The one album Eddie Van Halen learned note for note: “They really impressed me”
The guitar work of Eddie Van Halen is the kind of music that truly needs to be studied to be understood.
No one had heard anything like ‘Eruption’ when it first came out, and the fact that the guitar wizard had the nerve to turn his back to the audience whenever he played his signature solos made his craft feel more like a magic trick half the time he played. But under the hood, a lot of the theory that went into some of Eddie’s greatest moments came back to the blues more often than not.
After all, Eddie grew up listening to the British invasion like everyone else from his generation, but his favourite bands were always a bit more bluesy. He had a great love for the true geniuses of the genre like The Beatles, but since his favourite acts included The Dave Clark Five and Cream in the late 1960s, it’s no surprise that he took to creating bluesy licks that happened to be played with both hands on the fretboard.
But even among the shredding moments, Eddie never forgot about the importance of making a great hook, either. Most guitarists couldn’t get away with making a two-minute guitar solo a staple of their record without coming off as laughably pretentious, but it made all the sense in the world once Eddie started playing, especially with the tremolo picking part in the middle of ‘Eruption’ becoming one of the biggest earworms of his career.
Once you’ve exhausted the same licks over and over again, you’re going to want to move on to other things, and Eddie was no different. He kept his ears open whenever he could, but even when working with studio technicians like Michael Jackson and even fusion greats like Allan Holdsworth, nothing mattered more than him making the guitar scream whenever he got enough gain on his amplifier.
Rock and roll had always been about the power that comes from a great guitar riff, and when Eddie started working out parts of his favourite records, he wanted to dissect every piece of the musical puzzle. And while Eric Clapton usually gets a lot of credit for teaching Eddie every lick he knew, bassist Michael Anthony remembered that the guitarist had a fondness for what Pete Townshend did on The Who’s Live At Leeds.
That was the benchmark for what heavy music sounded like in a pre-metal world, and Anthony felt that Eddie managed to go beyond anything the British legends did when he first heard him, saying, “When I jammed with Eddie and Alex that first time, they played some of their original stuff. They were going through these time changes and I’m [thinking], ‘Whoa! What a trip!’ They were great players. They really impressed me… [Eddie] could play the whole Live at Leeds album, playing it note for note. It was just as good, if not better than Townshend!”
That kind of claim is borderline heresy depending on who you talk to, but if there was one guitarist who could actually manage to beat Townshend at his own game, it was Eddie. He had learned all of the licks that he could from whatever records he loved, and when he wasn’t trying to create the kind of musical thunder that Tony Iommi had when working on tracks like ‘Into the Void’ with Black Sabbath, he was coaxing the band to do their own versions of tunes like ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ on the record Live: Right Here Right Now.
Eddie was always willing to be a diligent student no matter who his rock and roll teacher was, but his longevity goes well beyond the idea of the pupil becoming the master. This was the closest that the next generation of guitarists had to Jimi Hendrix, and the musical doors that he opened were exactly what Townshend was talking about when saying that rock music needed to evolve.
