It’s almost not fair for any guitarist to measure up to what Eddie Van Halen did.
He never wanted to be treated as one of the greatest musicians to ever walk the Earth, but whenever he started one of his tapping solos, there was some magic going on that can only come from people that were touched by the musical gods. Only a handful of rock artists have reached that kind of level, but if Jimi Hendrix and Brian Wilson had that immaculate ear in the same way Eddie, the guitarist knew that they were only following in the footsteps of musical gods.
Because as much as Eddie appreciated making people happy whenever he played, he was always open to sharing his influences. Some of his tunes were genuinely innovative and had techniques that no one had ever thought of, but the best moments were when he would throw in a lick that sounded like him channelling AC/DC or ZZ Top half the time.
He didn’t even claim to take credit for inventing tapping. He would have happily given credit to Jimmy Page for sparking that idea when he first saw him playing in the 1970s, but the more that he got interested in the mechanics of the instrument, he knew that he could do things that he saw in his heroes like Allen Holdsworth whenever he picked up the guitar. Whenever he pulled out an Eric Clapton lick, though, he at least showed that there was some throughline back to old-school rock and roll.
There are a handful of tunes that might be indebted to the blues in the band’s catalogue, but that was only one piece of the puzzle for Eddie. He had a wealth of material to choose from whenever he went into his vaults, and when he got Sammy Hagar in the group, ‘Right Now’ and ‘Why Can’t This Be Love’ had much more musicality to them than what ‘Diamond Dave’ could do behind the mic.
But Eddie’s taste went far beyond the bog-standard rock and roll bands as well. He was a big fan of fusion act,s and while he could appreciate bands like the Dave Clark Five for helping him fall in love with music when he was a kid, he was already learning about the biggest names in classic rock from his father before he had even started playing guitar.
And while Eddie did have a unique lane whenever he played, he admitted that Bach was the well that every single artist went back to, saying, “There was church music, then Bach popularized tempered tunings, and now we’re playing chainsaws on stage and lighting them on fire. Basically, since Bach there’s really been nothing new under the sun. If we go back before Bach and use a natural, untempered tuning for the piano, we can only play in one key.”
Eddie was far from the kind of classical composer in the same way that Bach was, but those musical movements weren’t all that dissimilar than what he was doing on guitar. ‘Eruption’ is more known today for being one of the finest guitar solos ever pressed to tape, but if you peel back the layers of the spectacle of everything, a lot of the pieces he was playing sounded pretty close to what a classical piece might sound like if it were transposed to the guitar.
So, who knows? Perhaps if Eddie were still around to be making music today, he would have been making classical tunes on the piano as well as guitar masterpieces. After all, Sammy Hagar remembered how much a tune like ‘Can’t Stop Lovin’ You’ sounded like a classical piece of music, so it wasn’t out of the question for Eddie to start going outside the realm of rock altogether.
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