The one Van Halen album Eddie actually liked listening to: “Pretty close”
It was going to be hard for anyone to manage to match the kind of energy that Eddie Van Halen had whenever he made music.
He lived and breathed with his guitar by his side at all times, and even when he wasn’t always making Van Halen records or on the road, he couldn’t keep away from his in-house studio and threw in the odd riff into the vault for safekeeping. But when you look through all of their albums, Eddie felt that there were only a few times where the band actually managed to capture the kind of sound that he wanted to hear every single time he played his guitar.
Because looking through the David Lee Roth era, there were already a lot of patchy spots. The band’s debut is still solidified in rock and roll history, but Eddie felt that there were a lot of rough edges that should have never been recorded, including the solo masterpiece ‘Eruption’. But even with a few sore spots here and there, the fact that it took him all the way to the 2000s for Best of Both Worlds to become his favourite record to listen to was saying a lot for what the rest of the records were doing.
There were still fantastic moments all across their catalogue, but there were more than a few times when Eddie felt that his tracks could be a little bit muffled. Diver Down was already made when no one in the band wanted to be in the studio, and even when Roth delivered a masterpiece on 1984, every one of them were walking on eggshells to make sure that no one’s feelings got hurt behind the scenes.
And that didn’t really dissipate during the Sammy Hagar era. 5150 was their chance to make the best kind of record that they could without Roth, and though they passed with flying colours, the same issues happened during Balance. Everything wasn’t as punchy as they should have been, and for a record that seemed to talk about everyone having a fair share, it was far too compromised for any of them to look back on it all that fondly.
But when ‘The Red Rocker’ returned to the fold, Eddie could at least admit that The Best of Both Worlds was the most natural sounding record that he had made ever since he started, saying, “Throughout my career, I’ve relied on someone else to record my sound, and I can’t say that I’ve ever been really happy with the end result. I never really understood why no one could capture the sounds make on tape, but I never complained because professional engineers always intimidated me. Now I’m doing it myself, and I think I’m getting pretty close.”
And to his credit, the album does at least sound like the record that Eddie wanted to make. ‘Up for Breakfast’ might have some pretty goofy lyrics, even from the guy who wrote a song like ‘Poundcake’, but when looking through the rest of the mix, it does sound like the kind of record that was done without much input from the other members of the band. This felt like a Van Halen Brothers song that happened to feature Hagar and Michael Anthony in the fold as well.
A Different Kind of Truth struck a much better balance when Wolfie joined the band on bass, and Roth came back into the fold, but it’s not like the record was Pet Sounds by any means. The bass was still too criminally low in the mix, and now that we know what Wolfie is capable of in his own band, it’s a shame that he was never able to get the same kind of massive low end that Anthony had on many of their albums.
So while Eddie did have a lot more control over Best of Both Worlds, that wasn’t exactly a good thing every single time they made a new record. It’s every artist’s dream to be able to do whatever they want in the studio, but sometimes the best way to make a record is for someone to be defined by their limitations.
