The one guitarist Eddie Van Halen and Slash agreed was the greatest: “My hero”
There’s a certain magic that comes when talking about artists like Slash or Eddie Van Halen.
Even though both of them have carved out massive places for themselves in rock and roll history, each of them seemed to have their own language when approaching the guitar that seemed utterly alien to anyone else who was watching them. But every single note they played was always done in service of making something that sounded different from what the average guitarist was playing around that time.
Because when Guns N’ Roses and Van Halen started, rock and roll was going through a bit of a low point. Eddie had no time for trying to get on pop radio, and even if the other bands of his ilk were more focused on honing their chops, he was always trying to make the heaviest tunes that he could, whether that was him pulling from punk or developing his unique approach to tapping every single time he played a solo.
In the case of Slash, though, he seemed to grow up in the kind of world that Eddie had birthed. Every single guitar player up until that point wanted to be Van Halen in some capacity, but Slash took everything back to the days of blues when he performed. All of his solos had the history of artists like Eric Clapton and Joe Perry baked into everything that he played, but the real legends for both of them were the creative mavericks on guitar.
Their ears were drawn to people who didn’t have a specific agenda whenever they made a record, and when looking through their record collections, it all came back to people like Jeff Beck. Beck was already becoming a massive name after leaving The Yardbirds, but Eddie wasn’t fully on board until he heard what he could do outside of the blues mould on albums like Wired back in the day.
This was a new approach to playing, and that adventurousness really appealed to Eddie when honing his chops, saying, “I didn’t get into him until Blow By Blow. Just the instrumentalness of it. And Wired. Interesting stuff in there. I guess it was just the experimentation in there that I liked.” And for someone who grew up with blues, those records were like a door opening when Slash first picked them up.
He had been used to the same tones that every other guitar player was getting, but Slash felt that this was the kind of guitar hero that blew everyone else away, saying, “Jeff Beck is my big guitar hero. That’s my favourite guitar player. That’s the guy I sat down to learn ‘Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers’, ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’, all that stuff. That’s when I really started focusing on guitar technique, with Jeff.”
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And the biggest lesson that Beck taught both of them was to never stop learning about where to take the guitar. He never wanted to get put into a singular box every single time he made a record, and while Rod Stewart would have been happy to get nostalgic and play with him again, Beck was the one constantly trying to find something fresh to work with and refusing to dwell on the past every single time he made a record.
Everything he did was done in service of making songs that explored new sounds, and for anyone looking to pick up the guitar, he was practically the gold standard for what someone could sound like. Many guitarists can pick apart Eddie and Slash’s licks for decades, but for anyone who has truly done their musical homework, Beck has broken every single rule anyone made for him and set about making something different.
