The guitarist Paul McCartney thought was out of Eddie Van Halen’s league: “The best”
When artists praise their favourite musicians of all time, they’re more likely to present a bias towards those from their own generation, or even the ones who came before them and exerted a strong influence on their own work. Paul McCartney, however, has always stayed in touch with the modern guard.
Despite their markedly different origins, The Beatles’ bassist has always been impressed by the virtuosic guitar playing of Eddie Van Halen and the music he helped to create in his eponymous heavy metal act. Of course, McCartney knew how to dial up the volume and did a stellar job of creating proto-metal on songs such as ‘Helter Skelter’, but nothing he ever made matched the heaviness of Van Halen’s work.
That being said, many of Van Halen’s earliest influences were rooted in 1960s pop, and despite there being an aggression in their delivery of songs, there were sensibilities that they’d drawn from some of the most accessible bands of the decade before they emerged, with The Beatles being among those major touchstones.
There are plenty of people who would potentially go as far as to suggest that Van Halen was the greatest to have ever picked up his instrument, and with his unique finger-tapping guitar techniques, there were many at the time when they first emerged in the late ‘70s who thought that this approach was far more innovative than anything else that had come before it.
However, despite showing appreciation for Van Halen’s impressive abilities on the fretboard, McCartney was adamant that he couldn’t topple the man whom he considered to be the greatest guitarist who ever lived.
Many people would agree with McCartney’s assertion that Jimi Hendrix remains the greatest guitarist of all time, and that the innovations he displayed in the 1960s were miles ahead of anything that anyone else had ever demonstrated, and delivered with a sense of ease and flair that no other was capable of.
“I have very fond memories of Jimi,” McCartney revealed during a 1986 interview with Rolling Stone. “I mean, Van Halen’s great, I love Eddie Van Halen. But I still think Jimi was the best.” However, despite being unwavering in his love for Hendrix, he would later come to praise Van Halen again in an interview with Guitar Player, where he said that he stood out among the rest of the heavy metal guitarists.
“I like Eddie Van Halen as a player,” McCartney said. “He gets it right quite often. I like a lot of heavy metal guys because they wind it up. What I usually like in a heavy metal band is the guitar player. But when it’s just miles of scales, I lose interest. I like some of the hot sounds.”
It probably helps Van Halen’s case that he was significantly influenced by The Beatles and was prompted to turn his back on classical music after hearing what bands like them were capable of producing during his childhood. For McCartney to recognise that is a sign that the impact he had on Van Halen was never buried too deep, and that everything that made their own music accessible was being injected into the heavier sounds of Van Halen in order to bring metal to a wider audience.
