Van Halen – Eruption (Live at the Tokyo Dome 2013)

The Warm-Up That Wasn’t Meant For The Album

Recorded on September 8, 1977 during sessions for Van Halen’s debut album at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, “Eruption” was never intended to be released on record at all. The one-minute-forty-two-second instrumental explosion only made it onto Van Halen because producer Ted Templeman overheard Eddie warming up for an upcoming Whisky a Go Go show and commanded engineer Donn Landee to roll tape immediately. Released as part of the album on February 10, 1978, the track didn’t chart as a single but became something far more significant than a hit. It redefined what the electric guitar could do, introducing two-handed tapping to the mainstream and becoming Guitar World magazine’s second greatest guitar solo of all time. What listeners didn’t know was that Eddie never even played it correctly, making a mistake at the top end that he heard every single time the song was played for the rest of his life.

The debut album Van Halen peaked at number nineteen on the Billboard 200 and went gold by May 1978, just three months after release, eventually achieving diamond certification with over ten million copies sold in the United States alone. “Eruption” segued directly into the band’s cover of The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me,” which became their first single and peaked at number thirty-six on the Hot 100. The album competed against the punk explosion happening in London and New York, yet managed to sell prolifically despite initial negative reviews from critics like Rolling Stone’s Charles M. Young, who predicted the band would be fat and self-indulgent and disgusting within three years. Instead, the album remained on the charts for over 100 weeks and became regarded by fans and critics as one of rock music’s greatest debut albums alongside Led Zeppelin, The Doors, and Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced.

Eddie had been performing the solo in clubs for at least two years before recording it, incorporating the piece into Van Halen’s live shows as his designated guitar showcase. The inspiration came from sitting in his room at home drinking a beer, watching people stretch one note by tapping their finger on the fretboard. Nobody was really capitalizing on that, he realized, so he started experimenting and discovered an entirely different technique that produced a sound so unusual people thought it was a synthesizer or piano. The first twenty seconds referenced Cactus’s 1970 boogie-rocker “Let Me Swim,” with brother Alex Van Halen and bassist Michael Anthony thundering behind Eddie’s squeals, screams, and tremolo bar dive bombs. Then Alex and Michael stepped aside, and Eddie unleashed his two-handed tapping clinic that somehow sounded like Jimi Hendrix, Bach, and an alien invasion all at once.

The recording session was completed with minimal takes using Eddie’s custom-built Frankenstrat guitar, a homemade creation assembled from a fifty-dollar factory-second Stratocaster-style body and an eighty-dollar neck, total cost under $180. Eddie had raided his Gibson ES-335 for a PAF humbucker pickup, routing the body by hand with a power tool when the pickup didn’t fit, leaving rough edges that became part of the guitar’s unpolished charm. He’d painted it with black and white Schwinn bicycle paint in a distinctive striped pattern, though he later repainted it red when imitators started copying the original design. The guitar ran through a 1968 Marshall Plexi Superlead amplifier with the voltage adjusted to around 140 volts using a Variac transformer, plus MXR Phase 90 and Flanger pedals, with Sunset Sound’s natural reverb room adding dimensional space. Engineer Donn Landee captured everything in a single day, initially titling the track simply Guitar Solo on studio documents before the name was changed to “Eruption.”

“Eruption” appeared as the second track on Van Halen, the band’s debut released by Warner Bros. Records in February 1978. The album cost approximately $54,000 to produce and took only a couple of weeks to record, basically just our live show and all the songs we knew, according to bassist Michael Anthony. The band had been tearing up the Sunset Strip since 1974, reducing nightclubs to rubble with Eddie’s playing while established guitar heroes laughed at his duct-taped homemade stage setup when Van Halen opened for them. They weren’t laughing when the show was over and Eddie had won the room, leaving audiences’ jaws somewhere around their ankles. The album also featured “Runnin’ with the Devil,” “Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love,” and “Jamie’s Cryin’,” which would later be sampled by Tone-Loc for his 1989 number two hit “Wild Thing.”

The influence of “Eruption” cannot be overstated. Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett had been tapping since 1972, and Ace Frehley tapped on Kiss’s “Shock Me” solo from Alive II in 1977, but neither did it like Eddie. The track spawned an entire generation of imitators trying to replicate the technique, with YouTube now filled with twelve-year-olds ripping through the solo with pinpoint accuracy. Eddie’s playing inspired manufacturers to create superstrat-style guitars, Stratocaster-shaped instruments with humbucker pickups and locking tremolo systems that became the standard for eighties rock. Q magazine placed “Eruption” at number twenty-nine on its list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Tracks in 2005. Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong said the solo from “Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love” was one of the first he ever learned, while future Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Zakk Wylde heard “Spanish Fly” from Van Halen II and thought how can anybody get that good, it was beyond insane.

Eddie’s relationship with the track remained complicated throughout his life. To this day, whenever I hear it, I always think man, I could’ve played it better, he admitted in 1996. That self-criticism speaks to his perfectionism, but Chuck Klosterman of Vulture named it the best Van Halen song, noting if you love Van Halen, this is what you love, and you can listen to it a thousand times without diminishing returns. The original Frankenstrat guitar is now housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City as part of the Play It Loud: Instruments of Rock and Roll exhibit, having also appeared at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Eddie Van Halen didn’t just change how guitars were played, he changed how they were made, his DIY spirit inspiring generations of players to tear apart their gear, chase new tones, and believe that perfection isn’t found but built.

The featured performance from the Tokyo Dome on June 21, 2013 captures an eight-minute extended version that combines “Eruption” with “Cathedral,” showcasing Eddie at age fifty-eight still delivering dazzling fretwork before over fifty thousand fans. That concert became Van Halen’s first official live album with David Lee Roth, released in 2015 as Tokyo Dome Live in Concert, their final album during Eddie’s lifetime. The band had Pro Tools workstations attached to their mixing board throughout the entire tour, recording every show, but Roth chose Tokyo as the performance to release. Engineer Bob Clearmountain mixed the album to capture the show exactly as it happened, mistakes and all, preserving the raw energy of what Eddie called mosh pit craziness from Japanese fans who were finally allowed to stand rather than sit. The Tokyo performance stands as a testament to Eddie’s enduring brilliance, proving the magic of that original 1977 warm-up session still resonated thirty-six years later.