Did Pete Townshend influence Eddie Van Halen’s guitar style?
Every person who has picked up a guitar in the past five decades has, on some level, wished they could play like Eddie Van Halen. The archetypal guitar hero of American rock for much of the 1970s and 1980s, Van Halen inspired multiple generations of guitar players to follow in his footsteps, making expansive and endlessly complex riffs seem effortless. However, when it came to guitar playing, the Amsterdam-born musician also held a healthy appreciation for the power of simplicity.
While simplicity is not the word that comes to mind when listening to Van Halen’s discography, their extensive library of hard rock and metal classics includes some beloved but endearingly complicated tracks, which can seem inaccessible to budding young musicians attempting to replicate the sounds. Of course, those who stick with it and try to imbibe Eddie Van Halen’s complex skills are rewarded with an incredible education in guitar playing. But, for the guitarist himself, his gripe was that simplicity was far too often overrated.
After all, some of music’s all-time greatest guitarists have been famed for the simplicity of their playing. Complex compositions by the likes of Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, or Jimmy Page might stick in the heads of audiences, but countless iconic riffs—from The Rolling Stones’ ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ to Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water’—have been rooted in simple structures and playing styles.
Just because a guitarist is capable of playing expansive ten-minute solos and lightning-fast riffs does not automatically make them great. Just as preferring simple chord progressions and power chords does not make somebody a bad guitarist. In fact, some of Eddie Van Halen’s most prominent influences leaned more towards being rhythm guitarists rather than lead players.
One such figure was Pete Townshend, the songwriter and guitarist behind The Who’s groundbreaking sounds. First establishing himself in the mid-1960s thanks to a repertoire of youth anthems like ‘My Generation’ and an anarchic guitar playing style punctuated by windmill strumming and end-of-set destruction, Townshend was a defining voice of rock and roll during the 1960s. As such, it didn’t take long for him to have an impact on Eddie Van Halen.
“Pete Townshend was an influence as a rhythm guitarist,” Van Halen said in a 2016 interview with Guitar Tricks Insider. Expanding on the appeal of The Who’s axeman, he shared, “So it was just the power and intensity, and again, simplicity. You know, nothing was very complicated. Like, listen to ‘My Generation’ (sings the main riff). Even the later stuff on Who’s Next, it’s all very power-chord based.”
Power chords seemed to suit Townshend’s fast, loud, and usually simplistic playing style, as well as giving The Who’s discography a kind of punk power that separated them from the rest of the British rock scene during the 1960s. Subsequent releases, on the other hand, were instrumental in influencing blossoming scenes of hard rock and heavy metal.
Live at Leeds, for instance, might as well have been a blueprint for hard rock performances, and Van Halen seemed to study it very closely. So, although Townshend—compared to Eddie Van Halen, anyway—often favoured simple structures, his guitar playing style and compositions were anything but run-of-the-mill.
