“Very robotic”: the legendary guitarist Eddie Van Halen thought was too “stiff”
Eddie Van Halen was never one to bring down any guitarist out of spite. He may have had a few rivals on the Sunset Strip when he first started, but he was more likely to prop up the kind of artists who were doing new and interesting things rather than tear everyone through the mud. He did have a problem with artists pulling a little too much of his old schtick, and once David Lee Roth came out with a new band, Eddie didn’t have too much to say about Steve Vai.
Although Roth didn’t exactly part ways with Van Halen on glowing terms, how the hell was he going to replace someone like Eddie? This was the kind of guitarist that shaped the entire rock community across just one album when they came out, so how exactly is it possible to make lightning strike twice?
It’s not an easy decision, but if there was one person who could match his finesse, it was probably Vai. Outside of his solo career, Vai’s work with Frank Zappa already gave him a resume of playing the most outlandish things ever attempted on a guitar, which was probably the most Roth could have asked for.
Outside of working with Vai on his solo debut, Eat Em and Smile, Roth would truly get to test what he could when they took their show on the road. It’s easy to perform the same type of song on the record, but how would he fare when playing a piece like ‘Jump’ or ‘Hot For Teacher’ note-for-note every night?
Looking at the live footage, Vai was more than up to the challenge, making a lot of people do a double take to make sure they weren’t listening to a Van Halen record being pumped through the loudspeakers. Vai was phenomenal at his job, but from where Eddie sat, maybe he was a bit too good.
When talking to Shaun Baxter, Eddie thought that Vai’s technique had none of the soul that his original records had, saying, “I’m going: ‘This guy is better at what I do than I AM’, you know. But [whispering] he lacked the vibe… the feel. He was technically VERY proficient, but stiff… it didn’t SOUND like me, but he took my chops, so to speak, and made them very robotic… and did them twice as fast.”
That’s probably after Eddie had to deal with the legions of guitar players who were already trying to steal from him. If he hoped to trademark his sound, though, he would have had to go through almost every other guitar player on the Strip before he hoped to get to Vai’s supposed plagiarism of his technique.
Throughout his career, it’s easy to tell how Eddie and Vai were completely different animals. Whereas Eddie served the song at every opportunity and relied on rhythm, Vai is still a mad scientist behind the fretboard, doing as much as he can to make the guitar speak in the same way that auteurs like Jimi Hendrix did. Eddie certainly has his place in the hallowed halls of guitar gods, but given how Vai has been able to play an entire track on a four-necked guitar by himself, it’s safe to say that he’s earned a spot alongside those gods as well.
