Eddie Van Halen thought the world misunderstood one band: “I got the chills”
As far as guitarists go, Eddie Van Halen always had his ears attuned to the outskirts of rock and roll.
Not everything that he liked needed to fit into the realms of Top 40 radio, and considering his biggest inspirations were players like Tony Iommi and Eric Clapton, the fact that he made pop tunes like ‘Right Now’ and ‘When It’s Love’ is practically a miracle given what he had to work with. But for all of the great bands that fell by the wayside, he knew when artists were not cutting it and which were being kept down out of spite.
Because as much as people liked to take bits and pieces of what Eddie did all the time, he had no tolerance for any of those copycats. He was more than happy to have inspired people to pick up guitars and write songs of their own, but there’s a lot of his sound that is so distinct to him that it’s almost impossible to recreate it even if you’ve been playing the same tapping licks for the better part of 20 years.
But in his own free time, Eddie was more interested in listening to tunes that sounded different. A lot of what Van Halen was working with during the Sammy Hagar era, for instance, was far from the most obscure sounds in the world, but it’s telling that Eddie was interested in making songs in the same way that Peter Gabriel was when he started building a lot of his guitar and keyboard lines.
Even as a guitarist, Eddie had been on the lookout for the technicians of the world. Jeff Beck was already a one-off that was never going to be seen again, but there was something about the world of fusion that intrigued him. A lot of what Eddie did was based around the blues, so to hear a band like UK come out playing the most off-the-wall jazz lines he had ever heard opened his eyes to what could be done on the instrument.
The tapping legend had no problem talking up Allan Holdsworth’s playing, but when he saw them tank on the charts, he knew the rest of the world were in the wrong, saying, “Here we are in Reno, I’m sitting here tuning up, and all of a sudden [I said], ‘Is that Bill Bruford? Whoa!’ All of a sudden I got the chills. I was freakin’ out. All of sudden, Allan Holdsworth walks in. I’m going, ‘My God! These guys are opening for us? These guys are veterans!’ I mean, they’ve been through it. They played before us, and they bombed. People hated them. But I’m standing there, like you said, with tears in my eyes, just getting off, trippin’. It was so good.”
Then again, it’s not exactly a shock to find out that the band didn’t go over well with the Van Halen crowd. This was the era when David Lee Roth was becoming master of ceremonies for the greatest party the world had ever known, and since all that the UK had was their meagre hit ‘In the Dead of Night’, there were bound to be a few drinks thrown their way by the more rowdy members of the crowd.
But if you listen to how Eddie’s guitar sound changed following that tour, there are more than a few similarities in his playing and what Holdsworth was doing. It’s not a direct copy of his work or anything, but listening to an album like Fair Warning is a better indication of where his head was beyond playing the occasional Clapton lick in between all of the tapping sections everyone loved.
So while the world never gave UK the time of day that they should have, Eddie knew that he would always be sitting on one of the biggest secrets of the music industry. He had friends who preferred to remain in the session scene, like Toto, but Holdsworth deserved the kind of accolades only reserved for the greatest of all time.
