The one tour Eddie Van Halen called the most fun: “The best times of my life”
Every record that Eddie Van Halen ever made had to come from a place of fun for him.
There are plenty of albums that didn’t sell as well as others, but even if it was the most painful recording experience of all time, Eddie at least had a couple of great songs to show for it whenever he walked out of the studio. He could spin nearly anything into gold if he had the right idea, but if there was one place where he thrived the most, it was onstage playing with the rest of the band.
Which is strange, considering how many times Eddie had bouts of stage fright every single time he went onstage. He had grown up being slightly terrified of having the stage lights on him, and while that led to his severe drinking habit, no one could deny the chops he had, even when slightly buzzed. His tapping technique was unlike anything that the guitar scene had ever witnessed, and even when some of his heroes were trying to copy it, no one could really do his songs justice, no matter how hard they tried.
But Eddie wasn’t looking to be a guitar god when he first started making waves. Despite being one of the most humble guys in rock and roll, Eddie was far more interested in crafting songs, and even when talking about the greatest moments he ever had with Van Halen, his approach was a lot closer to what you would out of a fusion jazz guitar player than any traditional bluesy rock and roller.
Eddie could have certainly held his own next to the likes of Allan Holdsworth and Larry Carlton, but his strong suit was always in turning his Marshall up loud and seeing what would happen. He didn’t want to rely on effects to get the job done every single time he played, and when listening to a lot of his favourite acts, it was all about the feel that someone had whenever they strapped on their instrument.
After all, Eric Clapton wasn’t trying to hide anything when he was playing with Cream, and since Eddie looked up to ‘Slowhand’ every time he played Wheels of Fire, he wanted to follow the same kind of mentality. He didn’t need to have the flashiness of David Lee Roth to have fun, and when looking at his peers, the Young brothers were probably the closest thing that he had to a kindred spirit out in the wild.
AC/DC never tried to be anything except the greatest rock and roll band in the world, and while Eddie was gutted to hear of Malcolm Young’s passing, he would remember the times touring with them for the rest of his life, saying, “It is a sad day in Rock and Roll. Malcolm Young was my friend and the heart and soul of AC/DC. I had some of the best times of my life with him on our 1984 European tour.”
But what Malcolm did with his guitar was a completely different vocabulary to what Eddie had done. You could feel the raw muscle that Malcolm put into every single strike of the strings, and even if the closest that Eddie came to AC/DC was ‘Panama’, there was never anything that would replace the kind of chemistry that Angus had with his brother whenever he duckwalked across that stage.
Even if Eddie was miles better from a technical perspective, the magic that he saw in AC/DC went beyond any kind of blistering lead playing. Their music was simple, and anyone with a few weeks’ worth of guitar lessons could play their stuff, but what made them timeless came from the groove they could lay down every single time they counted a song in.
