“He did my exact solo”: The guitarist Eddie Van Halen said copied his every note
Any guitarist that’s been around the block has to deal with their fair share of copycats. No one can stop someone else from jacking their style, and even though it’s frustrating, the mark of any guitarist is about keeping themselves one step ahead of every other fretboard master that comes after them. Although no one could really play the guitar like Eddie Van Halen could—no matter how hard they tried—he considered this session guitar legend one of the biggest copycats of his style that he had ever seen.
At the same time, no guitarist will look at what Eddie did and not want to steal from it. There had been bits and pieces of tapping going on in the world of guitar, but Eddie took it to the next level by making pieces of music out of it. There might be an occasional note to connect certain phrases on Steely Dan records, but hearing ‘Eruption’ was like watching someone reinvent the instrument in real-time within the span of two minutes.
Suddenly, nobody could rely on those same blues licks inherited from Eric Clapton if they wanted to wow a gentle audience. Eddie had raised the bar, but the session music scene was already miles ahead of him in some respects by going into different forms of music.
Steely Dan already boasted some of the best players in the world of jazz and fusion, but Rick Derringer dominated the rock and roll side of the fence. Although he did have one hit to his name in ‘Rock and Roll Hootchie Koo’, he’s probably better remembered for being able to make his guitar sing on Edgar Winter’s best work, including that iconic guitar lick in the middle of ‘Free Ride’.
Derringer did have his bag of tricks, but when he started seeing Van Halen on the touring circuit, he figured that he needed to take a few cues from Eddie if he needed to keep himself sounding fresh. And what better way to draw inspiration from Eddie than to steal his ideas outright when it came time to play?
According to Eddie, Derringer would go up onstage when they were on the same bill and play every lick that he already played, saying, “Rick Derringer opened for us last year, and he did my exact solo. The next night, he does my solo again, and he ends the set with ‘You Really Got Me,’ which is exactly what we do. So I hate to say it, but I just told him, ‘Hey, if you’re going to continue doing that, you ain’t opening for us.’ So I kicked him off.”
It’s a routine most support acts suffer through, even Eddie. When Van Halen was the support slot for Black Sabbath, even Tony Iommi had to admit that the group was being pretty liberal with what they were stealing from the heavy metal gods, including making some of their licks sound like they were ripped from the bowels of Hell.
If anything, the fact that Derringer was learning from Eddie proves that a change of the guard was happening. No matter how many times people wanted to cling onto their blues licks like a life raft, Eddie had turned the music world on its head, and it was time for guitarists to either go along with the program or fade into obscurity.
