The only band Eddie Van Halen was obsessed with: “I was really over into”
Throughout musical history, you have great bands, and then, existing alongside them, you have bands that changed the course of rock, and Van Halen is a good example of the latter.
Rock music existed before Van Halen, and continues to exist after, but the sound and style of the genre shifted because the band took a genre that was already pretty well established and then expanded upon what it could be, introducing new playing styles and techniques, all of which broadened people’s creativity with possibilities.
There were many factors that contributed towards this shift in music. Frontmen like Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth were no small feat, plus the work that the entire band put into their music was massively commendable; however, there is no escaping the fact that Eddie Van Halen and his unique style of guitar playing lent a great deal to the band’s signature sound, his tapping technique kicking down whatever borders existed around rock and introduced a brand new style to anybody willing to listen.
Suffice to say, Eddie knows a thing or two when it comes to creating innovative music, and a lot of that stems from his pre-existing love for exciting boundary-pushing artists. He’s always been a big music lover, but he has a particular adoration for bands who try something new, and one of his favourites, a band he could well and truly obsess over, is Cream.
Ian Anderson once said that it’s tricky pinning down the origin of prog rock, given it’s the steady evolution of rock and doesn’t pertain to one specific moment or band, yet Cream and its band members are some of the most prevalent names within the genre.
“Of course,” he said, “…when those two guys left Graham Bond and set out as Cream, that became something that moved Eric Clapton along from just being a blues guitarist”.
This is what drew Eddie to the band; he loved the fact that they played rock music, but they also incorporated styles like the blues and jazz in a bid to help grow what people might have considered a relatively strict genre. They brought a new level of freedom to the sound, which was difficult not to get excited about, with Eddie noting that you heard these aspects of the band a lot more in their live music rather than in their studio recordings.
“The only band I was really over into was Cream,” he said, “And the only thing I really liked about them was their live stuff. ‘Cause they played two verses, then go off and jam for 20 minutes. [Then] come back and do a chorus and end.”
