The only guitar legend Eddie Van Halen couldn’t get through to: “Give me the shaft with their eyes”
It’s hard to think of anyone not having a great time listening to Eddie Van Halen do nearly anything.
He was a musical ray of sunshine every single time he picked up a guitar or played the piano, and when you listen to any of his interviews, he seemed to be one of the most humble geniuses that the rock and roll world had ever produced. But even if he was one of the most happy-go-lucky legends that anyone had ever heard of, there were bound to be a few people who gave him the cold shoulder as well.
Not that some of them weren’t deserved to some degree. Van Halen weren’t known to be the most well-behaved band in the world every single time they went on tour, and when you look at their first tours with a band like Rush, it made sense why the Canadian icons didn’t exactly take kindly to their tourmates getting a little bit too rough every single time they got off the stage to party.
But was anyone really arguing that Eddie didn’t deserve to be up there with the greats? ‘Eruption’ practically sealed the deal for him being one of the biggest guitar heroes of his generation, and even if he did wear his influences from people like Tony Iommi and Eric Clapton on his sleeve from time to time, he had carved out a place for himself that no one else had covered before. He was one of the greatest of all time, and the rest of the guitar community was pissed.
After all, the biggest calling card of any guitarist was supposed to be about being one of the musical kings of the universe, so when someone was kicking your ass every single night you took them out on tour, you’re not exactly going to feel great talking to them in passing. And that certainly applied to when Eddie started rubbing elbows with some of the biggest names in hard rock at the time, like Joe Perry.
Aerosmith had already become one of the biggest bands in America years before, but when Eddie talked about meeting Perry for the first time, he felt like the guitarist completely blacklisted him for a while, saying, “There’s one thing that bothered me so much in the very beginning, in ’78, our first tour, is how people like Joe Perry and other guitarists would just give me the shaft with their eyes. Wouldn’t say hello. Wouldn’t be nice. No nothing. I’m not that way.”
Then again, Perry’s style was always going to be different from the way that Eddie approached his playing. Perry never sought to be one of the most nimble guitar heroes of all time, and since a lot of his songs are more riff-oriented, his approach to guitar fell more in line with what the greatest R&B players were doing around that time rather than Eddie’s insane tapping techniques.
But it’s not like Perry didn’t have reason to be upset, either. A lot of what Van Halen was all about had to do with creating one of the greatest parties that anyone had ever seen, and even if he couldn’t compete with Eddie, there were a few moves that David Lee Roth did in the early days that felt like they were stolen from what Steven Tyler was doing whenever ‘The Bad Boys From Boston’ rolled in.
Perry did eventually call Eddie one of the greatest things to happen to the electric guitar, but those first few years were all about keeping his guard up to a certain degree. He knew what could happen when a guitarist kicked his ass every single time he performed, and he wasn’t going to find himself looking like yesterday’s news next to Eddie any time soon.
