“Everyone was riveted”: the artist Tom Morello called the Mozart of rock and roll
When rock music first started, it always seemed like the direct antithesis of classical music. Anyone could pick up a guitar and start playing if they had a song in their heart, but when looking at how much time classical musicians put into mastering their craft, there was bound to be a rub there between geniuses like Bach and Beethoven and people like Bob Dylan. Tom Morello may have been firmly in the rock and roll camp, but he knew when he was looking at someone who could give the greatest musical geniuses a run for their money.
Looking at Morello’s approach to the guitar, though, most classical musicians would hang their heads in shame. Despite having some real chops every time he took to the stage, Morello was more interested in the sonic possibilities that could be done with a guitar, which usually included operating like the DJ in Rage Against the Machine or making strange sounds that didn’t necessarily have any sort of harmony to them.
It wasn’t exactly the most theoretical way of looking at the instrument, but it was no less artistic, either. Morello knew that what he was doing was something that no other rock and roll guitarist had done before, and by continuing to innovate, he has built himself as one of the most singular guitar players in rock and roll. Most people have never sounded like Morello, and even when they have, it’s easy to call them ripoffs.
Morello’s approach was certainly original, but the mindset wasn’t necessarily anything new. The entire premise of great guitar playing came from players who never wanted to play the same thing that everyone else. So that meant modern guitar heroes changing things up every time they played, whether that be Pete Townshend bringing more volume into the mix or Jimi Hendrix creating different sonic colours. Then again, few guitarists were going to be able to step to what Eddie Van Halen did.
“With Eddie Van Halen, everyone was riveted. Because everyone knew we were in the presence of our generation’s Mozart.”
Tom Morello
While Van Halen gets a reputation for helping birth hair metal, that’s drastically underselling what Eddie brought to the table. Many people take the art of tapping licks for granted nowadays, but when looking at the way that Eddie used his technique, it was always in service to songwriting, even turning his solos into fleshed-out pieces like on ‘Eruption’ or shredding on acoustic on ‘Spanish Fly’.
Morello had already been studying the likes of Jimmy Page and Ace Frehley at this point, but he knew that what Eddie was doing was on the same level as classical greats when he saw him solo, saying, “He was just out there by himself. Normally, that’s the time of the concert when I’m like, ‘OK, time to go take a restroom break.’ With Eddie Van Halen, everyone was riveted. Because everyone knew we were in the presence of our generation’s Mozart.”
But beyond being one of the greatest guitarists of his time, Eddie helped open people’s eyes to the kind of technicalities of the guitar that could go hand-in-hand with classical music. Morello may have been firmly into songs that made people headbang, but once he figured out that there was something in common in the way that Paganini and Yngwie Malmsteen played the instrument, he started looking at his approach in a totally different way.
For anyone who takes their music seriously, there comes a point where all sense of genre begins to fade away. It’s all simply about creating the best music you can, and for any novice guitarist trying to put together a riff that will stand the test of time, they’re going to need to study everything that Eddie did throughout the course of his career.
