The artist Angus Young thought reinvented guitar: “He influenced a lot of people”
No one should really come into the music business with the intent of flipping everything on its head. There will always be people who have thought of something well before you did, and even if something totally original is hanging out of your back pocket, it only takes one butchered attempt before people start ignoring you entirely. Although Angus Young was more than happy to do whatever it said on the tin regarding raw rock and roll, he admitted that listening to Eddie Van Halen completely reshaped how he looked at guitar.
Because before 1978, rock and roll guitar was still known as the kind of genre descendant of the blues. If anyone had any hope of playing something with melody, it usually came from following bluesy guitarists like Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page, and nowhere was it more evident than with AC/DC’s music.
Listening through High Voltage, it was as if The Young Brothers didn’t bother acknowledging any music that came out after the dawn of Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley. Everything was bluesy and gritty rock and roll with just a little bit more dirt under its boots, and even if Angus commandeered Berry’s signature duck walk, seeing him in a schoolboy outfit thrashing the place to the ground is still too good for anyone to ignore to this day.
Even if Van Halen didn’t have any sense of spectacle, though, people would still have been talking about how Eddie approached the guitar. The sound of ‘Eruption’ practically announced that there was a new king of California, and on every track on Van Halen’s debut, it was like Eddie was inadvertently writing the lessons of every virtuoso guitarist who was bound to follow in his footsteps.
That didn’t seem to bother Angus in the slightest, though. He had firmly established himself as a guitar god with Highway to Hell, and while there was no excuse to suddenly change his sound, the Australian rocker did admit to being intrigued by how Eddie was pulling off those tapping licks.
Suddenly, rock and roll had become a much different playing field for Angus, telling Guitar, “Eddie was, I would say, besides his guitar playing to the world, he definitely was innovative with his guitar style. And to the world, he reinvented the way guitar had to be, and he influenced a lot of people that you would know out there.”
For all of the thousand notes that he could cram within the span of three minutes, it’s not like Eddie wasn’t a student of what Angus was doing either. He had previously listed Powerage among his favourite albums, and listening to ‘Drop Dead Legs’, Eddie remembered wanting to put together a groove that felt closer to what AC/DC would have done, complete with brash chords and the kind of swagger that can only come from someone who knows they are the absolute best.
Van Halen didn’t start by trying to be the most innovative group on the planet, but their legacy is a reminder of how influence works in the music business. It’s one thing to be able to play a million notes a second, but the only reason legends get their status is when people start following in their footsteps.
