Straight outta Pasadena, Van Halen were America's ultimate party band, monstrously entertaining and gleefully ambitious, a classically Californian quartet formed by two Dutch immigrants. They also happened to revolutionise rock music.
When the band’s debut album was released on February 10, 1978 – on the same day as that other late-70s game changer, Judas Priest's Stained Class – singer David Lee Roth was typically hyperbolic. “This is the 1980s!” he boasted, keen to show just how far ahead of the pack his band was. “And this is the new sound – it’s hyper, it’s energy, it’s urgent.”
The key to that new sound was the genius of Eddie Van Halen, whose extraordinarily fleet-fingered playing created a template that's still in use today. Allied to his band's thrilling, fuel-injected anthems – and a liberal sprinkling of effervescent covers – Van Halen's songs were the soundtrack to a life lived more loudly.
Here are 50 of the best.
50. Dance The Night Away
Dance The Night Away was reportedly inspired by Fleetwood Mac’s Go Your Own Way, and indeed, the song is one of the few pure pop tunes of the Dave Lee Roth era. As such, the emphasis is heavily on the vocals and chorus harmonies (the title refrain was originally ‘Dance Lolita Dance’, until Roth was convinced otherwise). Although Eddie’s guitar is uncharacteristically restrained (no solo!), he still contributes some stellar harmonics work and a classic major-chord riff.
49. Best Of Both Worlds
This 5150 track, featuring a wide-open cowboy chord riff that sounds like AC/DC playing Kool & The Gang’s Celebration, is one of the most well-known songs of the Sammy Hagar era. A live version, lifted from the 1986 Live Without A Net home video, was a minor hit on MTV, allowing viewers who couldn’t make it to the show the opportunity to witness Sam, Ed and Mike march in line formation – and Day-Glo trousers – across the concert stage.
48. Top Of The World
Does that opening riff sound a little familiar? That’s because it’s more or less the same one Ed played almost a decade earlier on the fadeout to 1984’s Jump. Legend has it that Eddie didn’t want Top Of The World included on For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, preferring to focus on fresher material. Producer Andy Johns convinced him otherwise, but not before Eddie could pull out another blast from the past – he recorded the song using the ’58 Gibson Flying V he played on another 1984 hit, Hot For Teacher.
47. Poundcake
The massive guitar sound on this track is the result of Eddie overdubbing three rhythm guitar parts: his main six-string, and two tracks of electric 12-string, for which he played a custom model built by English guitar-maker Roger Giffin. Combined with the cascades of guitar harmonics that ring throughout, a white-hot solo spot and an intro played with the assistance of a Makita power drill, Poundcake announced that EVH was still a major guitar force to be reckoned with.
46. Dancing In The Street
Eddie played this song’s riff on a Minimoog synthesizer processed with the same echo effect he used on Cathedral (also from Diver Down) – “two songs I couldn’t have done without an echo,” he admitted. “The riff was taken from a song of my own that I was in the midst of writing. Ted [Templeman, producer] heard it and said, ‘Hey, let’s use it for Dancing In The Street.’ Maybe if I played it on guitar on the record it would have been better.”
45. She's The Woman
After recording three demo versions – an early self-produced take, one with Gene Simmons in 1976 and another with Ted Templeman in 1977 – Van Halen finally released an official studio version of She’s The Woman on their 2012 album A Different Kind of Truth. Since Eddie had already lifted the original solo section and used it in Mean Street, he wrote a new one that, in addition to the intro’s cool chromatic bass figure, really allowed his son, bassist Wolfgang, to strut his stuff.
44. One Foot Out The Door
Fair Warning’s closing track was reportedly recorded on the quick, when the band literally had one foot out the door of the studio. Built on an ominous, burbling synth line carried over from the album’s previous track, the instrumental Sunday Afternoon In The Park, the song is a bare-bones rocker that fl ies by in a mere 1:58. Even better, more than half of that time is taken up by a furious EVH solo.
