The classic rock band Eddie Van Halen couldn’t stand touring with: “Treated us like shit”
The music world is not always a business to be making friends. Whereas some artists might look to prop up anyone they think has potential in the industry, it’s a dog-eat-dog world for most people, and you’d better hope you find yourself bitten more than a few times. Eddie Van Halen had to learn those lessons the hard way, and when he went out on tour in the early days of Van Halen.
Going on tour is never an easy thing for any band just starting out. Even if you blew up your town’s venues, made a name for yourself in a city or just generally dominated a local area, going out on the road presents a whole new array of issues. One of which is the touring band to which you are tied.
Van Halen might have enjoyed a meteoric rise ot the top of the rock pile, but even they had to endure some time as second billing. Being an opening act is a tiresome thing to endure; not only are you often playing to half-empty venues, but the headliners need to be kind for things to be bearable, otherwise, you get the short end of everything. Eddie Van Halen thought Journey were far from the rockers that he had thought they were.
For a band like Van Halen, that dynamic was always going to be short-lived. Their live show didn’t feel like a support slot performance, it felt like a takeover waiting to happen. Even in unfamiliar cities, they carried themselves with the confidence of headliners, which only heightened the tension with more established acts who suddenly had something real to worry about once the opening set was over.
It also meant that any friction on the road was magnified. Small slights such as limited soundchecks or lukewarm receptions weren’t just inconveniences, they became fuel. For a group already brimming with energy and ambition, those moments only sharpened their edge, pushing them to prove, night after night, that they belonged at the top of the bill rather than warming it up.
Granted, anyone who paid for tickets to a Van Halen show knew they would upstage anyone in their path. Even if he was playing next to Jimi Hendrix, Eddie could hold his own next to almost any guitar player, using his signature tapping technique that left fans dumbfounded as to what the hell he was doing.
Then again, Eddie may have been a bit too good for the Sunset Strip scene he was part of. After becoming a legend in the local scene, Eddie would say that he got a little bit pissed off at the amount of people stealing his trademark licks, thinking that they were nothing but copycats of what he was doing naturally.
After graduating to the support slots for significant bands, Journey seemed like a decent group for Van Halen to be paired with. Both had huge singalong choruses, and each of them had guitar stars that sounded absolutely amazing in an arena, with Neil Schon being able to give Eddie a run for his money on solos like ‘Any Way You Want It’.
They may have been joined at the hip musically, but Journey wasn’t about to let the new kids in town take the spotlight away from them. As opposed to being greeted with a warm reception, Eddie remembered the band being extremely petty and standoffish to them whenever they took to the stage.
When discussing the tour with Guitar World in the 1990s, Eddie said that Journey treated them like garbage, saying, “We used to drive people crazy. For example, very early on, we were on a tour supporting Journey. They would never give us soundchecks and treated us like shit in general, so we liked to fuck with them any way we could”.
Then again, maybe that behaviour was out of fear. Since anyone playing next to Eddie Van Halen was going to look like an amateur regardless, Journey may have been trying to intentionally sabotage the band’s shows to make sure that they looked like a clear improvement over what their audience had already seen.
For all of the jealous guitar players envying what Eddie could do, the true technicians knew that he was one in a million. Outside of working in his own outfit, Eddie would become friendly with guitarists like Steve Lukathur of Toto, who always reminisced on how much feeling he put into every note he played.
Journey might have just seen a kid who could play fast in Van Halen, but there was so much more going on underneath the surface. This was a guitarist who was bound to take over the world, and no amount of stage shenanigans was going to get in the way of him and the halls of guitar gods.
