Van Halen’s defining 1978 single started life as a punk song: “An innovator”
“An inventor”. That’s what Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi called Eddie Van Halen, and you can understand why.
When we talk about great guitarists, we tend to get bogged down in just how efficiently they played, but with Eddie Van Halen, it was a lot more than that. A good guitarist picks up a six-string and plays it well. But a revolutionary guitarist picks up that same six-string and decides they want to play it in a completely different way than is conventional.
“We used to have such a great time together. We really spilt our hearts out with each other,” said Tony Iommi. “What I like about Eddie, he was always an inventor. He’d always want to come up with something new. He worked hard to develop his own amplifiers. And he’d work on his own guitars as best he could to make them feel comfortable to him. He was always very much an innovator with a bunch of things.”
By doing this, Eddie was essentially able to make his very own guitar tone. On top of that, he played with a brand new tapping technique, which allowed him to reach solo speeds that other guitarists were incapable of. Before Van Halen had even released a song, it was clear that their guitarist had a fresh approach to rock, which was going to set them apart from other bands out there.
That being said, it’s one thing to be able to play the guitar in a unique way, but another thing entirely to take that unique style of playing and turn it into something half decent. There are plenty of innovative and exciting musicians out there, but they weren’t able to channel that creativity into a song that people actually wanted to listen to. It’s a very hard balance to strike, and one that it took Van Halen a while to figure out.
The issue that the band had at first was that they were taking inspiration from the wrong genre. They were making music towards the back end of the ‘70s, which is when punk rock was having its moment in the US and the UK. Eddie was a big fan and so tried to write music in a similar way, which is how he came up with the first draft of their track ‘Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love’.
The issue is that punk music relied on simplicity. All of the songs that were coming out of that movement consisted of two chords, which served those bands well, but it wasn’t the style that Van Halen should have been trying to make. Eddie’s unique tone and playing style favoured complexity, and so having songs that were incredibly basic alongside that extravagant playing style simply didn’t work.
That being said, even when the song was in its draft phase, anyone within earshot could tell that it had serious potential. As such, David Lee Roth put some vocals to it, and the band continued to work on it until it evolved into the classic hit that we know and love today.
Van Halen are considered one of the most influential rock bands on the planet, and their trajectory to the top started with early hits like ‘Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love’. It took the band a while to finish the track, but once they did, they worked out what kind of sound would perfectly suit Eddie Van Halen’s unique playing.
