The one guitarist Eddie Van Halen said was better than any shredder
Eddie Van Halen didn’t get into the music business to be one of the biggest names in rock and roll.
He loved playing music with his brother when he first got started, and he was going to spend the rest of his life trying to make the best riffs that he could once he discovered what could be done on the fretboard. But even if there were plenty of chances for him to work outside of the usual rock and roll wheelhouse, he didn’t like the fact that everyone else seemed to be taking his style whenever they started their own tapping techniques.
If anything, the fact that Eddie turned his back to the audience during those early Van Halen shows was probably one of the best things he could have done. No one understood how he could somehow make one guitar sound like four whenever he played, but when people heard ‘Eruption’ for the first time and saw what he was doing on the fretboard, a lot of them figured that they had a career path set out for them whenever they started working.
That’s not how Eddie thought about it, though. Sure, a lot of his greatest moments came when he happened to be playing some of his signature tapping licks, but there were also more than a few times when he was one of the greatest rhythm guitarists of all time. It was second nature for him to be able to lock in with his brother Alex, and his solos were never about giving him an excuse to show his technique.
He was still focused on serving the song before anything else, and a lot of his contemporaries were doing the same thing. In fact, for someone who had grown up in the same era that Van Halen did, The Edge from U2 was taking a completely different approach. He wasn’t going to be called one of the best technical guitarists in the world, but whenever he started working with his effects, he was creating the kind of tunes that most artists would have never thought of with only one guitar.
And while a lot of people clowned on The Edge for having too many effects, Eddie felt that he would much rather listen to him than any of the usual shredders of the world, saying, “He sure likes his echo, doesn’t he? But there again, he’s more of a songwriter, and that’s where it’s at. Expressing yourself as a songwriter is a lot more wide open. All these kids who are just gunslingers, they’ll come around. You can’t be doing that all your life–it’s impossible.”
There are still some people who are constantly reinventing what it means to explore the fretboard like Steve Vai and Joe Satriani, but The Edge practically created a whole new world whenever he started making those U2 records. ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ doesn’t necessarily sound all that impressive when you don’t have any of the effects on, but when you hear him in his element playing that intro, it’s like stepping into a time tunnel into the future whenever The Joshua Tree starts.
And that’s before getting into the subtle ways that he uses his guitar. Even without some of the great effects boxes that he uses, a lot of the best moments on U2 records are when he is a lot more subtle. There’s hardly anything flashy going on in ‘One’, but laying down that signature pulse of the song is the perfect backdrop for Bono to sing some of the most gripping lyrics he has ever made.
So while there are bound to be more than a few people who claim that The Edge is nothing without his effects boxes, Eddie knew that was never the point, either. Yes, The Edge doesn’t have the same technical chops as Eddie or even someone like Eric Clapton, but finding one’s voice on the guitar like he did was a lot more important than having to play the same kind of tune over and over again.
