“Bring back memories”: The one album Eddie Van Halen said his fans hated
It’s often too hard to gauge what the fans want whenever making a Van Halen setlist.
As much as Eddie liked the idea of playing music from all across his catalogue, there were always going to be a few people who were coming to see the David Lee Roth era of the band and missing the moments when they used to play songs like ‘Right Now’ or ‘Summer Nights’ instead of hearing ‘Jump’ or the 1000th time. But even if Eddie liked to sprinkle in bits and pieces from every part of his repertoire, he knew that there were a handful of songs that didn’t really need to be performed live all that often.
Then again, it’s unimaginable to think that Eddie would leave something out of the set because he thought it was too hard. There are pieces of the rock and roll guitar handbook that he put in there himself, and he would rather be flying all across the stage, making his guitar wail, than worry about whether or not he was hitting one particular part of the song exactly right whenever he got going.
But the stage layout looked a lot different when the band got back together with Roth in the 2000s. The final tour with Hagar featured some of the most underwhelming performances of Eddie’s career after hitting the bottle a little too much, and while he did come out of it on the other side, having Wolfgang Van Halen sub in for Michael Anthony meant that he needed to be on his toes a little more.
Wolfie wasn’t any old rock and roll bass player. He was going to have his ear close to the ground on everything that they did, and since he didn’t grow up playing those tunes every night, he was usually the one throwing in little ideas for the band to work into the setlist, whether it was a deep cut or trying out a song that they might not have given the time of day to when they were in their prime.
If there’s one thing that we can thank Wolfie for, though, it’s being able to give Van Halen a fitting sendoff. The thought of them ending their studio recording career on an album like Van Halen III just felt sad, so having them come back from the dead and make A Different Kind of Truth was them shutting the door on their career the right way. A lot of the songs were resurrected versions of what they had done on a few of their demos, and while Roth’s vocals were a lot more husky, you could hear them at least trying to get back to their old ways.
But even if the record was solid enough for the times, Eddie remembered seeing a lot of bored faces when they started filtering in some of their new songs into the setlist, saying, “We put it out in 2012. But then you go onstage and play those new songs, and the audience looks at you like ‘What’s this?’ They really want to hear the classics. Thank God we have so many songs that people want to hear–songs they grew up with and bring back memories of where they were and what party they were at. But it would be nice to put out new music that people would give a chance. Maybe 10 years from now stuff off of A Different Kind of Truth will be considered classic.”
With the benefit of hindsight, though, A Different Kind of Truth holds up more as a statement of intent than a proper album. There are still more than a few tunes that are classics amongst them and Eddie has an absolutely field day playing his guitar, but there are more often a few songs that feel like the band spinning their wheels or trying to become something a little more out of their depth than normal.
Still, it’s better to have had a record like this come along to wash the taste of songs like ‘Without You’ out of everyone’s mouths. Van Halen deserved a better fate than that, and A Different Kind of Truth was the kind of record that showed everyone that they could still make great music and could rest on their laurels as one of the greatest hard rock bands the world had ever seen.
