The guitarist Eddie Van Halen thought copied him: “Everything he did he learned from me”
Any guitarist who wanted to play fast can probably remember when they heard Van Halen for the first time. The opening groove on their debut record may have started with ‘Runnin’ With the Devil’, but as soon as ‘Eruption’ screamed out of the speakers, everyone had forgotten their old guitar heroes and found the next god they would worship into the 1980s. While Eddie Van Halen did have some stiff competition on the California hard rock scene, he knew that fellow guitar god Randy Rhoads had taken everything he learned from him.
If Eddie wanted people to stop copying him, though, that was a battle that he was bound to lose. Everyone was shocked the minute that he busted out his signature two-hand tapping technique, and within a few months, bands were already looking to hire guitarists who could do the exact same thing but faster.
But what Eddie did wasn’t about playing fast for the sake of playing fast. Despite how many notes he could cram into a smooth one-minute solo, it was always about having a good melody behind it and locking it into a rhythm rather than just wasting time practising scale exercises.
While Ozzy Osbourne was on the comeback trail as Van Halen were climbing up the ranks, he wasn’t exactly looking for a clone of Eddie for a guitar player. Van Halen had toured with Black Sabbath in the past, but Rhoads was a completely different animal than anyone else, usually taking a classical approach to his solos.
Despite Rhoads doing his own thing, Eddie said that the metal guitarist told him that he stole a lot of his licks, saying after Rhoads’s passing, “He was one guitarist who was honest anyway because I read some interviews that he did, and he said that everything he did he learned from me. And he was good, but what a fucking way to go! But I don’t think he really did anything that I hadn’t done. I can tell when someone’s copying my technique, but there’s nothing wrong with that”.
Granted, it’s not like Rhoads was as much of a copycat as Eddie would suggest. There are bits and pieces of classical music inspiration in Van Halen’s catalogue, like the tapping lines in ‘Eruption’, but no one was going to put as much taste into their solos as Rhoads, like the overture-sounding lead lines on ‘Mr Crowley’ or the acoustic interlude he created on the song ‘Dee’.
In fact, are we sure that Rhoads actually didn’t take things a little further than Eddie did? That’s not to downplay Eddie’s contribution to the fretboard, but if you listen to the ending solo on a song like ‘Diary of a Madman’, there are even hints of jazz in his delivery that was miles different from what Van Halen was making on ‘Jump’ around the same time.
If Rhoads was someone who could give Eddie a run for his money, though, we never got to see it after his tragic passing in a plane crash in the middle of one of their tours. Had he been able to flesh out his technique a little more, maybe we could have seen him move out of Eddie’s shadow in a post-’Eruption’ world.
