Eddie Van Halen at a concert in 1982.
Photo: Getty Images, Ross Marino/Rock Negatives. All rights reserved.
“1984” is perhaps the ultimate Van Halen album – with classics like “Jump”, “Panama” and “Hot For Teacher”. It would have been a real shame if this record had never seen the light of day.
But apparently it almost came to that, because: Eddie Van Halen had once called Gene Simmons from Kiss and offered his services on the guitar.
“You Can’t Leave Your Band”
This was told by Alan Niven, manager of Guns N’Roses, in an interview. So there was “obviously at a time when Eddie Van Halen had been so frustrated – it must have been around 1983 – that he rang Gene Simmons.”
And then he asked him if he could join Kiss. “Apparently Gene Simmons had the right intuition at the time, looked at Eddie and said, ‘You can’t leave your band. Her name is Van Halen. It’s your band.’ And it’s not just a matter of ownership and control, it’s a matter of content and style. Because Van Halen without Eddie Van Halen… I don’t know. Alex [Van Halen] is an incredibly underrated drummer in the shadow of his younger brother. And I think he deserves a lot more credit than he gets. But the absolute magic of Van Halen for me on my first impression was: the songs are good and the singer has an attitude, but my god there was a fire from that fretboard on that first album. That was just magical.”
+++ This article first appeared on metalhammer.de +++