The guitarists Eddie Van Halen crowned as the greatest: “It’s real”
There are pieces of what Eddie Van Halen did with the guitar that are probably never going to be fully understood.
Sure, there are plenty of artists that have picked up on the tapping licks that he did on every one of his albums, but there are a handful of times where he would reach into his bag of tricks and continue to have everyone dumbfounded as to what the hell he was doing. It was unlike anything that rock and roll had ever heard before, but that only comes from someone who has infused a piece of themselves into the way they play.
Because if we’re being completely honest, Eddie’s technique for tapping wasn’t exactly original when he first started doing it. Steve Hackett had employed the technique a few times when he worked with Genesis, and even Eddie himself said that he got the idea for it when watching Jimmy Page perform with Led Zeppelin and watching him bend off to the open string when tearing through ‘Heartbreaker’. But no one was actually turning them into pieces of music as he did.
After all, ‘Eruption’ will forever be known as one of the greatest things to happen to the electric guitar because of the classical-style melodies that Eddie was doing. It took a mad genius to figure out how to do something like that, but according to Eddie, a lot of that came from him sitting down with the instrument and getting used to it the same way that all of his heroes did when they first picked up a guitar.
Despite being a true original in rock and roll, Eddie said that the guitar heroes before him, like Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, were in a league all their own, saying, “Eric Clapton is Eric Clapton. Nobody does Clapton better than him. Nobody does Hendrix better than Hendrix. Music is an individual form of expression and if you start second guessing or trying to be something you’re not, this gets back to why our [sound] works. You know? Because it’s — it’s real.”
And, really, there’s a lot more truth to that statement than a lot of guitarists would like to admit. Every single guitarist of the British blues boom was following in Clapton’s footsteps, but none of them were going to have the same vibrato and raw attack on the instrument that ‘Slowhand’ did whenever he kicked off ‘Sunshine of Your Love’. Eddie was still a fan of Clapton’s work, but Hendrix’s approach sounded like it was being beamed in from another planet.
Hendrix had already taken his time working in Little Richard’s band, but if you look past the stage presence and the countless effects that he used on his instrument, his sound was about creating a mood whenever he played. And no matter how many people do Hendrix flourishes whenever they perform, there are only a handful of licks that they can pull from that don’t sound like a straight knockoff, whether it’s that wah-wah tone on ‘Voodoo Child’ or the beautiful clean licks on ‘The Wind Cries Mary’.
But compared to both of them, what Eddie did was take the mindset rather than the individual guitar licks. Half the time that Van Halen played the bar circuit, they got ridiculed for not getting the same kind of reaction when they played Top 40 music, but the fact that they could only sound like themselves was something they needed to lean into a little bit more if they wanted to get people in seats.
Sure, there might be a blues lick on a few of their songs and maybe even an effect that sounds a bit reminiscent of Are You Experienced, but the greatest lesson that anyone can learn isn’t about the kind of tone you have dialled in or how fast you can play. Because in the case of Clapton, Hendrix, and Eddie, all the magic that they ever needed was in their hands rather than the guitar.
