The one show Eddie Van Halen said he would never play: “What’s the point?”
The biggest lesson that any rock band should learn sooner or later is the ability to say ‘no’ to things.
The whirlwind of being one of the biggest acts in the world means going through the rollercoaster of press tours, soundchecks, studio time, and concerts with little room for interruption, so it’s important to put boundaries on what someone should and shouldn’t do when they are on the road. No one needs to be active every waking hour of the day, but Eddie Van Halen knew that some aesthetic choices were never going to work for his band, no matter how popular they were.
But Eddie would never willingly take things off the table in Van Halen. He was more than happy to try anything once if it felt like a good idea, and judging by how Van Halen III, it was safe to say that he was at the very least aware of when something wasn’t sounding normal. Sure, it broke the rules, but since when did the rules ever matter in rock and roll?
Especially when Eddie broke out the tapping chops, there was no reason to think he would follow the conventions of what the guitar could be. As far as every rock player was concerned, this was a brand new technique that no one had thought of before, and in Eddie, they now had the textbook definition of what a guitar hero should be, perhaps one that could even eclipse Jimi Hendrix in certain areas.
Compared to every other band Van Halen were lumped in with, there was one bridge they rarely crossed: power ballads. There might have been slower songs that had a lot more meaning than the traditional love song in their arsenal, but when looking at the likes of Poison coming out a few years after them, it’s not like ‘Love Walks In’ and ‘Right Now’ have the same kind of simplistic structure as ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’.
That might have ultimately been a good thing by keeping the band identifiable, but that also meant Eddie had to forego the usual approaches to sensitive songwriters like MTV Unplugged, saying, “I’m not an unplugged kind of guy. I don’t want to sit there and try to play our music on an acoustic guitar. What’s the point? I didn’t write it on acoustic — I wrote it on electric guitar, and that’s the way it’s meant to be delivered. If I wanted it to be acoustic, I would have done it that way originally. I’m not going to butcher my music just so I can be the flavor of the month.”
And it’s not like Eddie couldn’t do an acoustic song when he wanted to. David Lee Roth may have helped them channel some softer tunes like ‘Could This Be Magic’, but ‘Spanish Fly’ was proof enough that Eddie could dominate without any kind of volume knobs or distortion pedals, even carrying on to his later stuff when he made beautiful instrumentals like ‘316’.
It wasn’t an easy decision to leave MTV Unplugged behind, though. Some of the greatest performances of the 1990s came from that show, and given the fact that Eddie worshipped people like Eric Clapton, hearing him turn his back on the unplugged version of ‘Layla’ was bound to ruffle a few feathers with those who were more interested in the era of Clapton that sang ‘Tears in Heaven’.
At the same time, it’s important that Eddie knew his strengths and weaknesses and when he shouldn’t be throwing in an acoustic version of one of his songs. There’s a time and place for some downtempo material, but was there anyone on this planet who was sincerely hoping for a slowed-down coffeehouse rendition of ‘Panama’ or ‘Runnin’ With the Devil’?
