The band Eddie Van Halen said stole his guitar style: “Exactly like mine”
By the time Van Halen emerged from California, the music world was in dire need of a reboot. Although there was nothing wrong with what the heavy hitters were giving us, seeing everything get so bloated meant that things started to get insanely boring, and once the first few seconds of ‘Runnin With The Devil’ started on the band’s debut, hard rock suddenly sounded like a party again. And while David Lee Roth was known as the resident emcee whenever he started his signature banter onstage, there was nothing getting in the way of Eddie once he tore through one of his guitar solos.
Granted, Eddie’s work had more to do with his personality than any specific guitar sound. Many people would employ tapping techniques years after Eddie started working on them, but there was always a bit more soul in the way that he played them, almost like there was a tinge of humour in how he played scales with both of his hands on the fretboard.
But Eddie wasn’t looking to simply be another guitar hero. He knew that there was a lot more to explore on the instrument beyond the simple scales, and even if he wasn’t going to get the most expensive gear at the beginning of his career, he figured he could customise whatever he needed to get the sound he heard in his head. Because before people even heard a note of music, everyone was focused squarely on what his Frankenstein guitar had to offer.
From day one, the guitar maestro never had a proper guitar that suited him, so his solution was to take the body of one guitar and the neck of another to create what he wanted to hear. And even if it looked like it was thrown together in the group’s early days, he became the mad genius whenever he went into the studio, crafting the kind of tone that no one had heard once songs like ‘Atomic Punk’ and ‘Feel Your Love Tonight’ came on.
“I just don’t understand how someone could walk onstage with my guitar because it is my trademark.”
Eddie Van Halen
While Eddie couldn’t help but influence every hair metal guitarist that came afterwards, he became more than a little bit protective when someone stole his tone. After spending a few months checking out the clubs, he realised that some of the local bands were putting him to shame by making a cheap imitation of what he did.
Even though Eddie was lenient with some parts of his sound, he was knocked back when he heard the local band The Weasels copy him wholesale, saying, “A band called the Weasels was playing, and the lead guitarist had a guitar exactly like mine. I just don’t understand how someone could walk onstage with my guitar because it is my trademark. You know, when people see a freaked-out striped guitar like that, with one pickup and one volume knob, they obviously know it’s mine.”
That wasn’t even the only time where Eddie saw someone aping his sound. When he eventually went out on the road, some of his heroes, like Rick Derringer, were taking his trademark licks and putting them in his own songs, almost like he was trying to upstage him. As anyone would find out, though, there’s no point in trying to upstage Eddie unless you actually have the chops to back everything up.
But Eddie’s insistence that people not copy his guitar design was about more than simply being protective. He knew that the key to any great artist is being original, and seeing a bunch of copycats trying to make a mockery of that style is probably the reason why the Sunset Strip rock scene died an ugly death when everything was stripped back to basics.
