The Van Halen lick that Sammy Hagar was amazed by: “It’s fucking nuts”
Eddie Van Halen didn’t seem to be human half the time he played guitar. He may have had all the traits of an earthly being, but considering what he could bend out of a guitar in a few short minutes of a song, are we sure that he wasn’t some musically gifted alien that just happened to crash land on our planet? Wherever he came from, he gave the rock world something we had never seen, and Sammy Hagar still admits that the guitar figure on ‘Mean Street’ is absolutely insane.
Before Eddie had even thought of making that intro, it all came back to his ability to tap the fretboard. He would have been the first person to tell you that he didn’t technically invent the idea of tapping, but you weren’t going to see anyone else willing to make the guitar create pieces of music through tapping, like the solo of ‘Eruption’ or the amazing solos on ‘Jump’.
While he’s known today as one of the greatest lead players of all time, Eddie always paid attention more to his rhythm than anything else. Any good guitarist knows that locking in with the groove is the most important part, and hearing him work on songs like ‘Unchained’ showed that his right-hand technique was as important as the flashy stuff.
When Hagar heard the opening to ‘Mean Street’ for the first time, he thought that Eddie had come up with something insane, telling Howard Stern, “There’s something from the early days where every time Eddie would play it, it’s fucking nuts. That’s just lunatic. I just thought that was Eddie fucking around.”
Eddie’s playing on the intro is still musical, but this feels like the first time where his love of rhythm and lead guitar got to share the spotlight. Since half of Eddie’s guitar breaks had to do with effects and flashy playing, this was the sound of him beating the crap out of his guitar neck, almost like he was playing some sort of percussion instrument.
For someone who already had his own patented licks, this feels like it should only be attributed to Eddie. While more than a few guitarists have tried their best to imitate his style when they can, this lick is down to Eddie’s internal sense of rhythm, which was probably born out of him messing around on the guitar before something musical caught his ear.
The Hagar era was no different for Eddie’s ingenuity, either. There had already been other hair metal guitarists who sprung up in his wake, but Eddie wasn’t going to stagnate, even using more creative methods to his guitar, like playing it with power tools at the beginning of the song ‘Poundcake’.
Although Eddie would become known as one of the best guitarists in the world, ‘Mean Street’ shows him being more of a musical scientist than a guitar player. There might be loads of scales that people can reference, but at the end of the day, the guitar is still a relatively new instrument, and it takes someone like Eddie to realise what potential we have to squeeze noises out of it.
