Eddie Van Halen thought every one of his albums needed one kind of song: “More of me!
At the start of Van Halen, no one was going to tell Eddie what to do.
Whenever someone comes out of the woodwork with that kind of talent in his fingers, it’s best not to question them and watch as they put on a clinic on what can be done on the guitar when they perform. But even though Van Halen was already one of the most exciting bands of all time, it’s not like they didn’t have a certain formula for how to wow their audiences every time they came out with a new record.
Then again, the reason why fans were so excited listening to their debut is because it was so hard to pinpoint where everything was coming. Witnessing a song like ‘Eruption’ for the first time would have been one notch under listening to Jimi Hendrix back in the 1960s, but even by the standards of most guitarists, Eddie’s style was a lot more simple than a lot of people may have originally thought.
Sure, there were bound to be songs like ‘I’m the One’ that felt like they would forever be out of reach from a pure technical perspective, but a lot of his practical effects were actually fairly compelling. The intro to ‘Spanish Guitars’ feels impossible to pull off all on one guitar, but when you figure out that all he’s doing is droning on an open string with his picking hand and hammering on notes on the bottom strings with his fretting hand, it starts to make a lot more sense.
That may have worked great for the time, but when David Lee Roth started to limit the amount of guitar solos on the record, Eddie was going to put his foot down. He would never compromise his art to play up the rockstar angle, and as much as Roth could strut his stuff across the stage, 1984 was going to be the kind of record that Eddie wanted to make. And if it meant getting songs like ‘Panama’ and ‘Jump’, Roth would have to suck it up and sing the classics instead of argue.
If there’s one song that calls back to their early albums the right way, it was ‘Hot for Teacher’. The actual lyrics may have been more than a little bit cheeky even by Roth’s warped standards, but listening to the backing track, Eddie was always proud to bring a little bit more bounce into their sound whenever they could.
He had grown up with that kind of swing in his music, and getting that kind of shuffle was always the secret weapon of all their albums in his mind, saying, “I’m a shuffle guy. I love fast shuffles. I think that stems from my dad’s big-band days. Every Van Halen record has a song like that – ‘I’m the One’, ‘Sinner’s Swing’. It was an extension of that – more of me!” But even when they go back to the shuffle groove, it’s how they flip the rhythm around that makes the whole thing interesting.
A tune like ‘Hang ‘Em High’ thrives on the band getting more than a little bit freaky in the back half of the tune, and in the case of ‘Hot For Teacher’, it’s all down to how Alex Van Halen plays the drums. You’d be forgiven to mistake the opening drum solo for the sound of a diesel truck turning on, but once he really gets going on the drums, the whole track feels like a freight train even before Eddie comes in with those tapping licks.
The band already had a full sound by that point, but this tune is the kind of record that feels like a strange miracle to have pulled off. ‘Panama’ was already Eddie’s excuse to make an AC/DC-style lick, but they somehow managed to cross Motorhead with ZZ Top on this track and managed to get away with it.
