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In the excellent 1989 adventure of Bill and Ted, the rock-obsessed duo played by Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves adore Eddie Van Halen and fantasize that he will one day join the band. In real life, the film’s writers hoped to give the guitar god a major role in the film. We spoke with Alex Winter about the moment he discovered Van Halen as a teenager and the impact he had on the film series.
My awakening to Van Halen came in ’78. I had moved to New York City from the Midwest. Two albums for me in the rock world really defined that year: The Rolling Stones Some girls and Van Halen, Van Halen.
The Stones were the band to be in at the time. I say it was the best of that time. God knows they moved on. [Laughs]. But they had been around for a while by then, and it was a really seminal album and it had a very specific style. It was deeply rooted in both the streets of London and the streets of Manhattan. And then this Van Halen record came out of left field.
For me, it was the beginning of this kind of rivalry between one style of music and another that would later infiltrate rap throughout the eighties and nineties: the west coast versus the east coast. But I’ve never heard a virtuoso rock guitarist play pop songs with hymns before. Forever. I grew up in the seventies mainly in the Midwest. Hard rock was really difficult. I really liked it, but it was very difficult. I really liked Kiss when I was young, I know Gene Simmons is one of the people who helped Van Halen in the early days, but no one in Kiss could play like Eddie Van Halen. Not even close. So they are not really similar in that sense.
I think “Running with the Devil” was the first song … love that song. I know “Eruption” is the one with a massive solo, but “Running With the Devil” was exhilarating, powerful and innovative and very, very accessible. I think that’s what I really responded to. In fairness to David Lee Roth, I think the combination of the huge anthem nature of his voice mixed with Eddie’s guitar made a lot there. I think it would be unfair to dismiss that, because I think the whole package said, “Wow, to have hear this. “
I think the reason why everyone is crying so much is that so much emotionality in the Van Halen game! It wasn’t just about making faces. He wasn’t like a guy who could play guitar very fast. There was a really beautiful quality to what he played that I think really made a deep impression on people. I hate to keep it on this California thing, but, to me, it’s very much related to the Beach Boys and what made Brian Wilson so great. There was depth, intelligence and skill in these accessible pop songs.
Eddie’s image runs through all of our movies. Bill and Ted are supposed to like hard rock. But they were these sunny and optimistic Californians. And that’s really embodied by Eddie Van Halen. We talk a lot about Iron Maiden, but I think we would have come by listening to Van Halen and the positivity that was infused into the music.
I can’t speak for Keanu, but speaking for myself, air guitar came completely from the way Eddie played. I’m a huge Who fan and a huge Townshend fan, but there is a kind of street punk violence in Townshend that you won’t find anywhere in Bill and Ted. And I always thought about Eddie’s incredible physique with the air guitar stuff, and the way these guys would have seen it and how that would have impacted them.
We try to get Van Halen into each of the movies. [Laughs]. We asked him, but he said no. Very Spinal tap moment. [Laughs]. He was a person famous for his privacy and he wasn’t, you know, the front man. He was extremely charismatic and always very gentle, but he always rejected us. And then the third movie [2020’s Bill & Ted Face the Music], the guys wrote a whole scene around him. We spoke extensively with the Van Halen people, and he refused, saying it was for personal reasons. Obviously we had no idea what that was, but now it was pretty clear what it was about. It is simply devastating. Apart from any of our nonsense, it is a very sad loss.
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