Edward Van Halen: A Definitive Biography (6 page)

Edward went to the Rainbow and had an interesting brush with fame when he met Ritchie Blackmore, who had been a significant influence on Ed, particularly with regard to the tremolo bar. The band of course had played several Deep Purple and Rainbow tunes. Eddie told Obrecht, “I met him once at the Rainbow with John Bonham when we were just playing clubs. You know, I grew up on him too, and I ran over and said hello, and they both just looked at me and said, ‘Who are you? Fuck off.’ And it pissed me off.”

By 1977, Van Halen had left the Starwood behind and played almost exclusively the Whisky a Go Go playing at least once per month, often doing two-night stands. They continued to promote their own mini-concerts as well, most importantly at the Pasadena Civic Center. They played the center three times throughout the year, with their triumphant December 20 show caught on tape. Every song they played would be on either
Van
Halen
or
Van
Halen
II
.

CHAPTER 7 

Van Halen and the Guitar-Making Artist

In no uncertain terms, Ted Templeman is ten million times the producer Gene Simmons could ever hope to be. The band turned themselves over to him completely. He has been referred to openly as the “fifth member” of Van Halen.

The first day in the studio, they went straight in and captured twenty-five songs on tape as quickly as possible. After evaluating the material, they whittled the list down to nine total songs plus “Jamie’s Cryin’” which was completed in the studio (Ed noted, “I already had the basic riff for that song”). Edward: “The album is very live—there are few overdubs, which is the magic of Ted Templeman.”

During the recording of the album, Ted was also producing Nicolette Larson’s debut album. She is most famous for the 70s soft rock song “Lotta Love” that went to #1 on the adult contemporary chart. Ted drafted Edward to play on one of her tracks. Dave objected: “When we made our first album for Warner Brothers, Ted Templeman, the producer, approached Edward and said, ‘I’d like you to play on the Nicolette Larson album.’ I got right between them, I said, ‘No way! You’re not going to run off with bits and pieces of the scenery before the play starts.’ Ed wanted to play on it. I said, ‘Great. But you got to put a question mark on where your name goes. Got to keep it all in one camp.’” Playing outside of Van Halen was considered a no-no as a
spoken
rule. It was the first but far from the last of such squabbles.

Ted produced Larson’s debut album
Nicolette
and it also came out in 1978. It went to #15. “Lotta Love” was written by Neil Young, and another song on the album, “Last in Love,” was written by Glenn Frey and J.D. Souther. Other artists that contributed to the album included James Burton (Elvis for starters), Michael McDonald and Patrick Simmons of the Doobs, Linda Ronstadt, Albert Lee, Klaus Voorman (of Plastic Ono Band and The Beatles’
Revolver
album cover fame), and… Edward Van Halen (who went uncredited).

The track was called “Can’t Get Away From You” and, for the most part, could easily be an ABBA song. Edward played on the entire track contributing a tight, driving rhythm guitar complete with his trademark flourishes. The guitar solo is almost completely in a major key and features Ed’s wild bends, but sounds a bit hokey, especially given the backing music. What is slightly shocking is the outro of this somewhat limp soft rock throwaway—the outro sounds like it could have been straight off of
Van
Halen
. It is nearly identical to the endings of “You Really Got Me,” “Ice Cream Man,” or “I’m the One.” It ends with a one hundred percent Eddie Van Halen uninterrupted solo flourish that spans a full nine seconds of the three minute track.

As for the recording of
Van
Halen
, Edward said, “I would say that out of the ten songs on the record, I overdubbed the solo on only ‘Runnin’ with the Devil,’ ‘Ice Cream Man,’ and ‘Jamie’s Cryin’.’ The rest are live… . Because we were jumping around, drinking beer, and getting crazy, I think there’s a vibe in the record.”

