The rock album James Hetfield never gets tired of: “I still get blown away”
There will probably never be a definitive answer for the greatest rock album of all time. Every artist approaches the genre differently, so something that could mean the world to one person may be one of the biggest botched jobs in music history to someone else. What keeps albums alive is their replay factor, and James Hetfield has still yet to wear out the first Van Halen album he ever heard.
For a band that changed rock music overnight, though, Van Halen has a bit of a strange legacy. While they are justly defined as one of the greatest rock bands of the late 1970s, Eddie Van Halen’s signature tapping licks and David Lee Roth’s stage persona also inadvertently birthed the hair metal scene that came out of the early 1980s, which most metal legends like Metallica absolutely detested.
Influencing someone is never the artist’s decision, though, and even without that reputation, Van Halen hit the ground running on their debut. Fashioned as the kind of album that you could throw on at a party, the entire project feels like a blast from the minute that it starts, only letting up to give audiences a chance to catch their breath in between songs.
For Hetfield, this was exactly the kind of music that was right up his alley, recalling to Marc Maron, “It’s unbelievable. I still get blown away by that record. It is so alive sounding. (Also has so much youth) and rebellion. It sounds so great. It was party, it was definitely party music”. If this was party music, then Metallica were about to offer fans a different kind of ride.
Most metalheads had had their fill of the kind of party band images flashed around Sunset Boulevard, and once Metallica moved their act to San Francisco, they began to finetune what made them badass in the first place. Gone were all of the glamorous posturing, and in its place was the kind of heavy riffs coming from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal.
While Van Halen did keep up their own party-hard personas, it’s not like they weren’t listening to what the new bands had been doing. Throughout their time together, albums like Women and Children First verged on Black Sabbath levels of heavy, including Eddie making the kind of straight-ahead rock and roll that would make Lemmy give a knowing nod of approval.
It’s not like Metallica didn’t pick up a few tricks from Van Halen, either. If you ever picked up a guitar after 1978 and didn’t take something from Van Halen, chances are you would get some funny looks, and there were more than a few tapping licks spread across the band’s first handful of albums.
As much as lead guitarist Kirk Hammett loved to emulate the old blues players like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimi Hendrix, he was just as likely to take a few pages from Eddie’s playbook, including the now-famous tapping solo that kicks off the intense section of their song ‘One’. Hetfield may have more of a clear influence from someone like Tony Iommi, but when you’re in the mood for a good time with heavy guitars, Van Halen’s debut still hasn’t lost an ounce of its sheen.
