The only guitar solos Eddie Van Halen ever enjoyed: “It’s such masturbation”
It’s hard to think of any Van Halen song without Eddie tapping his way through every single solo.
He created a completely different language for how guitarists could play, and even if he hated the imitators jacking his style, you have to remember that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery. But in an age when every guitar player wanted to prove how fast they were on guitar, Eddie was far more interested in making songs that people would remember for the rest of their lives.
If you look at the difference between the David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar eras, for instance, the change in Eddie’s approach to music is a lot more drastic than most people realised. He was still the technician that he always was, but instead of using tapping every single time he got onstage, he wanted to use it as another colour for his sound in between the various piano lines that he was sprinkling into the mix.
The guitar nerds in the audience may not have been in love with the idea of the band being smothered in keyboards on a few of those albums, but it’s not like Eddie was ever losing his touch, either. Whenever he wrote a heavy riff like ‘Judgement Day’, it stood out just as much as ‘Right Now’ did with pop fans, but by the late 1990s, the solos started to become more of an afterthought most of the time.
There were certainly some tapping sections, but it was all done in service to the melody rather than trying to show everyone his skills. He already had that era of his career, and while it’s easy to look back at the solo to a track like ‘I’m The One’ and look on in awe, all Eddie saw was a lot of flash during the majority of those solos.
If he wanted to be remembered for his impact on guitar, he knew that the ones that he would always go back to the melodies that he played within the solos half the time, saying, “When Sammy joined the band, I said, ‘I’m tired of doing fucking guitar solos,’ but everyone insisted that I had to keep doing them. It’s such masturbation. A lot of it is just screaming, ‘Look at me!’ Some parts of the solo, like ‘Cathedral’ or ‘Eruption,’ are little compositions, and I don’t mind doing those.”
That might certainly apply to a lot of his copycats, but even when he played many of his solos, it’s easy to pick out the melodies in between the mindless guitar wankery. While ‘Spanish Fly’ comes dangerously close to falling into shredding territory in certain spots, the opening of a song like ‘Little Guitars’ is among one of the most beautiful pieces that he ever played, especially when he plays those luscious chords before Alex comes in.
But that bitterness probably explains why many of his solo interludes on the later albums are more like fully-formed compositions. No one needs the same skill level as ‘Eruption’ to play a tune like ‘316’, but even if it’s a bunch of chord arpeggios half the time, you can feel the genuine emotion throughout the entire song a lot better than you would if he simply played a million notes at a time.
Because by that point in his life, Eddie learned the one thing that a lot of people forget as a musician: subtlety. Anyone can try to impress everyone from the minute that they get onstage, but it’s important to take the listener on a journey rather than throwing everything you can at them at every opportunity.
