When listeners first dropped the needle on Van Halen‘s eponymous 1977 debut album, they were greeted by “Runnin’ With The Devil”, a radio-ready snapshot of the band’s hard rock sound, but it was track two, “Eruption”, that prompted a notion that persists among guitarists and music fans to this day: Eddie Van Halen is a singular guitar player.
On the album, “Eruption” is a brief but seismic snapshot of Eddie’s innovation in the world of electric guitar. It’s known for introducing a mainstream audience to the two-handed tapping soloing style that would go on to infiltrate much of ’80s rock, but it goes much deeper as a document of the talents, techniques, and influences that made EVH one of the most revered players of all time.
The instrumental, which the band had played live in various forms since 1975, was never intended as a “song” but rather as a vehicle for Eddie’s nightly guitar solo. Built on fragments of existing melodies—from Cactus‘s “Let Me Swim” to 19th-century French composer Rodolphe Kreutzer‘s “Etude No. 2″—the “Eruption” reads less like a guitar solo and more like a classical exercise, a technical workout for Eddie to make sure all his superpowers were at full capacity.
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The segment also allowed the guitarist to show off the finer points of his sound, the textures and tones he famously spent a lifetime tinkering with his guitars, pickups, and amplifiers to attain. Did you know that Eddie Van Halen held multiple U.S. patents for guitar modifications he invented? If that’s your kind of thing, check out this feature he wrote for Popular Mechanics in 2015.
As Eddie explained in a 1996 Guitar World interview with Billy Corgan, “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.’”
While it’s hard to find fault in the studio version, it’s easy to hear what Eddie was thinking when you start going down the live “Eruption” rabbit hole. As Van Halen exploded from clubs to stadiums, the instrumental remained a climactic portion of the band’s live shows, often stretching past ten minutes in length as a lit cigarette burned from the headstock of his iconic Frankenstrat.
There’s no wrong answer when it comes to live “Eruptions”—there are plenty of great ones floating around online—but we’re partial to this one from Veterans Memorial Coliseum in New Haven, CT on August 27th, 1986, which features added snippets of “316”, “Cathedral”, “Mean Street”, “Spanish Fly”, and more.
We couldn’t introduce it any better than then-frontman Sammy Hagar did on that night: “Now comes my favorite part of the show. It’s my favorite part of the whole evening. We’ve been on tour since March and I have no better time any time than right now ’cause I get to go sit down, have myself a nice cold one, and listen to the greatest rock and roll guitar player in the world, Mr. Eddie Van Halen.”
Rest in rock, EVH. We miss you.
Van Halen – “Eruption” (Extended Eddie Van Halen Solo) – 8/27/86
[Video: Hazardteam]
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