“Eruption”

In referring to the “ten songs” on the debut, Edward clearly did not consider one of the eleven tracks to be a “song” per se. It was not his intention to include a guitar solo instrumental on the album. During an interview conducted by Billy Corgan for a 1996 issue of
Guitar
Player
, Edward said: “The whole story behind ‘Eruption’ is unusual. It wasn’t even supposed to be on the album. I showed up at the recording studio early one day and started to warm up because I had a gig on the weekend and I wanted to practice my solo guitar spot. Our producer, Ted Templeman, happened to walk by and he asked, ‘What’s that? Let’s put it on tape!’ So I took one pass at it, and they put it on the record. I didn’t even play it right. There’s a mistake at the top end of it. To this day, whenever I hear it I always think, ‘Man, I could’ve played it better.’”

Never before on earth or in the nether reaches of the universe had there ever been a track like “Eruption.” For Edward, it’s “easy” to play. This last-minute addition, all 1:42 of it, changed the approach to the electric guitar forever (some sources say it was one single take; others say it was two or three takes). Quite simply, you’ve got pre-“Eruption” and you’ve got post-“Eruption.” If one was knowledgeable and had to pick just the top two (relatively unaccompanied) guitar solos, you’d be hard-pressed to pick anything but Jimi’s “Star-Spangled Banner” and “Eruption.” It is full of bluesy and classical sections, extreme tremolo bar dive bombs, and the ridiculous right-hand picking technique of death.

The man’s right-hand picking style was established as unique on two fronts. First, his standard picking attack using his wrist is one of a kind. The accuracy and speed of his attack—his
attack
—no one had reached that before. Another incredibly unique aspect of his picking technique is a move which involves locking his elbow in position and rapidly rotating his tibia and fibula while holding the pick between his thumb and middle finger. Using the latter technique, he hints at his over-the-top musical vocabulary toward the end of the first half of “Eruption” when he throws in a tongue-in-cheek nod to his violin days by quoting
Etude
No.
2
.

But of course, the big pay-off in “Eruption” is the neo-classical two-handed tapping section near the close. At some point, every single person that has ever picked up an electric guitar that had any sense of curiosity has attempted to learn that section. Not one day goes by at any Guitar Center in the world where someone is not overheard playing the tapping section of “Eruption” at least a dozen times per day every day for the last several decades. At the time, Eddie said, “A lot of people listen to that and they don’t even think it’s a guitar. ‘Is that a synthesizer? A piano? What is that?’”

The rest of
Van
Halen
was recorded in a live manner—with guitar, bass, drums, and even sometimes vocals all recorded absolutely live. The entire album was completed in three weeks time. The very first sound you hear on
Van
Halen
is a slowed down and reversed tape effect of car horns that Edward cobbled together. The first time the horns were used on a Van Halen recording was the 1976 demo of “House of Pain” when they were utilized as a brief sound effect.

Hands On

Edward had a hardcore creative and deconstructive/constructive streak in him. You hear car horns; he hears a sound effect. You probably don’t know the first thing about how to make such a device; Edward ripped out four car horns and got to work on it. “We took the horns out of all our cars,” he said, “my brother’s Opel, my old Volvo, ripped a couple out of a Mercedes and a Volkswagen—and mounted them in a box and hooked two car batteries to it and added a footswitch. We just used them as noisemakers before we got signed.”

Ed had already been doing his own thing with his instruments for a while at this point. Every off-the-rack guitar had a perceived problem from Edward’s point of view. They were either too thin sounding, not intonated correctly, frets too small, pickups in the wrong position, too many technical accoutrements, and, almost always, a tremolo bar that just didn’t work like he wanted it to. For all intents and purposes though, Eddie basically wanted a Strat-style guitar that sounded like a Gibson (common today, but theretofore unheard of).

He went straight to the Charvel guitar factory and bought a Stratocaster-copy body and neck for less than $200. He put in a modified Gibson PAF humbucking pick-up in the bridge position. Go into a guitar store and you’ll see countless variations of Strat-style guitars with humbuckers—but before 1978? Not so much. Edward’s unique mind conquered not only music, but the tools he used to make his music. Through his own bouts of trial and error, he figured out how to build a guitar to do exactly what
he
wanted it to do, to play exactly the way
he
wanted it to play, to sound exactly the way
he
wanted it to sound. Therein lies a major point of distinction between Edward and his oft referred to “competitor” as king of the electric guitar, Hendrix. Edward didn’t sing lead and write lyrics, but Jimi was perfectly content to take any Fender Stratocaster just exactly as it was made, no questions asked. To make it all the more simple, Edward’s guitar had just one knob, a volume knob—no tone knob. “I don’t use any fancy tone knobs,” he said. A tone knob on a guitar?! Fancy? The ability to adjust the difference of the output between treble and bass? Reiterated on yet another occasion: “No fancy tone knobs here!”

