“It’s such masturbation”: the Van Halen songs Eddie Van Halen grew to dislike
It’s virtually impossible to think of a modern guitar world that would exist without Eddie Van Halen.
Even though many guitarists have progressed by leaps and bounds since the late 1970s, you have to remember that Eddie was the first of his kind to sound like he did when he was writing all of those amazing guitar solos and tapping his way through every single lick in the book. This was a genius at work whenever he walked into the studio to cut one of his records, but there were more than a few moments when he started to get a little bit bored when he strapped on his guitar.
Because, really, Eddie didn’t want to be put into a musical box whenever he performed. He liked the idea of being respected as an artist, but people who only showed up to see him play his tapping licks weren’t what he wanted to be remembered for. He had a lot more to offer, but when he broke out the piano, he was going to need to do a lot more than tickle the ivories to get the hardened rock and roll fans on his side.
Which is probably why ‘And the Cradle Will Rock’ sounds so otherworldly when it opened up Women and Children First. Eddie was feeding his piano through a massive guitar amp, but when he found the right effect, it turned out he didn’t need too many bells and whistles for people to appreciate a song like ‘Jump’. He was following his bliss, and even if it was pure pop compared to ‘Runnin With the Devil’, he was still making some of the best music that his fans had ever heard.
That may have pissed off David Lee Roth to no end since he preferred Eddie’s guitar, but Eddie didn’t sign up to be a one-trick pony. He had a lot more to offer than a bunch of tapping licks, and when Sammy Hagar came into the equation, he began thinking about his role in the band a whole different way. He didn’t have to be a gimmick guitar player, and now that ‘The Red Rocker’ could play a few tunes, he had a lot more free rein over what he could play.
So by the time they got to work on records like For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, he could ease up a little bit and go for solos that people were going to sing along to. ‘Right Now’ might have still been the poppy single from that time, but across the rest of the album, it was easier to remember the riffs and the rhythmic side of Eddie’s playing on tunes like ‘Judgement Day’. The solos hadn’t gone away, but by the time of Balance, Eddie admitted to being a little tired out of playing the same songs over and over again.
His guitar solo was still a feature of their set, but he felt that even some of his own compositions had played themselves out by that point, saying, “It’s such masturbation. A lot of it is just screaming, ‘Look at me!’ Some parts of the solo, like ‘Cathedral’ or ‘Eruption,’ are little compositions, and I don’t mind doing those. But, still, what’s the point? I get bored doing it.” That’s borderline heresy in the guitar world, but it’s not like you couldn’t hear what Eddie was talking about to a certain degree.
‘Eruption’ and ‘Cathedral’ are still brilliant works of art and deserve to be remembered forever, but if you look at the way that he constructed solos later, he wanted it to be a bit less chaotic. His tribute to his son, ‘316’, is one of the most underrated pieces of his catalogue, and while it wouldn’t have been that out of place on a singer-songwriter record, it was much better for him to exercise that songwriting muscle than be relegated to the same tapping licks whenever he played.
Because while he loved giving the people what he wanted, he didn’t want to be kept in one realm for the rest of his life. Eddie is still the definition of what the modern guitar hero was supposed to be, but sometimes it’s better for the greats to start going in different directions to see what other kind of magic is out there.
