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Van Halen’s 1978 debut was a yearzero for virtuosity, the warp-speed instrumental Eruption establishing in two minutes flat that the metallers’ eponymous guitarist had the fastest fingers on the West Coast. Perhaps it was that same reputation for quicksilver two-hand tapping and violent tremolo abuse that meant Eddie Van Halen was reticent to show his bandmates the lick he’d been kicking around in private.
“I figured out something melodic instead of just going for it,” the guitarist said in 1980. “When I wrote Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love, I thought it was the lamest song I ever wrote in my life. It took me six months before I worked up the nerve to show the guys.”
By EVH’s eye-popping standards, Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love was a rudimentary doodle, not much more than an up-and-down picking pattern on a handful of open-position chords. As the guitarist said in Guitar World, it was a musical piss-take, too, lampooning the punk bands whose route-one neanderthals was the polar opposite of his own flashing-blade virtuosity.
“Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love was originally supposed to be a punk-rock parody. It was a stupid thing to us, just two chords. It didn’t end up sounding punk, but that was the intention.”
But as producer Ted Templeman knocked the debut album out of them at LA’s Sunset Sound over the summer of ’77, Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love emerged as a front-runner, its tense groove darkening the frivolous mood. ‘I’ve been to the edge,’ sings an uncharacteristically vulnerable-sounding David Lee Roth, as the band drop to a whisper. ‘And then I stood and looked down/ Y’know I lost a lot of friends there, baby, got no time to mess around.’
"Dave’s lyrics were so creative," Templeman told Guitar Player. "He had a sense of humour, and I’d never heard that unique situation where you have a heavy metal–sounding band with a sense of humour. Think of a song like Ain’t Talking ’Bout Love: “Ain’t talkin’ bout love / My love is rotten to the core.” [laughs] You know, who else is going to say, “You know you’re semi-good lookin’ and on the streets again”?
Then came one of EVH’s most interesting solos: light on flash, but melodic and evocative, with an offbeat Eastern-sounding tone.
“I doubled the solo section with an electric sitar,” he remembered. “It could have been a Coral, but it looked real cheap. It looked like a Danelectro. I never really knew it was an electric sitar, because it didn’t sound like one. It just sounded like a buzzy-fretted guitar. That thing was real bizarre.”
For all his early reservations, Van Halen had to admit: “Kids go nuts for it”. And even the next generation of the punks whose noses the song had set out to tweak were taking notes.
“When I started,” recalled Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, “I had this guitar teacher who showed me how to get those Eddie Van Halen sounds like on Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love.”
"It's like his guitar playing came from a different place," he told Howard Stern. "He reinvented how to play guitar. But they also wrote great songs, that's the main thing that I took away from Van Halen. The songs were just so fucking great."
Elsewhere, LA punks The Minutemen turned Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love on its head, covering the song on their landmark Double Nickels On The Dime set. Rather than pay faithful homage to the original, their version was simplified and shortened, its 38-second length a deliberate "fuck you!" to a band who'd done more than any other to promote the hedonistic Southern Californian heavy rock sound, something Minutemen bassist Mike Watt called "the most marketable rebellion I've ever seen."
A surprise cover version arrived in 2022, from David Lee Roth himself, backed by guitarist Al Estrada, bassist Ryan Wheeler and drummer Francis Valentino. Uploaded to YouTube, it has since been removed from the platform.
Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love has also been covered by ska punks The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, synth parody duo The Moog Cookbook and L.A. Guns guitarist Tracii Guns. It's also been sampled several times, most successfully by English electronic music group Apollo 440, whose 1997 single Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Dub reached the Top 10 in several countries.
The best part of 40 years later, Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love is the song producer Templeman considers his favourite, from all the hundreds of sessions he's worked on.
"First of all, Ed’s guitar – that riff is incredible, and Donn [engineer Donn Landee] got a great sound on it," he says. "Instantly, he tuned right in. And the lyrics are really brilliant, and Dave’s delivery is brilliant. And it’s got a really interesting solo on it. For some reason, out of anything I ever cut, I still love listening to that. And a lot of it is the intro. Ed’s guitar is amazing."