If anything was
fancy
about this particular guitar, it was Edward’s paint job, a seemingly random pattern of lines (and a little squiggly thing). Ed brushed it off, “Painted it up, you know, with stripes and stuff. I guess that’s my thing.” Again, Jimi did paint his guitar for Monterey, the one he burned, but when you think of Jimi, the guitar in his hands is bone white. Ed’s guitar looked completely like his and his alone. He used tape to make the lines in various widths, lengths, and directions. He preferred Schwinn bicycle paint: “It’s acrylic lacquer, like car paint. It’s good paint.” At first, this guitar—known as the Frankenstein—was just black and white, but it is the exact same guitar he is so famously known for (he added the red paint a little over a year later).

The “striped art” concept, if you will, was completely original in the world of art (“I love stripes,” he said). His unique design is as instantly recognizable as the American flag. The mouse pad on my office desk is an official red, black, and white striped pad. The photo of Eddie on the cover of
Van
Halen
, taken at the Whisky, shows him proudly brandishing his creation. The black and white stripes on his guitar make the whole cover. It is iconic. Arguably, it’s as original and unique as a Jackson Pollock work.

The getting-to-be-not-so young man, twenty-three years old as of January 1978, was a legitimate artist, even punk rock in his approach—he didn’t even need tone knobs! “A lot of bands keep hacking it out and doing so many overdubs and double-tracking that their music doesn’t sound real. And there are also a lot of bands that can’t pull it off live because they have overdubbed so much stuff in the studio that it either doesn’t sound the same, or they just stand there pushing buttons on their tape machines. We kept it really live.” Punk rock. Not Fleetwood Mac.

He built his own guitar. He inadvertently cast himself as an immensely successful graphic designer by painting his guitar in an extraordinarily original way. And he played the thing like no one had ever played one before. But damned if he wasn’t still a bit naïve.

The Release of
Van
Halen

So proud of the
Van
Halen
recordings, Edward took a tape of the album to play for the members of Angel at the home of drummer Barry Brandt. Angel on Casablanca… Angel discovered by Gene Simmons. Totally and completely without ill intent, Eddie played them a tape of the record. Shortly after, Ted called Eddie. Ted was furious. Ted informed him that Angel was in the studio trying to rush-release a copycat version of Van Halen’s take on The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me.” All’s fair, apparently. Of course, the VH version would be unbelievably superior to Angel’s version, so Angel (and Bill Aucoin, and Gene, and Casablanca) would have only succeeded to confuse the market. Somewhere, alone with his thoughts, he undoubtedly referred back to the money disbursement at the wedding and Jan’s “welcome to the music business” remark. Bill Aucoin looked Edward straight in the eyes, knowing how bad he wanted to make it—a kid flying all the way from Los Angeles to New York for his shot at the big time—and told him no. Then he tried to pull the rug out from under him. It was personal.

Because of Ed’s mistake,
Van
Halen
was in turn rush-released in February to beat Angel to the sucker punch. There wasn’t a whole hell of a lot of time for build-up publicity, and, in the scurry, Dave convinced the band to all shave two years off their ages—age fabrication being a longstanding entertainment industry tradition, no doubt. Because of this, Ed’s age would constantly be reported incorrectly for years. Many years later, Edward said, “I should’ve known when Roth said, ‘Let’s say we’re two years younger than we really are.’ And I’d say, ‘Why? I’m only 22. What’s the difference?’ That still causes problems for me to this day.”

Within a month,
Van
Halen
was #19 on the U.S. album charts. March 3, 1978 marked the dawn of a new era in Edward’s life. He became Edward the worldwide touring musician. Although he and Alex technically lived with their parents, the road would become home. It was definitely fun at first.