The guitarist Andy Summers called the best: “No one’s done it better than him”
The 1970s marked the golden age of the guitar hero. While the music world tended to gravitate to any hard rock band that played over the radio station, there was no disputing that the guitar stole the spotlight, with fans pointing out the power of every lick from artists like Keith Richards and Jimmy Page. In a world dominated by fretboard flash and technical mastery, Andy Summers decided to take a different approach.
Storming onto the scene with The Police, Summers had an unconventional way of attacking the fretboard, blending the sounds of new wave and punk with styles like reggae. Across The Police’s debut Outlandos D’Amour, Summers is all over the neck, proving that he could play a heavy solo on ‘So Lonely’ while also favouring skank rhythms on tracks like ‘Can’t Stand Losing You’ and ‘Roxanne’.
On the band’s following few projects, Summers would get even more minimalistic, using various effects to create a tapestry of sound across songs like ‘Walking on the Moon’ and ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’. While what Summers was doing didn’t seem to have technical complexity, his innovations from a production perspective struck a nerve with every other guitar player at the time.
Despite the legions of punk guitarists blowing up at the time, artists like Alex Lifeson from Rush found Summers’ approach incredibly refreshing, incorporating that skank rhythm into the song ‘The Spirit of Radio’. While Summers had an original musical vocabulary most of the time, even he could admit when he was witnessing genius for the first time.
When talking about the greatest guitarists he had ever seen, Summers knew that Eddie Van Halen shined above everyone else. Released the same year as The Police’s debut, Van Halen’s first album catapulted the band to superstardom overnight, with every guitar player in the world wanting to know how Eddie developed his signature style, using both hands to tap the fretboard to play a barrage of different notes insanely fast.
Discussing the legacy of Van Halen, Summers thought that no other guitarists could compare to what Eddie brought to the table, telling Johnny Beane: “He was a freak, you know? This playing that he sort of invented. I mean, brilliant. He was heavily copied, of course. It’s like the school of Van Halen, but no one’s done it better than him, as far as I’m concerned.”
While most of Eddie’s successors would zero in on his approach to tapping, Summers was more interested in the emotion that he put into every one of his notes, explaining, “He was a soulful player, bluesy, you know? He had his thing. He could really play as well as all the tapping stuff, which he was an absolute virtuoso.”
Until the day he died, Eddie considered that aspect of his sound his trademark. Regardless of how many notes he was playing at any given time, he made sure to make every note count, whether it was the massive tapping stretches at the end of his solo ‘Eruption’ or laying down a solid rhythm guitar figure like the intro to ‘Unchained’. Both The Police and Van Halen might exist on two different sides of rock history, but it didn’t take a degree in music theory for Summers to tell that he was watching a master at work every time Eddie played.
