The one guitarist Eddie Van Halen always wanted to play like: “He’s a real artist”
It’s hard to think of someone like Eddie Van Halen being dissatisfied with his place in rock and roll history when he hit it big.
In a world that was full of the traditional prog and singer-songwriter types, hearing that first Van Halen record let everyone know that there was a new guitar legend in town, and from the first few lines of ‘Eruption’, every single guitarist on Earth wanted to sound like that. Eddie had the entire music world at his feet half the time he played, but that didn’t mean that he had complete control over everything, either.
Because if Eddie had had his way, chances are there would have been far fewer people trying to make a living off of tapping. He wanted to be an original, but when you develop a new vocabulary on the instrument, the industry naturally wants five or six more versions of you to throw onto the charts. Even when looking at his heroes, the guitar maestro did end up getting a bit too perturbed when he found out people like Tom Scholz from Boston and Rick Derringer were jacking his ideas.
As far as he was concerned, everyone should have been finding their own voice on the guitar, but that’s not how it worked. The entire hair metal movement seemed to take its cues from Van Halen’s schtick, and despite being one of the single greatest living musicians at the time, Eddie did end up needing to compromise himself one too many times when working with David Lee Roth.
The guitarist could have kept on making musical symphonies every single time he worked on one of his records, but if it didn’t have a hit, it wasn’t going to matter. ‘Diamond Dave’ was the one pushing to make their tunes a bit more commercial whenever they could, and while that did end up working out great when making songs like ‘Unchained’, it had to sting when Eddie saw some of his musical babies get thrown out without any polish, like the intro of ‘Dancing in the Street’ or the intro for what would become ‘Little Guitars’.
But even though he had a lot more chops than he worked out on record, he already knew that some artists were outside the Van Halen wheelhouse. It was a miracle that the band even found time for some of his massive tapping licks, but if Eddie had his way, he would have rather tried to make his guitar sound closer to what Allan Holdsworth was doing whenever he put out a new record.
The UK had already been working out some of the greatest fusion songs of the time, but Eddie felt that it was going to be an uphill battle if he even tried to throw in those kinds of licks into his music, saying, “Holdsworth is the best in my book. I can kind of play like him, but it doesn’t fit our style of music. He’s a real artist. He plays a guitar like mine, too. He wears it up high, like a jazz guitar. I could play all that stuff, too, if I played with my guitar up that high, but how would a rock and roll kid look with a guitar up like that? I do have to sacrifice the amount of movement I do onstage for the way I play.”
That didn’t mean that every single one of Eddie’s solos had to be stuck in one genre, though. Although he always had a more unique style of playing, an album like Fair Warning is one of the only times where he could flex some of his stranger influences whenever he started working out tunes like ‘Mean Street’ or even the off-the-wall solo that in the middle of the song ‘Sinner’s Swing’.
But even if Van Halen were always doomed to the realm of stadium rock whenever they played, Eddie’s heart always catered to people like Holdsworth that kept things interesting on every track they made. And considering there are so many songs still in the vaults, perhaps Eddie had a few great fusion tunes up his sleeve that have still yet to see the light of day.
