The only band Eddie Van Halen was afraid to continue

Sammy Hagar - Eddie van Halen - Van Halen - 1990s

(Credits: Far / van Halen)

January 30, 2025 17:30, United Kingdom

There is a thin line between a rock ‘n’ roll audience and a mafia that Baying. So, imagine how terrifying it should be when you can feel the change towards the latter, and fear that it is the reason for it. There are stories throughout Mick Jagger’s years fearing a stage with James Brown in the first days or the best of the mother who each poster head is hated. But you don’t imagine Van Halen I would have such problems.

They were a band recognized for three things: technical excellence, energy and attitude. These are the three facets that generally make a live act of bulletproof. However, there was a concert in which Eddie Van Halen feared not enough. It was 1978, and his rising group was just arrived from the Opening for Black Sabbath when a lucrative offer arrived.

Eddie thought things were going in the morning. On Saturday tourWithout the slightest sound verification and only the 30 -minute slot, with six stacked Marshall heads, they played strong and “only people’s minds blew.” He ran his voice over his ferocity. The group itself trusts that they could replicate it in a great stage of the festival.

“We had an offer to play Day on the Green, which was the annual thing of the Bill Graham festival, and I think it was Aerosmith and foreigners playing,” Eddie recalls. With that in mind, they left the Saturday tour and ventured towards the huge day of the green crowd. Things seemed prepared for the next chapter for the group, one in which they dominated the live circuit of rock ‘n’ roll.

Confidantly curled up in this mentality behind the stage. “We played at noon after AC/DC and I am on stage seeing AC/DC,” recalled the guitarist. “80,000 people in the crowd simply jumped up and down because they obtained that infectious sound.” Suddenly, the first nerve jokes that the group had felt for a long time to flutter: how do you follow a band like AC/DC?

“I love them and Angus (youth), they are all good friends, and Brian (Johnson), and Angus’s brother, we went and saw them when they played the angels, they are big,” he told the boys, “he said Forbes. But that didn’t matter when Van Halen was relatively inexperienced on the stage of the festival, and with strict simplicity and arrogant attitude, AC/DC had the audience under his lovely spell.

“I go, ‘shit, we have to follow these guys’. So we don’t blow them,” Eddie admitted. However, not blowing them was almost their intention. AC/DC was not trying to show off or seem virtuous, they were taking advantage of the feeling of trance of the Rock ‘N’ Roll of Western Africa, one full of simple rhythm and the exultation it can inspire.

In fact, Eddie thought she was always part of Van Hale’s attraction under the hammer and striking touch anyway. “They are in a very basic fun way like me, they are not really luxuries, except that I do crazier things in my guitar maybe with the techniques,” he said.

He is not the only ACT that has been released by his simple save in spirit. Keith Richards could have held the Prince, a prominent genius, when he opened for the Rolling Stones, and has ruled out a few others, but he admired a lot of AC/DC, and that is like a drilling sergeant who really complemented a soldier. As Charlie Watts once explained: “They are excellent at festivals, I think they are probably the best. Keith has always liked AC/DC. “

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_gfn3a0yj0