The one-note solo Eddie Van Halen adored: “One of my favourites”
Mind-bending guitar solos have been in the arsenal of virtually every legendary guitarist since the dawn of rock and roll itself, but the art of the solo can often become lost within increasingly grandiose, overly complex compositions. If any one person truly mastered the art of the solo, though, it was Eddie Van Halen.
Within rock and roll circles, the title of ‘greatest guitarist of all time’ is endlessly disputed, but you can narrow down the options by picking out the few names that are always, inevitably, thrown out there. Eddie Van Halen is inarguably within that select group, and it is certainly easy to see why.
Even if you never subscribed to the hard rock hype of Van Halen’s heyday, you would surely have to concede that no rock band experienced the same longevity, dominating the American rock scene throughout the 1970s and 1980s. While Van Halen certainly wasn’t a one-man band, either, it was always Eddie’s masterful guitar playing at the heart of the group’s appeal; vocalists came and went, but so long as it was still Eddie on guitar, it was Van Halen.
At the heart of that appeal, for countless long-haired rock obsessives back in the day, was Van Halen’s immeasurable talent as a soloist. Few other players mastered the art of creating solos as extensive, otherworldly, and, in many cases, experimental, as Van Halen without becoming lost to their own self-congratulations. Guitar soloing is a fine line, but it is one which Eddie Van Halen traversed with all the poise and self-discipline of a particularly gifted funambulist.
You would be forgiven, then, for assuming that Van Halen’s record collection is made up entirely of fellow guitar heroes and, while the likes of Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton obviously played a key role in inspiring Van Halen’s playing style, they are merely the tip of the iceberg. In fact, Van Halen’s favourite guitar solo of all time came, not from the realm of expansive hard rock, but from the mind of folk-rock master, Neil Young.
As Van Halen declared to Guitarist back in his 1993, “One of my favourite solos is in ‘Cinnamon Girl’ by Neil Young,” plucking out a particularly influential Young composition that would eventually become cited as ‘proto-grunge’.
“It’s a one-note solo and it just fits the song,” the guitarist explained. “Anyone else would have gone ‘woraaagh’ and it wouldn’t have made any sense.” He added, “If I’ve changed over the years, it’s that I’ve got more in tune with the song.”
Not every song is befitting of a one-note solo – and Van Halen certainly has no place to lecture people in limiting the notes of their solos – but that simplistic solo suits Young’s legendary track perfectly, without overshadowing its songwriting power or core message. That, in essence, is the art of the guitar solo that many 1980s-era players lost sight of, but Eddie Van Halen always kept in the back of his mind.
That is not to say, of course, that records like 1978’s Van Halen are awash with one-note solos and bare-bones compositions, but none of the solos on that album overstay their welcome within the context of their respective songs. Simplicity is key, but every song must play to its strengths, and that appears to be the lesson bestowed upon Van Halen by ‘Cinnamon Girl’.
