“He had a touch that was different”: the one song Eddie Van Halen called the best Jimmy Page played
Every single guitarist who has ever lived has often gone through that period when Eddie Van Halen is one of the greatest musical beings of all time in their mind. Even though Eddie was always humble about his abilities, no artist since Les Paul or Jimi Hendrix has managed to have as much of an impact as he had, whether it was his ingenuity in making his own gear or the massive tapping runs he brought to the mainstream. But Eddie himself would have told anyone that he was only half as good as he was because of the people he listened to back in the day.
Because, as strange as Eddie’s technique seemed at the time, it’s easy to hear many of his influences in what he played. He always had an affection for fusion players like Allan Holdsworth, but there were plenty of instances where he would always go back to those same Eric Clapton records that turned him on as a kid.
Whereas most people were looking at Clapton like a god back in the day, Eddie was one of his most loyal disciples for a while, consuming nearly everything that he did with Cream before souring on him during his solo career. And when listening to some of the strange scale runs he would do in Van Halen, Eddie had that bluesy side of his sound when he found the right idea.
Clapton may have been the blues purist, but Jimmy Page was the one who kept pushing rock and roll forward. Even if Eddie preferred ‘Slowhand’, there was no way to outrun the shadow of Page if you were playing rock and roll guitar, especially considering how much he changed over the course of Led Zeppelin, whether that was the blues of the first record, the neanderthal stomp of their fourth record or going into new areas altogether on Houses of the Holy and Physical Graffiti.
But like all great guitarists, people know them better for the riffs they write rather than the overall songs. It’s easier for fans to hum the melody of the lick rather than latch onto every note of a guitar solo, but when Eddie looked at Page’s classics, he completely understood why a song like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ has developed a reputation that goes beyond rock and roll altogether.
That song was a journey, and Eddie knew that every guitarist only got one of those during their lifetime, saying, “He had a touch that was real different. Take a song like ‘Stairway to Heaven’. Come on, it’s a classic song and the solo in it is classic, everything about it is and that’s probably the height of his career, the best thing that he’s done. If he would’ve stopped doing that then, he might’ve went on.”
And while many musicians try to do their personal answers to ‘Stairway to Heaven’ like ‘Hotel California’, there’s something a bit more ramshackle about the way that Page plays. As much as people love the idea of him playing every note perfectly, the imperfections are what make the tune a lot more enjoyable, like the fact that the solo doesn’t stick to rigid time structures and the massive bends that sound like the guitar is being tortured.
Although a track like ‘Eruption’ deserves to be right alongside ‘Stairway to Heaven’ in rock and roll history, Page’s epic is quite simply more than a song. It was an entire experience over the course of eight minutes, and even if someone didn’t love it all the way through, it’s easy to admire the craftsmanship on display.
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