43. Why Can't This Be Love
Released in March 1986 as the first single from 5150, Why Can’t This Be Love was for most people the first music heard from the Sammy Hagar-led Van Halen. And indeed, the song’s bright, bouncy and downright pop sound, which features Eddie playing an Oberheim OB-8 synth, made it clear that, yeah, they were serious about that keyboard thing. How serious, you ask? When Van Halen performed this song live in the 80s, Eddie would often stick to the keys and leave the guitar rhythms – and solo – to Sammy.
42. Finish What Ya Started
With its twangy finger-picked guitar lines, dry drums and lyrics about unsatisfying sex (dreamt up by Sammy Hagar in a 2am session, after Eddie brought him a riff he’d just written), Finish What Ya Started is easily the most un-Van Halen song in the band’s catalogue. At times it’s near impossible to reconcile the suave, almost countrified infl ections and bright acoustic strumming with the group behind such beefy, all-the-way-to-eleven anthems as Hot For Teacher, Unchained, Panama etc. “Preposterous!” you’ll cry, just as you realise you’ve been humming the chorus for the last week…
41. Tattoo
Tattoo is based on an early Van Halen tune titled Down In Flames that was slated to appear on Van Halen II. Instead it emerged – with new lyrics, solo and other pieces – 34 years later as the leadoff single from A Different Kind Of Truth. The result is a comfortable and welcome link between Van Halen past and present. And take note of the guitar swells at the song’s coda, which did actually make it onto Van Halen II – as the intro to that album’s You’re No Good.
40. (Oh) Pretty Woman
Eddie came up with the idea to record a cover version of this early 60s Roy Orbison hit when Van Halen’s record label pressured them for a single after the Fair Warning tour. Eddie liked its riff, but much to his chagrin, the song became the band’s biggest hit, despite being one of only two Van Halen songs to that date without a guitar solo. “It shows you how much guitar solos mean to people,” he lamented later.
39. Hang 'Em High
The Warner Bros demo track Last Night had to wait five years before it made the cut for Diver Down, trading its lame lyrics about a suspicious boyfriend for one of Diamond Dave’s obtuse fables of danger and machismo. The reworked track is far more interesting, but Eddie’s solo was almost identical in both versions, right down to the midsolo key change, hammer-on trills and whammy workout.
38. 5150
After hearing the rapid-fire double-stops and massive cascading drums that fill the first full minute of 5150, you’ll wonder why Van Halen didn’t just carry on as an instrumental trio after the departure of Dave Lee Roth. To his credit, Sammy Hagar squeals his highest note ever on the outro, but Eddie’s solo is a stronger musical statement: a glorious 32-bar showcase of pure six-string skills. Let the man play all the synths he wants; this title track is his gift to his guitar fans.
37. Feel Your Love Tonight
During the 80s countless hair metal pop hits copied this song’s formula verbatim, from Roth’s horny lyrics to the guitar-and-vocals-only breakdown during the choruses. However, none of the imitations equalled this song’s lurid depiction of teenage lust, which was effective for inciting young couples into backseat action. Those of us who came of age during the 70s pity today’s teenagers with their Justin Biebers et al. It’s a wonder anyone gets laid these days.
36. Sinner's Swing
That was spontaneous, a first take,” Eddie said. That in-the-moment intensity is clear on the final product, as is some of the Fair Warning in-studio anxiety. An aggravated groove constantly shoves the song forward. Dave’s urgent vocals suggest a lothario on the prowl, and Ed’s frantic, slightly sloppy solo feels more like a panic attack, with rapid-fire tapping and hammer-ons barely constrained by six high-tension wires.
35. Cathedral
Plenty of guitarists (most notably David Gilmour, The Edge and Albert Lee) had exploited the dotted-eighth-note-echo trick previously, but Eddie gave the effect a new twist by playing his with volume control swells on his guitar. This combined with cavernous reverb, made his guitar sound like an organ. The first of three brief instrumental interludes on Diver Down, Cathedral stands alone as a complete musical piece instead of functioning as an extended song intro.
