Eddie Van Halen has passed and another era in rock music is over. The first six Van Halen albums are the ones to file under ‘essential listening’ - let this playlist be your guide. RIP EVH. We will remember your solos came with smiles. All hail the mighty Van Halen.
Words & curation by Keith, cover art by Mick
Eddie Van Halen has passed and another era in rock music is over. That overused word icon again looms large and quite rightly so. Eddie Van Halen didn’t invent the double handed fretwork technique he was famous for. He himself attributed that to Jimmy Page who he first saw do it - but Eddie took it as far as it could go: so deep into popular culture that any kid in the 80s learning to play the guitar wanted to know how to do “that Eddie Van Halen thing” before we could strum any Beatles chords. What the hell would we want to learn chords for when Eddie Van Halen was inventing all those riffs?
Mostly, we wanted to learn either ‘Eruption’ (impossible) or the solo he laid down for Micheal Jackson’s ‘Beat It’ (also, impossible). And that was what Eddie did, transform the guitar into a magic wand and play things on it and make sounds with it that were impossible to reproduce. As Jerry Cantrell of Alice In Chains put it recently, "Ed's a once or twice-in-a-century kind of guy, "There's Hendrix, and there's Eddie Van Halen. Those two guys tilted the world on its axis."
The first time he tilted mine (as a working class Northern English teenager with US high school daydreams) was that Beat It solo. And what a stroke of genius to invite him to do that on a pop single. But I remember exactly the moment Van Halen the band stopped me in my tracks, and that was hearing ‘Panama’ played on UK Radio 1. I was a rock kid, and I loved British metal and a lot of US hard rock, but until then Van Halen had eluded me. I thought they were too ill disciplined. I’d heard their cover version of Roy Orbison’s ‘Pretty Woman’ and if you have too, you’ll understand where I was coming from. But Panama was the opposite. It was an effective pop song, with everything in its right place: a crazy rock intro, a rollocking verse with a fantastic vocal turn by David Lee Roth, a catchy one word chorus and a blinding hot middle eight. And, if you tried really hard, it was just about easy enough to learn on guitar (even the solo). It is ace.
My friend ‘Jenks’ and I worshipped the song so much that once, after we’d crashed our way into a council estate party – the sort of gathering where literally anything could kick off at any moment with so much as a misconstrued look – we switched the soundtrack from what was probably Simply Red or Spandau, to Panama, thinking we might convert the locals to our more ‘transatlantic high school daydream’ way of thinking. The ‘dance floor’ cleared, and we swiftly made our exit. But wow, that track still burns whenever I hear it.
The other big track of the time was ‘Jump’ (in which EVH plays one of those keyboard solos that heavy metal bands specialise in i.e. a fast flurry of notes that is the direct equivalent of a guitar break) and both songs came from Van Halen’s 1984 album, which is one of the biggest rock records of the 80s. Like many fans, that is how I got started with Van Halen. However, as the obsession took hold, I began to appreciate that what I thought was ill discipline was in fact just the effervescent formula of the Van Halen brothers’ virtuosity and David Lee Roth’s charisma. Van Halen was a rock band with a pop sensibility and they were happy to go all over the place between the two genres. Through Lee Roth’s lyrics, they brought brighter, more everyday themes to rock songs and served them up with a sense of humour and even (how dare they) vulnerability. EVH himself would deliver his virtuoso riffs and solos with a big bright smile, revelling in the joy of it all. In doing all this, Van Halen quite literally brought a lighter touch to heavy metal. Once you got that, Van Halen got you.
I can’t remember in what order I backtracked from 1984 to their previous five LPs, but what I can tell you is that they are all distinctive and different from one another, and I’ll summarise for you shortly as a guide. But Eddie is gone, and so there can never be another Van Halen album after all. Their first six LPs (with the original line-up) burned into your brain, and after the long hiatus (and the Sammy Hagar years), they made one more album with Lee Roth: 2012’s rather bloated A Different Kind Of Truth.
There was perhaps no going back, but the prospect of a legendary rock band not even being able to give it a try adds to the sad clouds this year has cast, musically speaking. Now let’s all play them more on the radio and keep trying to emulate those pull-offs and hammer-ons. Even if they are impossible. :)
The first six Van Halen albums are the ones to file under ‘essential listening’:
Van Halen: a near perfect pop-rock debut with many of the songs good enough to be singles and a genuinely unique guitar sound i.e. Eddie Van Halen’s calling card. In fact, ‘Eruption’ was more than that, it was a threat to all other professional rock guitar players.
Van Halen II: despite containing some real rockers, the overall sound is lighter and poppier, with many of the songs including single ‘Dance The Night Away’ as close to bubble gum pop as you can expect heavy rock to get.
Women and Children First: heavier both musically and lyrically, the album is more representative of the hard rock scene in the USA as the 80s arrived. ‘And the Cradle Will Rock’ is the kind of song you can imagine blurting out of teenagers' bedroom (or Daddy’s car) windows. Eddie’s guitar sounded rougher and slower - there are shorter, simpler solos throughout with a focus more on classic rock riffs, at times verging on punk-rock and in some ways a very early version of grunge.
Fair Warning: different yet again, this was a return to pop-rock with shorter, catchier tunes (‘Unchained’ bounces off the studio tape) but again a bit of punk and even some jazzy slower numbers (Push Comes to Shove) with EVH often deploying the chorus pedal and in the case of Unchained, a flange. He is in the zone throughout, and David Lee Roth knew it, and raised his own game too. If you really want just one track that demonstrates what he could do then try putting on ‘Hear About It Later’ and just follow the guitar line. It comes from a different place.
Diver Down: a real mish-mash of an LP, it goes all over the place. It contains classic hard driving rock (Hang ‘em High), soft rock ballads (Secrets), funk-rock (Little Guitars) and a couple of eccentric instrumental interludes. EVH played hardly any solos on the album and no less than five of the twelve songs on there are covers, including that ill-disciplined cover of Roy Orbison’s ‘Pretty Woman’ (which was a massive US hit) and another curiosity in an electro-rock version of ‘Dancing in the Street’. It is short, very eclectic and sold bucket loads in the USA. And I played it to death.
1984: bringing us full circle, 1984 is a culmination of everything that had gone before. It had the pop-rock Van Halen style and sound down to perfection and contained quite a few bangers including its four hit singles Panama, Jump, I’ll Wait and Hot For Teacher. There is a reason it became a huge record. After the brief intro of the title track, it contains just eight songs, all of them pop-rock high-rollers. In a word, disciplined.
Afterword:
I’d have liked to have told Dave Lee Roth the story of Panama at the council estate party in darkest, coldest Hull, but alas, I did not. For a few long moments in 2016, I stood right next to him at the lunch buffet at Soho House on Sunset Boulevard: just Dave and I perusing the delights of the salad bar. But when you come to be that close in the company of one of your biggest idols, what do you say? We quietly filled out plates and nodded to one another and that was that. He’s a healthy guy and I hope he lives a long and healthy life.