The legendary guitarist who “didn’t have a nice word” to say about Eddie Van Halen
A lot of the music you hear today, which might sound relatively standard, at one point, was completely brand new and mind-blowing. One of the most modern forms of music that falls into this category is the tapping technique people use when playing guitar solos. Before Eddie Van Halen came along, this style of playing was hardly used, and the guitarist made it mainstream to the point that it’s now a go-to method for a number of shredders out there.
Many people were huge fans of Eddie Van Halen because of his guitar playing. Both singers he had worked with in Van Halen, David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar, felt drawn to Eddie the minute he started showing off his ability. In fact, one of the only reasons Hagar agreed to join Van Halen was that he was allowed to keep his originality and intertwine it with Eddie’s playing style.
“What I brought to Van Halen was just who and what I am,” said Hagar when discussing joining the band. “It was Sammy Hagar, who and what I was at that moment, but very inspired by Eddie Van Halen’s musicianship… He inspired me to write songs… Goosebump songs.”
Another guitarist who found himself in awe at Eddie’s playing style was the Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi. Van Halen went on tour supporting Sabbath, and as they were getting the crowd warmed up, Iommi found himself amongst the fans, absolutely blown away by what he saw on stage.
“We took Van Halen on their first big tour, they were with us for eight months,” Iommi recalls, “Eddie was playing things I’d never seen before… We’re still friends, and we became friends then. Of course, he set off a whole new load of players playing like that, and now I can’t believe some of them. I can’t follow it. I certainly couldn’t do it.”
However, just because a large chunk of the guitar world was excited about watching Van Halen doesn’t mean everybody was. Some guitarists out there also played with his finger-tapping technique and resented the credit he got as the person who invented that style of playing. One of these guitarists was Randy Rhoads, the first person Ozzy Osbourne worked with after Black Sabbath.
“I heard recently that Eddie [Van Halen] said he taught Randy all his licks… he never,” said Osbourne, talking about the two’s rocky relationship, “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.”
It is true that while they were both exceptional guitar players with similar styles, Rhoads didn’t become a household name in the same way that Eddie did. Whenever two musicians run parallel to one another as they did, there will always be tension, which means we have the anomaly of somebody disliking Eddie Van Halen’s guitar playing.
