The guitarist Eddie Van Halen called a genius: “He’s a great player, songwriter and producer”
Given his pedigree as a rock and roll god, Eddie Van Halen didn’t really need to listen to anyone other than his muse throughout his lifetime. He may have grown up on a diet of artists like Eric Clapton during his Cream days, but when it came time to lay down his own licks, you wouldn’t mistake a song like ‘Eruption’ for any other guitar player. Eddie always had his own lane, but he could still recognise fellow guitar virtuosos, and as far as he was concerned, Jimmy Page reinvented what it meant to be a guitar player.
Granted, Page wasn’t exactly looking to become merely a guitar player. He had already proven himself in the session scene and wanted to put together a band that could take the blues farther than The Yardbirds ever could.
Although most of Led Zeppelin’s best work revolved around Page creating riffs or variations on classic blues tropes, the intensity of their music paved the way for what would become hard rock and heavy metal. Sure, the band might not have thought in those terms, but there’s no way you could look at half of the metal community with a straight face and say that a track like ‘Immigrant Song’ isn’t indicative of early metal.
Whereas most musicians would be happy to have laid down a song like ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ during their lifetime, Page wasn’t satisfied with just contributing to the band’s sound. He wanted to get down to the sonics of everything, and his work as a producer in the studio and a showman onstage was always about working in new lanes as a musician.
When he wasn’t looking to use strange instruments like a theremin or a violin bow on his strings, Page was trying to incorporate new techniques into the band’s records. Say what you want about the band’s ramshackle style, but you weren’t going to hear anything like the backward vocals and breakdown in the middle of ‘Whole Lotta Love’.
Despite calling Page sloppy in the past, Eddie had to admit he was one of the most gifted musical thinkers he had come across, telling Guitar World, “He’s a genius. He’s a great player, a songwriter, a producer. Put it this way, he might not be the greatest executor of whatever, but then you hear a Page solo, he speaks. I’ve always said Clapton was my main influence, but Page was actually more the way I am, in a reckless-abandon kind of way”.
That kind of reckless spirit is almost neglected when talking about Eddie. As much as his playing can sound precise whenever he takes a solo, there was also some good-natured humour in the way he played. When looking at the way he set up his rig, Eddie was also willing to push the envelope just like Page did, including using an electric drill in some of his songs.
Eddie made everything sound cleaner and helped take Page’s sounds even further in Van Halen, but it was never supposed to be a competition for him. It was just about serving the song, and whether it was Zeppelin or Van Halen, both guitarists gave the world a road map for what could be done on that electric hunk of wood with strings on it.
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