The guitar solo Eddie Van Halen called the greatest: “One of my favourites”
Every album Eddie Van Halen ever made may as well have come with a notepad for guitar players.
No matter how many times Eddie wanted to trademark his tapping licks, there were always going to be people studying to find out how the hell he was getting all of those sounds out of his guitar every single time he took a solo. But even though Eddie loved to wow the audience and copy the phrases that he heard in his head, not everything necessarily needed to be the hardest thing in the world to have an impact on him.
When Eddie was first coming up, rock and roll was just getting born, and while he loved a band like the Dave Clark Five, the guitars weren’t exactly playing Satriani licks or anything. The British invasion may have brought a lot of new musical flavours into the mix, but no one could have predicted the kind of sea change that would come when people like Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix started transforming the rock and roll world.
These guys were looking at the guitar as a new tool and squeezing everything they could out of it, and you can hear a lot of those same principles in Eddie’s playing. He never wanted to be too much of a showboat, and even when he threw some shredding into a song like ‘Beat It’ by Michael Jackson, he was still worried about serving the song rather than taking a few bars to annihilate every other person in the group.
So with a guitarist that could play like that, how the hell did grunge not manage to shoot them down? I mean, Kurt Cobain was focusing on playing from the heart instead of playing some insane technical lead, but Eddie had been following in the footsteps of the same rock stars that he did when he first had the idea of being a guitar god. Clapton was the godfather of his style, but you couldn’t forget Neil Young, either.
Compared to every other guitarist, Young didn’t give two shits whether everything sounded in tune or not or blended with the rest of the band perfectly. As long as the solo felt right for the moment, it had a chance of ending up on record, and Eddie was knocked out at how much soul Young put into a track like ‘Cinnamon Girl’ when he first heard it.
The solo is dead simple and only uses one note played over and over again, but as far as Eddie could tell, no other type of flashiness could have replaced what Young did, saying, “One of my favourite solos is in ‘Cinnamon Girl’ by Neil Young. It’s a one-note solo and it just fits the song. Anyone else would have gone woraaagh and it wouldn’t have made any sense. If I’ve changed over the years, it’s that I’ve got more in tune with the song.” In fact, the whole song feels like a spit in the face to the virtuosos of the world in many respects.
Yngwie Malmsteen could play a million notes at a time, but years before he had even practised his classical scales, Young could make the same impact by only playing one note. And while Eddie is the best of both worlds when it comes to technical brilliance and heartfelt performances, Young’s solo isn’t solely about making a guitar break that people are going to remember forever.
For him, rock and roll was all about giving 110%, and for those few seconds, never has anyone looked like they are at war with their guitar. It might not have been all that dangerous if you look closely, but what Young did for the rest of the guitar world taught everyone how impactful you could be if you had a guitar and a heart that was willing to bleed for its cause.
