The one guitarist Eddie Van Halen hated working with: “A real dick”
It’s almost not fair to judge any guitarist on the same level as Eddie Van Halen.
By now, his style of playing is as revered as Jimi Hendrix was in the 1960s, and anyone who has ever tried to tap their way through one of their solos was always going to be involuntarily mimicking what he was doing every single time they got up onstage to play. But even in an era that was dripping with guitar heroes, Eddie figured that there were a few who weren’t exactly the nicest people when he first joined the touring circuit.
But it’s not like guitarists were bending over backwards to learn from this guy when they first got started. It’s like the Wild West every single time that any band goes out onstage, and if someone was out there blowing everyone away every single time they touched the fretboard, it’s not like they were going to be having the best time. The last thing they needed was someone to upstage them, so bands like Black Sabbath really had their work cut out for them when they found these new kids from California.
Ozzy Osbourne had talked about Van Halen giving them a run for their money, but no one was going to infringe on Tony Iommi’s territory. He was a dark wizard of rock and roll in many respects, but when the other guitar heroes saw what Eddie could do, he remembered getting more than a little bit annoyed when they started copying him. These were his heroes, and now all they wanted to do was steal every single lick that he played the minute that the stage lights went out.
It’s one thing for someone like Rick Derringer to steal from Eddie’s licks, but the fact that Tom Scholz did the same thing was going the extra mile. Scholz had already been known for pioneering some of the greatest guitar sounds of the 1970s on that first Boston record, so hearing him taking the same kind of technique that Eddie was doing along with it was severely below the belt as far as Eddie was concerned.
He could at least call Derringer out on it, but since Scholz was so standoffish when the band played, Eddie didn’t necessarily have kind words to say about him after the fact, saying, “Tom Scholtz is a real dick. He’s unsociable. I guess he just thinks he’s God or something. He never comes around, he doesn’t say hi. He doesn’t do anything. Just kind of hides out, runs onstage and plays, and disappears afterwards. So I started talking to the other guitarist (in Boston), and I told him, ‘Hey. Tell him I think he’s fucked!’”
But the best kind of revenge usually came from the records that Eddie put out afterwards. He knew he couldn’t keep doing the same schtick every time he played, and even if there were moments where his taps would sound the same, no one could even fathom the kind of playing that he was doing when he launched into the intro to ‘Little Guitars’ or started that little army of notes that kicks off ‘Mean Street’.
Because when you look at how everyone tried to copy him, it was about much more than using both hands on the fretboard. There have been plenty of stories about everyone from Ted Nugent to Billy Corgan trying out his gear, but when you listen to them play some of those iconic licks, you realise that a lot of the Van Halen sound was all in Eddie’s hands from their debut record onward.
So while Scholz can try to jack his style all he wants, the fact is that Eddie was his own unique animal, and no amount of studio trickery was going to stop that. Boston already had their sound down to a tee, and even if there were a few great guitar hero moments throughout their career, no one can emulate a guitarist that put their whole self into every note they played.
