The one song Eddie Van Halen was scared to play for decades
There aren’t too many things that one can do with a guitar that Eddie Van Halen didn’t master during his lifetime.
Many people have tried their best to copy his style over the years, but when listening to him blaze through ‘Eruption’ or deliver the perfect solo to ‘You Really Got Me’, you are hearing someone who’s completely in tune with their instrument and knows exactly what every single song needs. So when that same person finds a song that’s difficult to play, you better believe that it is a beast to tackle.
But even some of the biggest Van Halen songs of all time are based around taking the basic elements of rock and roll and beefing them up. The riff for ‘Runnin’ With The Devil’ is fairly easy to get under your fingers, but compared to what he’s doing on tracks like ‘Loss of Control’ or ‘Unchained’, it’s hard to capture the mechanics of what he’s doing, especially when he goes from those harmonics on tracks like ‘Panama’.
Although many people would point fans to the David Lee Roth era as the moment where Eddie was at his best, it’s hard to pick one when he stockpiled so many licks. According to him, countless riffs had been stockpiled that never found a home until years later, and while they only may have seen the light of day on albums like A Different Kind of Truth in 2012, they were still fantastic by the standards of any other guitarist.
Then again, one of the most criminally underrated pieces of Eddie’s style is what’s going on in his right hand. Everyone pays attention to the tapping licks, but he was a rhythm guitarist before anything else, and listening to that swarm of guitar feedback and noise on ‘Mean Street’, he was as much in tune with making the guitar speak through pounding out a rhythm as he was with weaving together the perfect lead line.
So when it came to the hardest song in his discography, it’s strange to think that it came from an album that Eddie didn’t care for all that much. Diver Down was the only album in the band’s catalogue that was released solely to make money, but despite no one wanting to be there half the time they were making the record, Eddie considered ‘Hang ‘Em High’ to be one of the toughest pieces of their catalogue.
In fact, Eddie felt that Van Halen wasn’t good enough to play it for years because of how intense it is, saying in 2012, “We played ‘Hang ’Em High’ for the first time during soundcheck. That song is wicked. It has so many changes, there is so much shit going on, and it’s fast. If you slip up once the whole song is fucked.” And listening to the riff itself, it’s easy to see where he’s coming from.
‘Loss of Control’ was already a difficult song to play on rhythm guitar, but this is practically that on steroids, complete with some of the strangest patterns that Eddie ever came up with. To his credit, though, Wolfgang Van Halen is responsible for helping get the song off the ground, always giving his old man that solid foundation for when he needed to play the odd tricky lick in the song.
Even in an era where artists can look up how to tap as if it’s second-nature, there’s no discounting for the time it takes to build up a rhythm like this. Eddie had found ways to make the oddest-sounding noises catchy, but this is practically Morse code being pounded out on a guitar half the time.
