The rival Eddie Van Halen thought lacked one crucial element of greateness: “This guy is better at what I do than I am”
With fingers faster than a pickpocket and more swagger than a heavyweight champion, Eddie Van Halen came out swinging in the late 1970s and reinvented guitar in a whirlwind of glorious attitude and stunning musicianship. He coupled precision with prowess and became a pioneer of a new hammer-heavy style of guitar playing.
As Steve Vai said in praise of the late maestro, “When I look back at it, there’s really a few guitar players that just came and created a paradigm shift on the instrument. And in my life, it was Jimi Hendrix and Edward Van Halen. I was in college when I heard Edward, and it was a revelation. He had definitely raised the bar with innovation and sound and tone—that was unprecedented at the time. And it was a form of ‘shredding,’ so to speak.”
While nobody can be sure why on earth Vai insisted on being the only man to ever call him Edward, the rest of his appraisal was perfectly on the money. Van Halen’s music had never been heard before. He assaulted your sensibilities with a whirlwind of sound, but it was far from raw noise. There was always an innate sense of melody to Eddie Van Halen’s work that hinted at the highly trained origins of his originality.
In his own view, however, there was one guitarist who was more trained and even better at the quick-fire blaze of precise notes than he was. When Dave Lee Roth went solo and teamed up with Vai in 1985, he was blown away by what the guitarist was able to produce from a technical standpoint. “I’m going: ‘this guy is better at what I do than I am’, you know,“ he told Shaun Baxter about the shocking moment he first heard them performing together.
But the more he listened, the more he realised something was missing. ”He lacked the vibe… the feel. He was technically very proficient, but stiff,” he said. “It always made me feel bad in a way. Because it made me feel like, ‘Wow, is that how people perceive me?’ Because, to me, listening to him, it didn’t sound like me, but he took my chops, so to speak. And made them very robotic and did them twice as fast.”
Vai’s credentials on the technical front have never been in question since the very start of his career. When Frank Zappa was auditioning guitarists, a very young Vai rocked up to chance his hand. He could barely muster stubble at this stage, making the audition akin to a high school student taking a few conical flasks over to Nikola Tesla’s lair and asking for a job. He was unknown, inexperienced and understandably nervous.
Nevertheless, Vai had the skills to impress. After a youth spent riffing along to his favourite rock records and later reinventing those riffs, he was sure he could handle what Zappa would throw at him despite his tender age. “He’d play something, and he’d say, ‘Play that’, and I’d play [it],” Vai recalled. “Then he says, ‘Now, play it in 7/8’. So I play it in 7/8. He says, ‘Now play it in reggae 7/8”.
The tests grew increasingly weird. “He said, ‘Okay, add this note’. And it was impossible. It was physically impossible, not just for me but for anybody,“ Vai continued. “I said, ‘I can’t do that,’ and he said, ‘Well, I hear Linda Ronstadt is looking for a guitar player.” And as a crestfallen Vai made his way to the door, Zappa had to stop him and tell him he was joking. It seemed that even as a teenager, Vai had mastered the guitar.
The next step was to match that magic with flair. As Ritchie Blackmore would comment, perfection is to be avoided. ”Jimi Hendrix used to play lots of wrong notes,” the Deep Purple guitarist said, ”because he was searching all the time, ‘where the hell is that correct note’. When he did find that right note… wow, that was incredible, but if you are always playing the correct notes, there is something wrong, you’re not searching, you’re not reaching for anything.”
In Eddie Van Halen’s view, the same rang true in a spiritual sense when it came to Vai, a guitarist he considered too polished and perfect to truly tick all the boxes of rock ‘n’ roll.
