10 Perfect Rock Songs That Don't Have Any Lyrics

Whenever Van Halen played live, you pretty much only needed Eddie Van Halen onstage to be amazed. Despite having one of the greatest frontmen of all time in David Lee Roth, there have been countless bootleg videos online of just Eddie letting his guitar sing onstage, which more often than not found their way onto the record. The studio may have been Eddie's playground a lot of the time, but Cathedral was the more experimental version of what Eruption was hinting at.

While the original guitar solo that he gave us on the first record was amazing from a technical perspective, Cathedral is where things get a lot more cerebral. Since there wasn't nearly as many fleshed out songs on Diver Down, this is a couple of minutes where Eddie played with the volume knobs on his guitar, with every note being fretted before the guitar was brought up in volume.

Although Eddie had already started to bring the keyboards into play, all you're hearing on this record is guitar, as he goes through different chord tones to make the entire thing sound like a church organ. This was a solo that not even Eddie's guitar would survive though, with the volume knob giving out halfway through and feeding back for the rest of the take. By that point, the magic had already been done, and Eddie had another guitar solo gem to add to his bag of tricks.