The Van Halen song that captured Eddie breaking a guitar
During the early 1980s, Eddie Van Halen quickly became known as a mad scientist behind the fretboard. After the debut Van Halen album in 1978, Eddie was on a quest to do whatever he could with his six-string, whether hooking up different extensions or running it through a million different amplifiers. Although most of Van Halen’s material was meant to be user-friendly, most fans didn’t mind when Eddie took solos by himself, either.
Despite David Lee Roth’s nonstop charisma from one song to the next, much of Van Halen’s early works featured instrumental tracks that let Eddie do his thing. After blowing people away with the ultimate guitar solo, ‘Eruption’, the tune ‘Spanish Fly’ was added to the mix, featuring Eddie playing an entirely different solo on acoustic guitar using different flamenco styles.
As the ‘80s wore on, Eddie Van Halen started to venture outside the traditional realm of guitar, creating songs dominated by piano like ‘And the Cradle Will Rock’. Despite Roth’s insistence not to mess with the formula, Eddie continued to venture down the musical rabbit hole, experimenting with different tones in his guitar to make it sound closer to a piano. Although the band finally recouped from their monster touring schedule, the need for one more product led to them throwing everything into the mix for Diver Down.
Since the band were short on material, Eddie took it upon himself to write a new guitar showcase for the record, featuring him twiddling with the volume knobs of his guitar to simulate a church organ. Titled ‘Cathedral’, the tune sounds like Eddie is playing within the bowels of some Roman Catholic church, as the notes reverberate off the fretboard with ease.
Although Eddie is a monster, he admitted that the guitar wasn’t equipped for what he was about to do to the volume controls. In an interview later, Eddie remembered that the volume knob broke midway through the recording, saying (via Van Halen News Desk), “On that cut, I use the volume knob a lot. If you turn it up and down too fast, it heats up and freezes. I did two takes of that song, and right at the end, the volume knob just froze, just stopped”.
The effect can be heard towards the end of the tune, as Eddie’s flurry of notes continues to whirl around until nothing is left but a subtle swell of notes at the end. This song may have been used to fill up time on the final record, but Eddie was already hard at work on his next vision for 1984, putting his foot down about using keyboards on the record and refusing to compromise on Roth’s vision.
After butting heads throughout most of the recording, Roth elected to leave the group after the record was completed, with Sammy Hagar taking over lead vocals on later albums like 5150. The change in the lineup did nothing to dissuade Eddie, though, incorporating everything he could into his music, often flipping between piano and guitar depending on what the song called for. Eddie Van Halen might be known as a genius behind the fretboard, but what he played on ‘Cathedral’ indicates how well he understood his instrument.
