When Van Halen performed a concert on Jimmy Kimmel’s outdoor stage in 2015 to promote the release of their new Tokyo Dome Live in Concert album, lead singer David Lee Roth cut his nose open while twirling a baton during the song “Panama.” Roth scampered off stage and had the wound — which would later require 14 stitches — taped up. The band continued to play as guitarist Eddie Van Halen, one of rock’s most revered and profoundly original players, filled the space with a fusillade of licks and noises. Minutes later, Roth returned to finish the set, first asking the audience: “How do I look? Like f***ing Hiawatha, right?”

he really used to be chaotic

A less-resilient act would have folded when first blood was drawn that night, or more likely wouldn’t have already made it this far into a career that has spanned five decades, three singers and two bass players. What could have kept this band, formed in Pasadena in 1972 by Eddie and his brother, drummer Alex Van Halen, together so long? Well there’s the money — the group has topped the charts, sold tens of millions of album and packed countless arenas over the course of its career — but there’s also the music.

With both Roth, who left the band in 1985 and returned in 2006, and his replacement Sammy Hagar (not so much with third singer Gary Cherone, but we’ll get to that later), Van Halen have never failed to deliver. There are of course the hits — “Jump,” “Running With the Devil,” “Finish What You Started” — that anyone who has ever tuned into a rock radio station knows backwards and forwards, but digging deeper uncovers countless album tracks and unreleased gems that reveal a band with a musical range and sensibility that extends far beyond feel-good anthems and screeching rockers — not that there’s anything wrong with either of those.

absolute f***ing virtuoso guitar player

An instrumental available only on the soundtrack of the Cameron Crowe–penned 1984 movie The Wild Life, "Donut City" is as long forgotten as the teens-bongs-and-nunchakus romp for which it was penned. But while the film, which starred Eric Stoltz, Lea Thompson and Rick Moranis, might deserve to remain buried in the rubble of pop culture, "Donut City" — named for the shop that Thompson's character Anita works at — is a propulsive and memorable rocker featuring a beat lifted straight from Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean," baritone guitar riffing and Eddie Van Halen indulging in a Hendrix-inspired backwards guitar solo.

Buried deep on disc two of 1993's Van Halen Live: Right Here, Right Now this electrifying rendition of the Who classic reminds us that Van Halen aren't just a killer band, they're a killer cover band to boot. Eddie Van Halen's patented finger-style popping proves perfectly suited to reinterpreting the keyboard part that opens the song, and when Sammy Hagar lets loose the throat-shredding "Yeahhhhhh" that serves as the song's climax, it has all the power and passion of Roger Daltrey's original

The goats ⚡️🙏

Although credited to Brian May and Friends and therefore not strictly a "Van Halen song," this epic 12-minute tribute to Eric Clapton, the two guitarists' shared idol, features Queen's May and Eddie Van Halen gleefully trading licks over a standard blues progression. May, a hard-rock guitarist with a style and sound no less innovative than Van Halen's, must have felt like he held his own in this face-off as he chose to release the historic jam on his 1983 Star Fleet Project EP. It's a good thing he did, as this an exceedingly rare example of Eddie mixing it up with another guitarist.

this was from the victory tour in 84 and during the houston gig, random fact about it was prince went to this concert with his bodyguards and midway through the show he took off his hoodie and all the fans around him started screaming it's prince!!

don’t think anyone in history has ever been able to exactly reproduce note for note with the same energy and feel the solo on beat it

which is hilarious because that take was so spontaneous you can even hear a door knock in the song right before he kicks in his solo on the spot, they didn’t even cut that out boss s***

i don’t recall what was the story but i know eddie didn’t want to be credited on it in exchange for something else - im sure he has since regretted it haha

I always wished Prince put out a funk-less Van Halen type rock record just to show he could be better than any other rock band on MTV, like Living Colour but better.

jump is so iconic in france bc it’s the theme of one of the most emblematic soccer team so everyone knows the song like an anthem - because it is, not just in theory but technically speaking

Roth

basically did it as a favour for Q I believe, when MJ rang him for the solo he told him to f*** off because he thought it was a prank call

the amp he used during the solo also caught fire apparently because of faulty wiring

20 mins of recording and he was out and history was made

Van Halen would impact the charts with their fair share of sweet-hearted power ballads after Sammy Hagar joined the fold, but songs expressing deep sentiments were few and far between in the David Lee Roth era. A notable exception is this Who-inspired track from Women and Children First, in which Diamond Dave suddenly goes all emo and admits that a girl has "up and left, and I almost died." The song rocks hard (there's even a brief bass solo) to mitigate the unexpected outpouring of feelings, but Roth reveals himself to be just as vulnerable to the love bug as the rest of us mere mortals.

what took the dude 20mins in prolly one take for generations across the globe trying to recapture it bar by bar decades later

think about it

I feel this on a spiritual level

there's layers to the rankings of the all time greats, layers and layers...

revolutionised guitar playing in the late 70s but predominantly 80s with his frankenstrat, the tapping, that typical eddie tone

song with the same title and riff would appear on 1984, but this demo version, also from a batch of tracks produced by Simmons, is far more unhinged. The tempo of this early iteration is amped up, the vocal performance impassioned and the beat unrelentingly fierce. Frenzied verses are punctuated by bombastic lead guitar jabs and the chorus, while gone on the subsequent version of the song, concludes with the haunting car horn sound that would soon serve to open "Runnin' With the Devil," the first track on the band's debut album.

only guitarist that could've gave eddie a run for his money was randy but he was taken from us too soon

thoughts on van halen 3?

Not the best album but still had some good moments of guitar for sure