Vim Fuego
Van Halen has always been a bit of a mystery. Eddie Van Halen revolutionised the art of playing the electric guitar. His techniques were so unique that in the live setting he used to play solos with his back to the crowd so no one could see what he was doing. Alex Van Halen can be a stunning drummer when he’s given space to move. In David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar, the band had two of the most amazing and flamboyant front men in Rock. Um, and bass player Michael Anthony could play bass with his teeth. With all that in their favour, Van Halen should have been the best fucking band ever. Well, Van Halen is a pretty big band, and has been since first blowing rock fans away in 1978, but they have never consistently been the best.
See, what I don’t get is, despite the guitar maestro and larger-than-life frontmen, Van Halen has recorded a lot of godawful, pissweak songs over the years. This “Best Of” has concentrated a number of them all in one place.
OK, this may seem harsh, when you look at some of the songs here. “Eruption”, “Runnin’ With The Devil”, and “Panama” all leap out and hit you between the eyes. In a word, these songs rock, because they are ROCK songs. All the essential elements of good rock songs are there, and then there are those solos. The solos which launched a million air guitars, the solos which broke the spirit of legions of aspiring guitarists, knowing they’d never match them, the solos from heaven and hell.
But then, inexplicably, Van Halen developed a taste for writing insipid synth-pop mush. Sure, Eddie and Alex decorate a few of them with solos and flourishes of their own, and said tunes allowed the frontmen to shine, but they just didn’t rock. In fact, a lot of them suck. Take “Jump” for example. It’s one of the band’s biggest hits ever, but do you instantly recall any of the solos or guitar work? There’s some there, if you listen, but it’s not what catches your ear. Despite the popularity of the song in sporting stadia the world over, “Jump” is still little more than middle-of-the-road pop mush. It’s safe and sanitised, and hardly shows off anything which originally made Van Halen rock so much. “Poundcake” is equally as lame, as are pretty much half of the tracks here.
For some reason, possibly copyright or label related, the band’s breakthrough hit, a cover of The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” isn’t included, and even more disappointing is the omission of the school boy perv-fest “Hot For Teacher”.
Ultimately, the good time rock songs in Van Halen’s occasionally impressive repertoire are badly overshadowed by the poorly done pop songs. Van Halen. Great musicians, terrible songwriters.