The only producer Eddie Van Halen never wanted to work with: “His name was in the hat”
Van Halen weren’t known to be the most complicated band in the world.
Eddie had a lot of tricks up his sleeve whenever he busted out a guitar solo, but when looking at either the David Lee Roth or the Sammy Hagar eras of the group, it’s easy to see them slowly turning a lot of the guitar maestro’s ideas into fleshed-out songs, since the singer was the one that helped put everything together when they entered the studio. But when the band were on the comeback trail, Eddie had a few ideas of who should or shouldn’t have been allowed to enter the studio at any given time.
After all, he had already gone through the headache of trying to call the shots when Roth started to have disagreements with him during 1984, but even when moving the studio to his house, it’s not like everything worked out perfectly. ‘The Red Rocker’ was a shot in the arm for a while, but given how fractured their partnership had become towards the end of Balance, it really was time for them to move on to something better when Eddie called the singer up to tell him that it was over.
Then again, working with Gary Cherone would have made for a pretty sad epitaph if Van Halen III was the last album they ever made. Even if you’re one of the most diehard Van Halen fans in the world, it’s insanely difficult to defend an album like this, especially with the songs being all over the place and Eddie sounding like he’s a mad scientist trying to conduct strange experiments on his own songs.
This was the first time that Eddie had a major dud on his hands like this, and while he did go through a bit of a wilderness period once the album bit the dust, it would have been a shame if it were one of the last major products the band made. And while the impossible seemed to happen when Roth rejoined the group, Eddie’s son, Wolfie, should really be credited for Van Halen’s final bow on A Different Kind of Truth.
It’s not the best Van Halen album in the world, and it definitely has a few songs that didn’t sound nearly as good as they would have back in the day, but with the help of producer John Shanks, Eddie was at least ready to put himself to the test again. He had written those riffs decades before, and while he was finally ready to get back into the studio, the initial idea to work with Rick Rubin wasn’t something that Eddie was remotely interested in when he first started working on it.
Rubin was a fantastic producer, but Eddie felt that given how the band functioned, his production style needed to be far away from what they were doing, saying, “Sabbath is doing their reunion also, and they’re working with Rick Rubin. I don’t think Rick is the right producer for the kind of band that Van Halen is, but his name was in the hat.” It’s not like Shanks didn’t have a great track record, but it’s probably for the best that Rubin didn’t work on this kind of project.
Since the bearded musical wizard was known for sitting down with the act and trying to pull something greater out of them, there’s a good chance that that kind of approach would have only served to kick things off with Eddie and ‘Diamond Dave’ again, and the last thing they needed was the band to end their career with one last fight once they finally decided to put everything to rest.
And while the songs definitely could have used more punching up and maybe shaved just a hair off of the album’s runtime, what ended up on the record didn’t really matter. All the Van Halen fans were asking for was a record that was solid from front to back, and with very few outright terrible moments, A Different Kind of Truth is the kind of album that most of the band’s peers would have loved to have ended things on.