34. Girl Gone Bad
Dramatic and dynamic, Girl Gone Bad is the closest thing Van Halen ever recorded to a progressive rock epic, with Eddie and Alex interlocking with stunning, nearly psychic precision to create a mammoth wall of sound. Ed’s virtuoso guitar performance is like a condensed encyclopedia of his signature techniques, incorporating chiming harmonics, expansive open-string textures, melodic chord figures, brutal riffs, tremolo picking, tapping, squeals and dive bombs, but his “outside” jazzy flourishes may be the most impressive aspect of his tour de force solo.
33. I'll Wait
Although Jump is the 1984 song commonly credited with igniting the “to-keyboard-or-not-to-keyboard” rift in the VH camp, it was actually I’ll Wait that, as Eddie recounted, David Lee Roth and producer Ted Templeman “didn’t want to touch with a 10-foot pole”. And indeed, whereas Jump is a guitar-based rocker at heart, I’ll Wait is pure synth-pop, with Alex Van Halen on Rototoms and a co-writer credit for ex-Doobie Brother crooner Michael McDonald to boot.
32. When It's Love
The first song written for OU812 – hearing the music in the car en route from the airport, Sammy Hagar wrote the lyrics before they reached the studio – Eddie called this unabashed power ballad “a classic tune” in 1988. “It’s pretty, it’s heavy, it’s melodic, it’s singalong… it’s just a happening song.” Eddie, who always cited Eric Clapton as a major influence, intended this song’s solo as an overt tribute to Slowhand’s style.
31. I’m The One
At its core I’m The One is a hot-rodded blues boogie tune that provided a springboard for Eddie to show off his impressive shredding chops, with a jazz scat vocal harmony interlude thrown in for comic relief. The true inspiration for Joe Satriani’s Satch Boogie starts here, as Satriani copped everything, from Alex’s thundering double-kick shuffle to Eddie’s ascending triplet runs. Numerous shredders followed suit, but none were able to swing quite like Eddie did here.
30. Where Have All The Good Times Gone?
David Lee Roth once said that Van Halen learned six Kinks songs from a K-Tel greatest-hits album, but this song and You Really Got Me are their only Kinks covers that have surfaced. Considering the dearth of original songs on Diver Down, Van Halen probably should have retitled the song Where Have All Our Good Tunes Gone! but they still managed to deliver a spirited performance even if their revision of this Kinks classic wasn’t as earth shattering as You Really Got Me.
29. Right Now
Eddie wrote this with Joe Cocker in mind, thinking the band might use guest vocalists after Dave’s departure. It was a massive commercial hit with Sammy instead, using a dramatic piano riff borrowed from Eddie’s soundtrack to the 1984 teen flick The Wild Life. The addition of a Hammond organ-Leslie speaker combo made for a keyboard-heavy anthem that “some people thought was risky,” Eddie said, “but to me, it’s not even stepping out. It’s still a rock tune.”
28. Top Jimmy
During the early 80s David Lee Roth frequented a notorious Hollywood after-hours club/art gallery called Zero Zero, where he commiserated with a bohemian crowd of lowbrow artists, models, underground filmmakers and punk rockers. Here he met rhythm ’n’ booze singer Top Jimmy of Top Jimmy & the Rhythm Pigs, who passed away in 2001 but remains immortal thanks to this song. Ed used a DADACD tuning and played a Ripley stereo guitar with individual strings panned left or right in an alternating fashion.
27. So This Is Love?
"I definitely had a lot of pissed-off energy in me that I got out on Fair Warning,” Eddie admitted. “It does have kind of a dark underlying tone to it.” So why is this tasty piece of ear candy the only Van Halen song that can legitimately be called “jaunty”? Credit Michael Anthony – this strutter positively bounces on the bass line, flowing into a smooth groove that finds the band thoroughly in the moment.
26. Romeo Delight
Some of the rhythm and lyrical elements of this Women And Children First track were lifted from an earlier Van Halen tune, Get The Show On The Road, which appeared on their 1977 Warner Bros. demo. Although the song is a scorching rocker – David Lee Roth himself described it as “powerrock; twice as fast as your hearbeat”, it also features some more subtle ingredients, such asthe incessant ‘heartbeat’ sound heard during the verses and breakdown. Eddie explained: “Mike was picking quietly, and I tapped my strings against the pickup poles.”
