The guitarist Eddie Van Halen thought hated his guts: “They would feel threatened”
No one gets to the top of the musical food chain without picking up a few enemies along the way. There are bound to be people in your corner who will be ride-or-die until you decide to pack it in, but people can sometimes be looking to tear down because they either don’t agree with you or are jealous of everything that you stand for. While there was no debate that Eddie Van Halen was among the greatest guitarists in the world when he debuted, he admitted to getting the cold shoulder from Joe Perry when he first got started working with them.
In theory, though, Van Halen and Aerosmith are the perfect pairing for a co-headlining tour. Both of them were on the fringes of hard rock half the time, but they were always more about creating a party atmosphere rather than going too far into the Black Sabbath school of riffs. For all their similarities, though, Eddie and Perry were two completely different entities.
Sure, Perry could put together a handful of decent riffs and lay into the pocket with Joey Kramer behind the scenes, but it was going to take a rocket scientist to figure out how Eddie came up with his lines. There had been plenty of virtuosos that had come before, but Eddie was putting together the kind of licks that made it sound like he was playing with four hands.
It would normally be any veteran rock band’s golden ticket to have Van Halen as their opener, but this wasn’t a case of musical brotherhood or anything. No, Eddie remembered getting the cold shoulder from quite a few guitarists who were jealous of him, and Perry, in particular, was icy when they first went out on tour.
When discussing his time with Perry, Eddie was convinced that the Aerosmith guitarist wanted absolutely nothing to do with him, saying, “In 1978, on our first tour, people like Joe Perry would just give me the shaft with their eyes. You know, wouldn’t say hello, wouldn’t be nice. Nothing. I’m not that way. I just think of people like Joe Perry, who hate my guts anyway. They wouldn’t go out of their way to help anybody, cause they would feel threatened.”
It’s one thing to be protective of one’s ego, but in the case of Eddie, most guitarists should have known to get the hell out of the way. No matter what kind of riff they had in their arsenal, chances were that Eddie had something to beat it every single time, whether that was him making pure rock and roll on ‘Somebody Get Me a Doctor’ or experimenting with new styles like the beginning of ‘Little Guitars’.
And even if Perry found his sound and stuck with it, no one was going to match Eddie when it came to tapping. Whereas other people were using their instruments as another voice in the band, Eddie was a one-man symphony whenever he started tapping, usually putting anything he could think of into these little pieces like ‘Spanish Fly’.
Once the dust settled, though, Perry was able to find his own voice, sticking to riff-based soloing and working off of everything Steven Tyler was singing. They both had their own niches on their instruments, but in terms of raw chops, no amount of bluesy riffing was going to go toe to toe with ‘Eruption’ any day of the week.
