The guitarist Eddie Van Halen called “standalone”
If one band were to be credited with inventing 1980s hair metal, no one could argue against California’s Van Halen. Formed in Pasadena in 1973 as a counter to the era’s earnest singer-songwriter hangover, a pilfering of glam’s pop glitz and some ruefully scribbled notes on AC/DC’s cloddish party rock saw guitarist Eddie Van Halen and his younger brother plus drummer Alex win an army of fans turned off by punk’s nihilistic iconoclasm.
Recruiting high-energy David Lee Roth for acrobatic frontman duties, 1978’s Van Halen set a template for the following decade’s hard rock domination: electric solos, shimmering production, hedonistic lyrics, and cartoon stage presence.
Van Halen was already massive as the 1980s rolled by, but 1984‘s lead single pushed the band briefly to the biggest act on the planet. Dropped in December 1983, the band’s happy marriage of phat Oberheim OB-Xa synths with their stadium rock strut thrust ‘Jump’ to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 and a stratospheric level of fame due to its MTV-ready video. Roth would depart, and Sammy Hagar would step behind the mic to usher in the band’s second lease of life, continuing with on-off reunions and ever more singers until Eddie’s death in 2020.
Routinely heralded as one of rock’s greatest guitar players, naturally, Eddie had plenty to say about the axe pioneers before him. Speaking favourably over the years on everybody from Pete Townshend to Eric Clapton, one guitarist marked in his estimation a distinctly bold character nobody could emulate. “I didn’t get into him until Blow By Blow,” Eddie told Rolling Stone in 2011. “Just the instrumentalness of it. And Wired, interesting stuff in there. So I guess it was just the experimentation in there that I liked. Jeff Beck is definitely a standalone”.
Beck’s work was always guided by an intrepid desire to explore every inch music had to offer. Hailing from The Yardbirds’ triple-whammy of golden guitarists along with Clapton and Jimmy Page, Beck would try his hand at everything from jazz fusion, bluesy rock, classical reimaginings, and even a foray into heady electronica. Following his short-lived The Jeff Beck Group and Beck, Bogert & Appice trio, Beck pursued a largely instrumental body of work that let his guitar do the talking.
His first album credited solo, 1975’s Blow By Blow, brought in Stevie Wonder for uncredited clavinet contributions and production chops from George Martin for a modern-sounding record replete with funk keyboards and a novel use of the talkbox on Beck’s cover of The Beatles’ ‘She’s a Woman’.
It would set a precedent for Beck, a journey as a keen collaborator with an eclectic range of artists that would, in turn, inspire unexpected creative detours up to his death in 2023.
“You never know what the hell he’s gonna do, Eddie reiterated. “My brother and I were in France 20 years ago, and Jeff Beck was playing. He was doing a rockabilly thing. And we were like, ‘What the hell is this?’ So you never know what to expect with him”.