25. Women In Love
Along with the same album’s Spanish Fly, the unaccompanied guitar intro to Women In Love is a rare early documentation of Eddie Van Halen’s stunning technique stripped of amp distortion. The 30 seconds of clean-toned, tap-harmonic-infused lines display yet another tool in the guitarist’s seemingly bottomless arsenal, while the song’s lyrics detail a rare instance in which David Lee Roth actually loses the girl.
24. Little Dreamer
This live staple of the group’s early days shows the polish and comfort of a road-tested tune. David Lee Roth gets the chance to prove he can do more than just wail, squeal and leap around as the band’s hyperactive frontman – on this track, he shows he can actually sing. And sing well. Eddie offers some attention-grabbing rapid-fire pyrotechnics in the solo, but he clearly steps back and helps create a mid-tempo, brooding groove so Diamond Dave can have the spotlight.
23. Jump
Eddie previously played synthesiser on songs like One Foot Out The Door and Dancing In The Street, but here he plays his Oberheim OB-Xa like a true keyboard instrument instead of a surrogate guitar. “Certain people didn’t want me playing keyboards because they thought I should only be a guitar hero,” he recalled. “But hey, I’ll play a Bavarian cheese whistle, if I can play it well – whatever that is.” Eddie called his guitar solo – spliced from two separate takes – his favourite solo he never wrote.
22. Spanish Fly
Eruption turned the rock guitar world on its head. So what did Eddie Van Halen do for an encore? He unleashed another acrobatic, tap-infused shredfest – on acoustic guitar. A jaw-dropping performance, Spanish Fly had modest origins. Eddie was “fooling around” on an acoustic when producer Ted Templeman “walked in and said ‘You can play acoustic?’ I looked at him like, What’s the difference? It’s got six strings! I ended up coming up with Spanish Fly.”
21. Somebody Get Me A Doctor
Although it didn’t appear on record until Van Halen II, Somebody Get Me A Doctor dates back to the band’s club days and appears on the demo (with the intro chords reversed) that they recorded with Gene Simmons in 1976. In addition to a riff that’s as funky as anything in the Van Halen catalogue, Eddie offers up a solo that is positively blazing. Just how blazing? At its conclusion you can actually hear him get a round of applause from the band.
20. Dirty Movies
David Lee Roth spins a seedy tale of a prom-queen-turned-porn-queen, and Eddie matches him with a suitably lewd-sounding guitar melody – only his second slide guitar performance (after Could This Be Magic?) on a Van Halen record. Eddie cut the song on a modifi ed Gibson SG, which underwent further alteration during the recording sessions. When the guitar’s bottom horn impeded his ability to reach the uppermost frets with his slide, he recalled, “I took a hacksaw right there in the studio and sawed it off.”
19. Jamie's Cryin'
One of the few songs on the first album that was written in the studio, this pop-friendly track also features one of the album’s few overdubbed solos. The juicy midrange rhythm tone came from a korina Ibanez Destroyer, which Eddie said “was a great-sounding guitar – until I took a chunk out of it to make it look different. On the cover of Women And Children First, it’s missing a piece. Boy, did I screw it up.”
18. Little Guitars
The title refers to the miniature Les Paul replica built by Nashville luthier David Petschulat that Eddie used to record this song, which gave the guitar parts a distinctive, bright tone. Even cooler is the way Ed plucks chordal figures on several strings simultaneously to create a choppy effect similar to what Pete Townshend played on Won’t Get Fooled Again, but Eddie used only his fingers instead of an organ processed through a synthesiser. American critic Chuck Klosterman recently called its intro “Eruption without electricity”
17. Push Comes To Shove
Although Eddie said that Push Comes To Shove “was Roth’s idea of trying to cash in on the reggae thing,” it’s really more of a slow, grinding funk song, thanks to Michael Anthony’s disco bass line, Alex’s steady drumming and Eddie’s chorus-processed rhythms that slink instead of skank. The guitar solo, however, veers into jazz-fusion territory as Eddie unleashes smooth legato lines reminiscent of Allan Holdsworth and palm-muted melodic runs à la Al Di Meola.
