The songs Eddie Van Halen wished had never happened: 🗣️“Wasn’t my idea”

There can always be a certain pain that comes with revisiting one’s back catalogue. As much as people like the idea of seeing a band’s evolution across their albums, what could sound naive and charming to someone’s ears can be like looking at the embarrassing moments from a musician’s adolescence half the time. No one can claim to be completely proud of everything they put out, and Eddie Van Halen would have rather played things a lot differently when he first started making music.

 

But when Van Halen first started, it’s not like Eddie and Alex were the most commercially-driven rock stars in the world. They only wanted to play the loudest music they could, and even if they had to tone things down a little bit, they were always going to sound louder than anyone else in West Hollywood whenever they lit up the stage.

Even for someone who had serious chops like that, though, they needed that fifth element to kick them into high gear. Michael Anthony’s seriously high voice put them well above everyone else, but when David Lee Roth joined the group, you’d have sworn the band had been given a dose of adrenaline. Roth might not have been the most versatile singer in the world, but what he lacked in technique, he made up for in being one of the greatest showmen the world had ever seen.

 

More than anything, though, Roth knew how to play the game. It was one thing to work a room in any Hollywood club, but since no one knew their music, they’d have to play a few cover songs to get their foot in the door. Granted, they were always going to be louder than everyone else, but as long as they were playing a metalised version of KC and the Sunshine Band, that was all that mattered.

Whereas that was a means of getting gigs, it got to be a bit more complicated when they started putting covers on their records. By Roth’s logic, getting a hit with a cover was starting off on the right foot, but Eddie knew that they were better off playing their own music than covering songs by Linda Ronstadt and Martha and the Vandellas.

 

Their versions of ‘You’re No Good’ and ‘Dancing in the Street’ were fine on their own, but Eddie would have been completely fine if they were erased from his discography, saying in 1988, “I’ve heard some stuff and I think our songwriting’s a lot better nowadays. To me, it’s mainly some of the cover tunes, I’d say ‘You’re No Good’. I listen to that stuff sometimes and I go, ‘Oh.’ Stuff [like] that wasn’t really my idea to do.”

 

But even if Eddie didn’t like some of the tunes, he managed to make them his own perfectly. ‘You Really Got Me’ already scanned properly as a hard rock song when The Kinks first started playing it, but even for someone born and bred in country rock like Linda Ronstadt, Eddie understood the moodiness of the tune right off the bat, always throwing in the perfect echo effects to make everything sound ominous.

 

Yeah, they didn’t technically have to make these cover songs if they didn’t want to, but Van Halen’s covers served the same purpose as Led Zeppelin’s did when they played old blues tunes. People understood that it was someone else’s song, but it hardly mattered when they gave those tunes a dose of musical rocket fuel.