The legacy Eddie Van Halen wanted to leave behind
It’s hard to quantify what Eddie Van Halen brought to the electric guitar ever since 1978.
There are many guitarists that have tried to match what he has done with the six-string, but one of the greatest parts of his sound is being able to hear the pure unbridled joy of him tapping his way through whatever solo that he was working on. Beyond the great licks, there was always some semblance of fun to what he was doing, but it took a lot of hard work for him to even get to that point.
Keep in mind that the whole reason why Eddie even got the chance to play guitar was the result of him becoming sick of hearing his brother Alex play his drums. He had loved that sense of rhythm when he first started playing, but even if it was clear that his brother was much more comfortable behind the kit, the rhythmic side of the music was never going to leave him once he started making riffs.
If you look at his status in guitar history, one of the most neglected parts of his playing is what he does for the rhythm side of things. The riff to a song like ‘Panama’ might not seem like the most complicated thing in the world, but getting it to lock into the groove with Alex’s drums is one of the most deceptively complicated parts of the band’s catalogue.
And while everyone likes to go back to the massive solos on tracks like ‘Eruption’, a lot of Eddie’s best moments happen when he isn’t necessarily tapping the guitar. Sure, that was the technique that was going to be etched on his tombstone, but Eddie wasn’t going to stop once he found a gimmick. He was a musical inventor, and whether that meant picking up a different instrument or finding new tricks, he was going to make sure that no one was able to copy what he did.
‘Spanish Fly’ may have been the first time people got to hear him play without all the musical bells and whistles, but the intro to ‘Little Guitars’ is still one of the most insane tricks he has ever pulled off. The flamenco picking was already there on ‘Eruption’, but hearing him fret the lower notes while playing the higher strings makes it feel like a guitar duet happening on only one instrument.
It wasn’t the conventional way of playing, but Eddie felt like those kinds of tricks were what he should be remembered for, saying, “If I kick the bucket tomorrow, the only thing I want people to at least think of me as or respect me for or whatever, is that I have done things with the guitar that no one else has done. I’ll beat the [shit] out of my guitar and get whatever noises I can out of it.”
The same could be said of punk guitarists that didn’t have any sense of technique, but what Eddie did was far different. No other guitarist would have been daring enough to make a piece like ‘Cathedral’ while turning the volume knob of their guitar up and down throughout the whole tune, but even if the technology failed him in some spots, that should never be considered a point against the guitar maestro.
If anything, the technology needed to catch up to him in a lot of respects, and when he finally came out with his own brand of guitars, fans finally got the chance to do all the tricks that Eddie could do. And yet, even when he’s gone, there’s a reason why no one truly sounds like him. They can study his records, but above all else, you need the kind of heart and the hands that he had.