16. Atomic Punk
Eddie often credited Black Sabbath as an early musical influence, and you can really hear that inspiration during this song’s verses when he plays rapidfire staccato eighth notes that evoke Paranoid. But Tony Iommi never played anything as brutally boisterous as EVH’s intro, where he summoned a wash of dissonant white noise by rubbing the strings with his palm and processing the signal with an MXR Phase 90, creating what sounds like a helicopter with chainsaws for rotor blades.
15. D.O.A.
By combining Eddie Cochran teenage blues, Tom Waits gutter grit and one-chord punk-rock raunch, Van Halen created a poetic anthem of untamed youth that’s the aural equivalent of a 50s juvenile-delinquent exploitation film. Eddie’s acrobatic solo ascends, dives and spins out of control like a stunt pilot and ends with him wiggling an obnoxious mocking melody with his whammy bar, like a stiff middle finger waved under a police officer’s nose.
14. Take Your Whiskey Home
This throbbing, mid-tempo song is distinctive in the DLR-era Van Halen catalogue for how positively restrained the band sounds. Roth sticks mainly to his lower register, floating somewhere between singing and speaking the lyrics, while Eddie weaves a snakelike single-note riff around the rhythm section’s incessant and steady thud. But this is Van Halen, of course, so there are still a few fi reworks: a nimble and bluesy acoustic-guitar-and-vocal intro, and two quick but deadly EVH solo spots.
13. Ice Cream Man
In his pre-Van Halen days, David Lee Roth used to perform this horny mid-century blues – originally by John Brim – in solo acoustic form. It became a Van Halen staple early on, before being recorded for posterity on the band’s 1978 debut. And while Dave’s vocals and acoustic guitar (tuned to open E) are a highlight of the studio version, Eddie made sure to firebomb the proceedings with one of his most electrifying solos on record.
12. Everybody Wants Some
Van Halen at their most primal. Alex pounds out a tribal beat, DLR whoops and wails, and Eddie rubs out animalistic noises on his guitar strings before raining down massive chord chunks. And while the largely ad-libbed lyrics are mostly nonsensical (‘I took a mobile light, lookin’ for a moonbeam’), the chorus is as direct and forceful as it gets. As Eddie said of the song’s massive sound, “I just turn it up. Everything is on 10.”
11. Light Up The Sky
Both Eddie and Alex proclaimed this their favourite Van Halen II track in 1979 due to what Eddie called its “progressive” feel. “The changes are a little more bent than the commercial stuff.” True enough: the intro joust between guitar and bass heralds wide dynamic shifts between quiet passages, balls-out rock riffage and a drum breakdown, capped by a solo full of tremolo picking and precise whammy waggles. There’s a lot of drama in these three minutes.
10. And The Cradle Will Rock
The hard-rocking Cradle was actually Eddie’s first foray into using keyboards on a Van Halen song. He performed the rhythm part on a Wurlitzer electric piano cranked through his 100-watt Marshall amp. The resulting sound was oddly guitar-like and contributed to the song’s haunting vibe. Still, Eddie received blowback from some of his bandmates. “They didn’t want a ‘guitar hero’ playing keyboards,” he recalled. “And that kind of ties in with why they didn’t want Jump.”
9. You Really Got Me
Van Halen’s cover of The Kinks’ You Really Got Me premiered on LA radio station KMET months before their debut album. Allegedly, it was rush released because Eddie let Barry Brandt of Angel hear the track, which inspired Angel to record their own version. “It bummed me out that our first single was somebody else’s tune,” Ed said. Even so, Van Halen made the song their own with three-part harmony vocals, Eddie’s raucous guitar tone, and the first taste of his revolutionary tapping technique. No wonder Angel’s version never materialised.
