The one genre Eddie Van Halen never wanted to join: “It’s bullshit”
Eddie Van Halen didn’t want to find himself stuck in a musical rut whenever he made a new record.
The idea of playing one style of music for the rest of his life never sat well with him whenever he went into the studio, and even though Van Halen was a rock band, that didn’t mean they couldn’t switch things up every now and again when making a record. That’s the whole reason why the ‘Van Hagar’ years worked so well, but there were more than a few times when Eddie felt that his critics tried to put him in a musical box far too often when they made a new record.
Because as much as the band was heavy, how the hell do you even describe Van Halen to someone who hadn’t heard it before? In 1978, the greatest guitar hero still living at the time was probably someone like Jeff Beck, but you weren’t hearing the strange tapping licks that came out on ‘Eruption’ or anything. This was a completely different kind of music, and Eddie was at the forefront of his own brand of rock and roll.
But going through every one of their albums, the heavy side of their sound was never encroaching on Black Sabbath territory or anything. Eddie loved Sabbath and even became good friends with Tony Iommi later in life, but what they were doing wouldn’t have fit into the traditional heavy metal category at a time when the biggest names in the genre were people like Judas Priest.
Eddie liked his fair share of metal music, but he felt that he was too far ahead of what those bands were doing, saying, “The reason I think we’re happening is because we are one of the only real bands out there. We play good music — or at least I think so. Half of the critics think it’s thud rock bullshit. They label us heavy metal old hat. Name me a heavy metal band that’s done what we’ve done. I sound like I’m bragging, but I don’t mean it that way.”
And if you listen to the way that Eddie is playing on their later records, it gives you a little more perspective. Most heavy metal bands weren’t allowed to think outside the box like he was when pulling influences from Allan Holdsworth, and even by the standards of metal at the time, Fair Warning is one of the strangest albums released by any band at the turn of the 1980s. But you can’t really separate Van Halen from what they did to the entire metal scene in their first few years together.
David Lee Roth was the magnetic superstar that every single hair metal band tried to get behind the microphone, and while Eddie didn’t like everyone copying him, it wasn’t like he could help it. So many people were taking his gimmicks and going in their own direction, but being one of the originators of hair metal is not necessarily the kind of accolade that they needed to be defined by throughout their career.
Eddie was the kind of person who liked to create a party every single time they played, and a lot of their first records were the first time most people realised that metal could sound fun. It was all about Satan and the occult or superheroes in the case of Kiss, but whenever you threw on one of Van Halen’s records, you were pretty much guaranteed to have a good time when it came on during a party.
So while many people might have liked to put Eddie in a box, it’s not like he didn’t deserve a spot in that category. He was making some of the heaviest riffs imaginable, and even if he considered himself a straight-up rock and roll guitar player, that didn’t mean that he couldn’t have his own separate impact on a whole genre. In fact, it’s not all that different from what his buddy Iommi was dealing with. He didn’t want to invent a genre, but the masses came to him.
