energy…they were just unstoppable. I’ll never forget [it].”
Other bands might have tried to move on past those kinds of shows, but AC/DC is the perfect example of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Everyone might know exactly what they’re getting when they pick up one of their records, but somewhere in between the typical blues riffs is that primal feeling that everyone gets when they listen to rock and roll for the first time. It can be redundant, but when you’ve hit the nail on the head that well, who the hell cares about doing anything else?
While Van Halen did eventually have other plans for their music once ‘the Red Rocker’ entered the fold, it’s bands like AC/DC that helped remind Eddie what he was in the business for. You could definitely spread things out if you want to, but it didn’t matter if it didn’t have nearly the amount of swing and swagger that it was supposed to.
