The guitar Eddie Van Halen was forbidden from playing: “Little punk kid”
Unfortunately, there is no rulebook for being a good frontman or band leader. You can take inspiration from others, but there’s no guarantee you’ll pull it off as well, or have as much charisma to make it work and draw audiences in. And often, as Eddie Van Halen once realised, looking like something you’re not is one sure way to turn people off.
Van Halen isn’t someone we necessarily look at and think about having any sort of identity crisis, especially as he always seemed like someone who just had it figured out. It also helped that his guitar-playing was never a means to become the next best guitar hero, but something that served his music; a means to an end, and any accompanying label was just pure serendipity.
There was an obvious nonchalance there too that almost seemed bashful at times, like you could go up to him and praise how much he’s done for guitar music, and he’d look at you uncomfortably, like he didn’t exactly like being spotlighted for something he didn’t even think about all that much. But that’s the thing: he was one of the greatest guitar heroes, one that Tony Iommi once said set off a domino effect with other players, purely because he was “playing things I’d never seen before”.
But this detachment from what it meant to join the same coveted group as names like Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Slash and so on earned him the title as one of the biggest innovators, because he’d try and test certain “tricks” like a scientist coming up with a new chemical combination, or an architect trying out new ways to make something look nicer, even if he didn’t so much think about the kind of musician it made him at the time.
Steve Lukather once explained it perfectly when he recalled working on ‘Twist the Knife’, saying, “I remember him telling me, ‘Look, man, I never meant to turn it into this parlor-trick thing — it’s just the way I play,” adding, “He was just a humble little guy who just loved to mess with shit and do things different. He always had an ‘adventure mentality.’ He knew what he wanted. And he wanted really weird shit.”
But this constant commitment to artistic progression and evolution didn’t always mean making the right decisions, or even the ones we’d deem “cool”, anyway. Van Halen very much lives up to that title now, but there were certain moments during his career when those around him would have to hold up a metaphorical mirror and urge him to take another path. One instance occurred when he started playing an ES-335, which apparently made him look like a wannabe Roy Orbison, sans the sunglasses.
“I was playing a 335 for a while before we got signed, and it sounded fine,” the musician told Guitar Player in 1980. He said the others would poke fun, telling him, “You’re rock and roll, you ain’t Roy Orbison. Either get some dark glasses or get rid of the guitar”. He added, “There’s this little skinny punk kid playing a Ted Nugent axe,” a realisation which made him “dump” the 335 and pick up a Les Paul instead.
It seems like some sort of rite of passage for most legends to have some strange “don’t mind me just figuring it out” phase before they settle into who they’re supposed to be. Van Halen might’ve still gone on to earn a reputation as one of the most forward-thinking deviants out there had he continued to channel Orbison’s look on stage, but switching to guitars that better suited him and building them around what he wanted made him more of a pioneer who wasn’t afraid of destruction if it meant getting what he wanted.
As he once said: “The reason I started dickin’ around…I just didn’t like the fact of having the standard rock-star setup.”