8. Eruption
The song that flummoxed, inspired and intimidated a generation of wannabe guitar players. Its first few seconds are practically a direct lift from the intro to Let Me Swim by 70s boogie rockers Cactus, but what follows is arguably the most inventive, groundbreaking and utterly mind-blowing rock guitar demonstration of the past four-plus decades.
Eddie’s instrumental tour de force explodes with lightning-fast runs, screaming pinch harmonics, insane dive bombs, nods to 18th century violin etudes and furious tremolo picking, among other techniques. And if the song doesn’t necessarily represent the first time a guitar player ever tapped, it is at least the first time people heard a guitarist tap for a good half minute.
To this day, it’s the yardstick by which all shredfests are measured, but that doesn’t mean EVH was wholly impressed. “There’s a mistake at the top end of it,” he told Guitar World. “Whenever I hear it, I always think ‘Man, I could have played that better.”
7. Panama
Panama is Van Halen being quintessentially Van Halen. Roth is all brash swagger, with the hottest ride on the block. And, hey – he may have just stolen your girl, too! Musically, Eddie’s riffing, paired with the propulsive rhythm, is the aural equivalent of burnin’ down the avenue full blast with the top down. And that whooshing sound heard during Dave’s midsong soliloquy? That would be the engine of Eddie’s Lamborghini, with microphones on the exhaust pipes.
6. Mean Street
Originally recorded as a demo called Voodoo Queen, Mean Street was reworked with darker lyrics, a dramatic chorus and a bridge lifted from early versions of She’s The Woman, the song that surfaced on A Different Kind Of Truth and that the group unveiled during their performance at New York City’s Cafe Wha? in early 2012. Eddie’s outrageous intro was inspired by funk slap bass. “I tapped on the 12th fret of the low E and the 12th fret of the high E and muffl ed both with my left hand down by the nut,” he said.
5. Runnin' With The Devil
On the two occasions that Van Halen recorded this song as a demo – first with Gene Simmons producing in 1976 and again in 1977 with Ted Templeman and Mo Ostin as producer – it came directly after House Of Pain. The intro’s unique dissonant, descending sound effect, created using a collection of car horns and tape manipulation, was actually the ending of House Of Pain, and the car horns appeared briefly throughout that song.
While the effect was somewhat distracting between songs, Templeman realised it would make a brilliant attention-getting intro, so he decided to sequence Runnin’ With The Devil as the first song on Van Halen’s debut album. With its basic chord progression and melodic guitar ‘solos’, Runnin’ With The Devil is one of the simplest songs Van Halen ever recorded, but like Smoke On The Water and Iron Man, a big part of its power comes from that simplicity. Yet, to paraphrase Roth’s lyrics, the simple things weren’t so simple.
Little embellishments – like the harmonised vocals on the chorus, the rhythm section’s deep groove that swings as much as it stomps, and even the way Eddie rakes the strings between the bridge and stop tailpiece on his Ibanez Destroyer on the intro – make Van Halen’s recording nearly inimitable. Perhaps the most striking feature of this song is Van Halen’s raw, violent and hungry attitude. It’s the kind of thing that only exists during that magical make-or-break moment when a band announces its presence to the world at large.
4. Beautiful Girls
Back in the 70s and 80s, most aspiring bands enjoyed the rite of passage of playing at strip clubs and wet T-shirt contests. This privilege has now passed on to the club DJ, but while it lasted it was one of the best gigs an up-and-coming musician could hope to get (especially if you managed to get lucky after the show).
“It was one of the reasons why we played,” Alex explained. “It’s just life. It’s seeing everything, enjoying it, and taking it a little bit further than it should. You had to do the wet T-shirt contest during the fourth set. You had to get the girls lubed up, and then they would get looser and start to hike their skirts up.”
While Van Halen had plenty of songs that could fill the bill, they went one better by writing their own ode to ogling called Bring On The Girls with a bump-and-grind riff, raunchy rhythm and lascivious lyrics guaranteed to get things going. Due to record label pressure, the band toned down the lyrics slightly from the 1977 demo version and renamed the song Beautiful Girls when they recorded it for Van Halen II.
