The guitar player Neil Young “couldn’t relate to”
You will always find people debating what it is that makes a good guitar solo. From Jimi Hendrix to Joni Mitchell, styles vary, but that doesn’t mean greatness dissipates.
There is a common misconception amongst music lovers that a great guitar solo is the piece of work that best resembles something impossible. For anything to be considered an amazing guitar solo, it must be played fast, up and down the fret, culminating in a sound that no human being should ever be able to draw from a six-string. Sure, this is impressive, but it’s not the only way to play the guitar well.
If you ever want a great example of a good guitar line not needing to be anything complicated, look no further than the track ‘For What It’s Worth’ by Buffalo Springfield. This is a pretty simple song, one with a catchy chorus, sweet sounding vocals and a relatively straightforward chord progression. Despite all of this, one of the most standout features on the song is Neil Young’s guitar playing.
A couple of notes, that’s all he needs, just a couple of notes. The simplicity is borderline infuriating, as other songwriters sit huddled over a guitar for hours, trying to find the notes but allowing them to continuously slip through their fingers. Then along comes Neil Young, with apparently such a mastery of his guitar, arranging, and the big picture of what a song should be like, that he knows he only needs to add a couple of notes to elevate this song from good to great.
Of course, you then have guitar players who have a different approach, one which gives off the impression they are somewhat adverse to simplicity. Neil Young, with his breadth of musical knowledge, knew that just because these artists were different to him, it didn’t mean that their style was any less impressive. He remained a fan of guitarists who used a lot of distortion and played quickly, even if, in his words, he “couldn’t relate to” them.
One such guitarist he didn’t play like but was still a fan of was Eddie Van Halen. When talking about the guitar work of Eddie, he heaped praise onto him, despite not ever seeing him play like that. “I appreciate these guys who play great. You know, I’m impressed by these metal bands who are scale guys […] These guys are good guys […] I mean these guys are geniuses,” said Young, “Eddie Van Halen, they’re genius guitar players, they’re unbelievable musicians […] I can’t relate to them. One note is enough.”
Young isn’t alone in this, there were many guitar players who couldn’t relate to Eddie Van Halen. A large part of his appeal was the fact that he invented a new style of guitar playing, one that made it so that the speed at which people could play was massively increased. You hear it a lot these days in hard rock and heavy metal, but at the time, it was a brand new style of music that blew away anybody who stumbled across it.
Tony Iommi, for instance, despite his brilliance, knew that he was never going to play like Eddie Van Halen. “I didn’t ask him how he played any of his [music],” said Iommi when discussing the two of them jamming when on tour together, “Because I wouldn’t be able to do it.”
