“He just thinks he’s God”: The three guitarists Van Halen accused of copying him
When Eddie Van Halen burst onto the scene, he brought with him a style of playing that was, for many, completely alien. Long and hard-hitting notes were abandoned in favour of sped-up and chaotic sounds. It was a fascinating way to play the guitar, and his shredding technique can be found throughout metal music.
Van Halen was never against people adopting his technique; if that were the case, he would have a vendetta against a wide range of musicians. He wasn’t a fan of when people completely copied everything about his sound. This happened on more than one occasion, and the first time was particularly hard for the guitarist, as one of the impersonators was a hero to him growing up.
“Rick Derringer opened for us last year, and he did my exact solo. After the show, we’re sitting in the bar, and I just said, ‘Hey, Rick. I grew up on your ass. How can you do this? I don’t care if you use the technique – don’t play my melody’,” recalled Eddie, “And he’s drunk and stupid and going, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah’. The next night, he does my solo again, and he ends the set with ‘You Really Got Me’, which is exactly what we do. So I hate to say it, but I just told him, ‘Hey, if you’re going to continue doing that, you ain’t opening for us’. So I kicked him off.”
Derringer didn’t support Van Halen again, something that the guitarist describes as “fucked”. It’s easy to understand his frustration, as he will have praised Derringer’s originality when growing up and getting into music, so to have the chance to perform on the same stage and he used it as a platform to rip the guitarist off is a particularly tough situation to be in.
Johnny Winter was also accused of copying the hard rock soloist. “Still Alive and Well, stuff like that. And here’s the guy copying my stuff. It’s pretty weird,” Van Halen said the same about Tom Scholtz from Boston. “We played right before them – I forget where – and I do my solo. And then, all of a sudden, he does my solo. And it was real weird, because it was a daytime thing.”
He continued, “I was standing onstage, and the whole crowd was looking at me like, ‘What’s this guy doing?’ I was drunk, and I got pissed. Tom Scholtz is a real dick. He’s unsociable. I guess he thinks he’s God or something. He never comes around; he doesn’t say hi. He doesn’t do anything.”
The problem with being such a forward-thinking musician is that while you pave the way for other musicians to expand the confines of modern music, you also risk having other musicians downright steal your forward-thinking music. Van Halen was on the receiving end of it, in circumstances that he rightly considers, “fucked”.
