The Van Halen songs David Lee Roth never wanted to release
Telling Eddie Van Halen not to play guitar solos is the equivalent of telling a locomotive to politely stay in place as it’s going down a train track.
Like it or not, Eddie was always going to be attached to his guitar, and even if his lead breaks could seem self-indulgent if it were any other guitarists, he was always the one person who was practically given permission to make as many weird noises as he wanted on the six-string. But there had to come a point where people started to have questions of how much of the record was going to turn into an instrumental project half the time.
Make no mistake, David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar did fantastic things for the Van Halen brand, but one of the main showcases was always Eddie’s guitar. ‘You Really Got Me’ is a fantastic cover of The Kinks and should be commended for launching the band to superstardom in many respects, but the fact that it came in on the back of ‘Eruption’ is the real pivot that shifted the rock and roll world on its axis.
But when looking at the way that ‘Diamond Dave’ and ‘The Red Rocker’ worked, it was always about trying to structure the tunes just right. A lot of what Eddie and Alex were working on weren’t even close to being full songs by the time that they were brought into the studio, so it was normally the frontman’s job to dictate where the song’s chorus was going to be, what the melody was going to do, and write all of the lyrics for them.
And while Roth was far from the greatest vocalist in the world, his voice had enough charisma to carry him through most of Van Halen’s classic records. A record like Women and Children First might have been the peak of where his screeches sounded great, but around the time of Fair Warning, you could tell that things were starting to change.
Eddie got to call the shots more in the studio on that record, but aside from ‘Unchained’, it’s not like a lot of the tunes ended up on the radio. The band needed some time to recharge their batteries, but since the beast needed to be fed, getting them back into the studio to work on Diver Down was always going to be a bit of a gamble. They were running on fumes by that point, but even when Eddie had time to fool around, Roth had reservations about him, including ‘Cathedral’.
Despite being one of his best solos, Eddie talked about how Roth fought him hard on putting it on the record, saying, “‘Cathedral’ I’ve been doing for over a year and I wanted to put it on a record. It’s just that Dave said, ‘No more fucking guitar solos.’ [Producer] Ted [Templeman] didn’t know that that’s the way Dave felt. And so one day when Dave wasn’t there, I said, ‘Ted, what do you think of this?’ I played him ‘Cathedral.’ And he’s going like ‘My God! Why the fuck didn’t you show me this earlier?!’ And I explained to him, ‘Well, Dave just said, ‘Fuck the guitar hero shit –we’re a band.’ So Ted just said, ‘Fuck Dave.’ So we put it on anyway.”
Eddie didn’t really need another reason to prove why he was one of the greatest guitarists in the world, but hearing what he did on ‘Cathedral’ doesn’t even sound like a guitar half the time. ‘Spanish Fly’ already proved that he didn’t need any effects to blow minds, but by giving him a volume knob and a few chords, he turned his guitar into a makeshift church organ whenever he started performing the tune live.
While the recording itself did end up costing Eddie his volume knob when it broke right at the end of the take, it’s interludes like this that actually make Diver Down more interesting as an album. They already didn’t have much to work with in terms of new material, so with this tune, ‘Intruder’, and the intro to ‘Little Guitars’, this is the best example of what Van Halen would sound like if they had made a mixtape.
