“It kills me”: Randy Rhoads had nothing nice thing to say about Eddie Van Halen
Just when the 1970s came to a close, and the whole of music thought guitars were about to die a painful death, Eddie Van Halen came creeping out of the shadows to resurrect the instrument and become perhaps the best player since Jimi Hendrix.
In fact, a mere mention of his name thrusts my brain straight to a place of six-stringed heaven. Sure, the surface level of the connection is the performance of his mind-bending guitar solos that felt as though they were going to bust any amp that they were run through. But beneath that was a whole lot more.
Van Halen wasn’t just about the cosmetics of guitar playing; he was a true pioneer. As Tommy Iommi put it, “He was always an inventor.”
He added, “He’d always want to come up with something new. He worked hard to develop his own amplifiers. And he’d work on his own guitars as best he could to make them feel comfortable to him. He was always very much an innovator with a bunch of things.”
Naturally, such a place at the forefront of change sparked a legion of copycats. In the ‘80s, a generation of hair-metal players introduced Van Halen’s tapping technique into their arsenal, in a mild hope of capturing the same enigmatic essence as the great guitar player.
But similarly, some were unfairly bundled into comparison. Musicians who were equally as virtuosic but distinctly different in terms of nuance were being thrown under the Van Halen umbrella, much against their will, and Quiet Riot guitarist and co-songwriter for Ozzy Osbourne’s solo albums, Randy Rhoads, was one such musician, with him taking exception to such claims, arguing that he was performing from a similarly unique place.
He claimed, “Everything happens so fast that I haven’t had enough time to think about what I want to do. I have my own personality on the guitar but as of yet I don’t think I have my own style. For instance, I do a solo guitar thing in concert. I do a lot of the same licks as Eddie Van Halen. Eddie is a great player, but it kills me that I do that.”
Rhoads continued, “For me, it’s just flash that impresses the kids. I’m trying to make a name for myself as fast as I can. I wish I could take time and come up with something that nobody else has done. But that’s gonna take a few years yet.”
But the ‘Prince of Darkness’ weighed in to shed a little more light on the situation, and chalk Rhoads’ defence up to bitterness. It seemed as though there was a lot more than stylistic rivalry between Rhoads and Van Halen, and instead, something of a personal vendetta that sparked such comments. Osbourne, however, leapt to his co-star’s defence and assured the public that there was no plagiarism going on.
Osbourne explained, “I heard recently that Eddie (Van Halen) said he taught Randy all his licks, he never [did]. To be honest, Randy didn’t have a nice thing to say about Eddie. Maybe they had a falling out or whatever, but they were rivals.”
Each with a Black Sabbath member in their corner, the rivalry of Rhoads and Van Halen became one for the ages. Of course, in music, there is never really a winner of these squabbles, except the music itself, which gets better and better every time these players try to outdo one another.