3. Unchained
Unchained is not just a welcome major-key party anthem in the middle of the moody Fair Warning – it’s the Van Halen song that sold a million guitar fl anger effects pedals. By carefully setting the fl anger speed to sweep up in pitch on one half of the main riff and down on the next, Eddie created a risingand-falling rollercoaster vibe that gave the fans a chance to throw their hands in the air and go along for the wild ride. A short, surprisingly restrained solo begins with some fl ash but quickly swings straight into melodic territory, bringing the break to a crisp crescendo.
The song makes a perfect showcase for Roth’s swagger, Michael Anthony’s harmonies, Alex’s percussive thunder, and, per Eddie’s choice on this album, plenty of guitar overdubs. And hearing Eddie play several guitar parts at once is just more of a good thing. Whether the ad-libbed conversation between Dave and the apparently sharp-dressed producer Ted Templeman was really a spontaneous creation or a rehearsed bit is still up for discussion, but it hardly matters – it’s proof that the band’s playful personality was still in evidence, despite a widening rift between producer and artist.
“I felt at the time that [Templeman] didn’t understand me anymore,” Eddie said. “I’d get so frustrated at not being able to do what I wanted. I ended up doing 90 percent of the guitar tracking at four o’clock in the morning with our engineer, Donn Landee.” They say adversity inspires greatness, and with Unchained, the ire clearly fuelled the fire.
2. Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love
Much as Slash has gone on record saying that his legendary guitar intro to Sweet Child O’ Mine was written as a joke, Eddie Van Halen downplayed Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love as “just a stupid thing. Just two chords”. But to paraphrase Spinal Tap, there’s a fine line between stupid and clever. And this classic track from Van Halen’s 1978 debut (as well as Slash’s work on Sweet Child, for that matter) falls firmly into the latter category.
Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love was one of the last songs written for Van Halen, and Eddie originally conceived the straightforward, two-chord basher as a knock on the then-burgeoning punk movement. But apparently “punk rock” as played by Eddie Van Halen includes an opening riff built on heavily palm-muted, arpeggiated chords, a third-verse breakdown fi lled with chiming harmonics, and a hooky, almost vocal-like guitar solo that, on the album version, Eddie doubled with an electric sitar. Of playing the sitar, he recalled, “It sounded like a buzzy-fretted guitar. The thing was real bizarre.”
In the end, perhaps the joke was on Ed, as Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love has gone on to become one of Van Halen’s most iconic tunes. In addition to being a classic-rock radio staple, it was played on almost every tour the band did with Roth. And in perhaps an even greater testament to its popularity, it was one of the few DLR-era songs that remained in live sets during the Sammy Hagar years.
1. Hot For Teacher
A quintessential classic Van Halen song must have several crucial elements: thundering drums, rumbling bass that is felt more than heard, an outrageously cocky vocal performance, a killer guitar riff, and an acrobatic guitar solo with more thrills and spills than Evel Knievel jumping 25 explosive-filled cars with a dirt bike and a fifth of Jack Daniel’s.
Hot For Teacher delivers all of these elements and then some, making it the definitive Van Halen song. The song begins with a bang, with Alex Van Halen pummelling a rapid-fire intro that sounds more like a dragster warming up for a race than a drum kit. Eddie kicks the dynamics up a notch, furiously tapping his Flying V’s fretboard before blasting off into power-chord overdrive. The song’s real appeal, however, lies in its infectious nitro-fuelled boogie-blues shuffle, which sounds like ZZ Top juiced on meth and Viagra.
“That song was beyond any boogie I ever heard,” Eddie recalled, “it was pretty powerful.” DLR walks a tightrope between macho metal posturing and tongue-in-cheek humour, making a possibly obscene scenario seem absurd. Eddie’s solo is pure excitement, distinguished by dazzling ascending runs and a loose, flowing feel that makes even his most challenging passages sound effortless and unforced. The boisterous climax, lifted from the band’s 1977 demo of Voodoo Queen, is an aural orgasm that probably left most first-time listeners shouting “Oh my god!” in weak-kneed unison with Roth.
