There are lots of songs that show Eddie Van Halen’s electric guitar wizardry, but focusing on his flash shortchanges his musicianship. Van Halen — who, it should be noted, was an immigrant with a half-Polynesian mother, making him a person of color — studied piano as a child, took up drums as an adolescent, then switched instruments with his brother Alex, who was learning guitar, and even played the cello for relaxation. He also played bass on their records because, he said, Michael Anthony was such a poor player that Eddie had to teach him the bass parts to the songs. Though all their original tunes were credited to the entire band, Van Halen wrote almost all the music himself.
After the group reached stardom with David Lee Roth as frontman — he was allowed to join because he owned a PA system the fledgling band used to rent, and Eddie figured it would be cheaper to add him to the band — Van Halen’s relationship with him soured. Roth went solo, and Van Halen turned to Sammy Hagar. Fans derided the result as “Van Hagar,” but Van Halen cut four No. 1 albums with him behind the mic stand.
Van Halen considered vocals and lyrics beside the point of his music, so he put up with Roth’s sex-crazed monomania, but Hagar eventually tired of writing about “female body parts,” as he put it. This song came together when Hagar was writing the lyrics and heard Van Halen in another studio playing a piano melody that he had used years before as soundtrack music for the film “The Wild Life.”
Hagar considered his lyrics for “Right Now” the best he had ever written, so he was furious about the video using printed phrases that had nothing to do with them. It nonetheless won Video of the Year at MTV’s Video Music Awards in 1992. It’s also worth noting that while every phrase starts with “right now,” they all apply almost 30 years later — even the one that reads, “right now there is no cure.” (Sorry for the grainy visuals, but this is the only one I could find on YouTube).
If you’d rather hear Eddie’s groundbreaking guitar style, here’s a live version of “Eruption.” On the band’s first album this instrumental forever changed the way rock guitar was played. When he played it on stage, he went on far longer than two minutes.
If you’d rather hear something from the David Lee Roth period, too bad. I never could stand the skeevy little jerk, and I’ll be damned if I change my mind right now.