The song Eddie Van Halen would play until he died
For Eddie Van Halen, playing music almost felt like second nature whenever he got up onstage.
He may have had to practise for years at a time before he finally landed on his signature tapping technique, but whenever he put on a show, anyone would have been glad to hear him play every single lick in his library and been equally as satisfied even if David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar weren’t onstage. At the end of the day, though, Van Halen were phenomenal songwriters, and Eddie figured some songs have become a part of his DNA after playing them one too many times.
Then again, there’s a good chance that Eddie could have come up with any classic lick on the fly and turned it into a fantastic song. Their version of The Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’ might ot stray too far from the original arrangement from the 1960s, but when you put that riff in Eddie’s hands, it goes from being a snarling punk-ish rock song to the sound of a jet airliner about to take off. But being a musician was only one facet of what Eddie could do.
If anything, he was a musical inventor in a sense, and when listening to some of his finest works, it’s more about how the hell he got certain sounds out of his guitar than worrying about what specific notes he was hitting. No one could have imagined guitars could make the noises in songs like ‘Poundcake’ or ‘Cathedral’, but Eddie could also easily trick people into thinking they were hearing a guitar.
‘And the Cradle Will Rock’ is by far one of the heaviest tunes that the band ever made, and yet most of it’s being done by Eddie pounding his way through the tune on a distorted piano. So if he managed to sound that great behind the ivories, what could he have possibly sound like if he based a whole tune off of the keyboard? It was a bold risk, but it seemed to pay off in dividends with ‘Jump’.
Despite the band not wanting to go in a pop direction, there’s no note out of place when Eddie kicked off that opening guitar hook. People might have had to adjust their brains by the time they first heard it on the radio, but compared to the straightforward rock songs, it seemed to fit right in among the rest of their catalogue. And in Eddie’s mind, ‘Jump’ transcended nearly everything else they did.
There were bound to be other songs in their arsenal that had an equal impact on the rock crowd, but even when releasing new music, Eddie felt that ‘Jump’ would forever have a permanent fixture in their live show, saying, “We gotta do a tour and give people some new music, you know? I’m the one in the band that said I’m not going on tour unless we do a record. Even though there are career tunes like ‘Jump,’ we’ll play ’til we die, you know? Sometimes it’s fun to play new music, too. And I think we owe it to our fans.”
While Eddie goes on to mention other fixtures like ‘Runnin’ With The Devil’ and ‘Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love’, there’s a certain ex-factor behind ‘Jump’ that no other song in their catalogue has. ‘Right Now’ might be the closest comparison, but even when making the equivalent of electronic music in the bridge of ‘Jump’, it never loses the same sense of power that all great Van Halen songs always had.
That’s because Eddie never did anything half-assed whenever he stepped into the studio. He was out to capture magic on every tune he could think of, and no one gets to that place by being merely good. They get there by hitting their instrument with everything they’ve got until they have a quality tune.
