The guitar icon Keith Richards was never impressed with: “I don’t remember a thing”
Keith Richards has never been one to mince words when it comes to his opinions. If he deemed something as trash, you’d certainly hear about it. Conversely, if someone was pushing the boundaries of rock and roll, he’d likely offer them his signature pirate smile in approval. Despite his extensive collection of rock and roll and blues records, Richards openly admitted that he never quite grasped what Eddie Van Halen brought to the table.
When viewed together, Van Halen and Richards seem to come from two completely different planets. Richards was the rhythm guitarist who all but invented the idea of what a riff should sound like, whereas Eddie was the flashy guitar player who made tapping runs that marked a turning point in lead guitar playing.
If you hear their influences, there are actually more similarities than you might expect. Richards always knelt at the altar of artists like Howlin’ Wolf and Robert Johnson, and since Eddie’s favourite guitarist of all time was Eric Clapton, it’s safe to say that he at least knew his way around the traditional blues scales.
At the same time, Eddie wasn’t going to be satisfied just playing the blues all the time. After seeing Led Zeppelin play the LA Forum, he first got the idea of playing with both his hands on the guitar neck, which often sounded like he somehow had an extra hand filling out his guitar parts. The Stones were already in disco territory by the time Van Halen arrived, but Richards never saw the appeal of Eddie’s playing.
Speaking to the LA Times, Richards said that Eddie’s style was a bit too flashy for him, saying, “I don’t remember a thing about Van Halen in those days…I use the guitar to project a song. I’ve never been out there, like, Wally’s Whistling Saw, and everybody’s supposed to be impressed. I’m not impressed by that kind of guitar playing. The rock players, they’re good and they’ve all got their little thing going. But it’s never been my bag”.
Then again, Richards has always been about the space between the notes. Eddie could have won people over with his amazing tapping licks for decades, but Richards’s approach was more focused on laying down a groove, whether that meant locking in with Charlie Watts or laying down a guitar part that functions more like a percussion instrument than anything too melodic.
That’s not to say that Richards didn’t have some influence on Eddie. Since he played almost all the lead guitar on the album Beggars Banquet, that piercing guitar tone on ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ was certainly a precursor to what Eddie would be doing with volume, especially on songs like ‘Unchained’ where it sounds like his amp is about to explode.
If nothing else, Richards and Van Halen both had a huge influence on the world of guitar playing, just from different angles. Richards showed all of us the importance of rhythm guitar, but once people had those first chords under their fingers, Eddie was where you could go when you wanted a real challenge on the instrument.
