The most powerful guitar riff Eddie Van Halen heard: “It engulfs you”
The power of most Van Halen songs is usually something that you could feel in your chest before anything else.
Eddie may have been known for his tapping licks and being able to make his guitar sound like it was being played by four different people, but when you listen to the way that he and his brother Alex lock in on those rhythm parts, some of their tunes were sturdy enough to demolish any other rock band in their way half the time. And that only came from Eddie listening to some of the heaviest bands that came before him when he put something on the turntable.
It can sometimes feel like his talents came from outer space, but a lot of what Eddie was doing was a lot more practical when you broke those songs down. He was a massive fan of Eric Clapton when he was growing up, and even if Van Halen doesn’t sound anything like Cream by any stretch of the imagination, you can still hear the same kinds of blues scales that ‘Slowhand’ was using all over Van Halen’s early records.
They were a lot more bluesy than anyone gave them credit for, but that’s also part of the reason why they could never hold on to a gig in their early years. Everyone in the club scene needed to learn how to play top 40 radio, and as much as Eddie wanted to get the fans on his side, he fully admitted that a band like KC and the Sunshine Band would always end up sounding like Black Sabbath when it came out of his guitar.
You can definitely hear a lot of Sabbath in the way that Eddie constructs his guitar parts, but the pure swagger came from him listening to his fair share of AC/DC records as well. The Young brothers were certainly a much simpler version of rock and roll than what Van Halen fans were used to hearing, but even if Back in Black has been beaten into rock and roll fans for the past 30 years, Eddie was more of a fan of the deeper cuts that they made with Bon Scott.
Scott wasn’t long for this world when the band first started, but he had the right kind of image that the band thrived on. His boozy rocker persona was everything that rock and roll was supposed to be about, and while Highway to Hell is the real staple of this era of their career, Powerage was the nastiest they had got up until that point. And when it came to rock and roll power, nothing got better than Eddie turning on tunes like ‘Down Payment Blues’ whenever he needed something heavy.
Sabbath had their own camp in terms of pioneering heavy metal, but in terms of unadulterated rock and roll, Eddie felt that AC/DC had the kind of power that no one else had, saying, “My favourite AC/DC song of all time is off an album called Powerage called ‘Down Payment Blues’. [It’s just] the power. It just engulfs you. You just feel it and it makes you vibrate.” So if Angus could make a guitar sound like that with only a few blues licks, who’s to say that Eddie couldn’t do the same thing when he made his songs?
His attempt at making an AC/DC-style song on ‘Panama’ doesn’t exactly sound like the boys from down under, but when you look at the rest of the early Van Halen catalogue, you can hear him searching for that kind of power. A lot of that came from listening to Cream as well, but there are traces of swagger laced all throughout a song like ‘Loss of Control’ that wouldn’t have been possible without listening to some of AC/DC’s finest tracks, either.
AC/DC might have been the blueprint for what straight-ahead rock and roll was supposed to be, but even if they found their one trick and ran with it doesn’t mean that they didn’t know what they were doing. They had found the golden sweet spot that most bands long to get throughout their career, and Eddie knew that he had made something unprecedented if he could make a riff that sounded as feral as they did.
