“Really made me crazy”: The song Eddie Van Halen said should have never been made
There’s a certain power that comes when you have a band named after someone like Eddie Van Halen.
As much as the band was a group effort every time they went into the studio, you tend to have a little more of a say in what the band was going to be doing when your name is on the banner outside every single venue. That’s why bands like Bon Jovi and Dio worked so well, but even Eddie had those moments when things weren’t really going the way that he had planned in his head.
For one, the fact that David Lee Roth was in the band at all was already a strange sign for him. ‘Diamond Dave’ was a great entertainer, but he was also the exact opposite of what Eddie wanted the band to be. He didn’t like the idea of the band being a sideshow, and while there are more than a few moments where his guitar and Roth’s voice sounded perfect, that was a lot more ground for him to cover once he had Sammy Hagar join the group after 1984 came out.
‘The Red Rocker’ was a seasoned veteran of the rock genre, and while he had a lot more musical ideas in his arsenal, that didn’t really mean stepping on Eddie’s toes too much. Roth’s voice wasn’t exactly the most flexible thing in the world, but compared to the more commercial music that they made with Hagar, it was a lot easier for the faithful Roth fans to claim that the band became a parody of themselves once Hagar joined. But, really, is that really a fair comparison?
I mean, for one thing, both versions of the group sound completely different. You weren’t going to hear Roth singing a song like ‘Dreams’, nor was Hagar ever going to sing ‘Runnin’ With the Devil’, but if there was one silver lining, it was that Eddie didn’t have to worry about playing cover songs anymore. He was already pissed off at the fact that they filled out their records with tunes like Linda Ronstadt’s ‘You’re No Good’, but even if he could forgive one song on a record, it had started to get ridiculous during Diver Down.
The band’s fifth record is already pretty contentious in their catalogue, but it’s not like the covers were downright terrible. Their version of ‘Oh Pretty Woman’ is one of the better versions that anyone has done of that song, and while ‘Happy Trails’ is a fun gag that the band did as part of their live shows, Eddie got more than a little bit pissed off as soon as he heard what they had done on the opening of the song ‘Dancing in the Street’.
The song is a classic from the golden age of rock and roll, but when Eddie heard that his original riff had been pasted over the song, he was livid, saying, “The track that really made me crazy was ‘Dancing in the Street’. I was working on a great song with this Mini Moog riff that I envisioned being more like a Peter Gabriel song, but when [producer] Ted [Templeman] heard it, he decided it would be great for ‘Dancing in the Street’. Ted and Dave were happy, but I wasn’t. The riff was my original idea, and I didn’t even get writing credits for it.”
And with all due respect to Roth, the reasoning behind putting this riff at the start of the song doesn’t really make any sense. The actual tune is one of the best dance songs of all time, so to put this ethereal-sounding backing track on right before feels like we’re about to tune into some strange otherworldly song before bringing everything back down to Earth when the real tune kicks in.
Templeman’s reasoning was always about getting as close to a hit as possible, but even if they thought they were halfway there by covering a rock and roll classic, that doesn’t mean that it necessarily works for Van Halen. They were a band of many talents, but this was one of the first times where the band started to sound like more of a sideshow than they ever had before.
