FEATURE:
The Lockdown Playlist
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Eddie Van Halen’s Finest Guitar Work
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GIVEN the news that…
PHOTO CREDIT: Fin Costello/Getty Images
the great Eddie Van Halen died earlier this week (on Tuesday), I had to dedicate a Lockdown Playlist to his incredible guitar genius. I think Van Halen is one of the greatest guitar players ever, and he helped revolutionise and evolve the guitar and bring it to new audiences. He very much had his distinct and intimidate style, and I listen back to the classic hits from Van Halen and they are defined by the stunning guitar notes of Eddie Van Halen. Michael Hann writing for The Guardian explained why Van Halen is such an important player and innovator:
“Think of Eddie Van Halen as a time traveller as much as a guitarist, someone who saw the future and fetched it back into the present. “What Eddie Van Halen did was reinvent the electric guitar,” says Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott. “He took it to the next level. He did what Hendrix did in 1967. He made people start listening again.”
He was far ahead of the times, in fact, that his playing could be used to symbolise something unearthly: it is him playing on the cassette that Marty McFly uses to convince his future father he is an alien in Back to the Future – a burst of Van Halen’s squalling, squealing playing, then the words, “silence, earthling!” In 1985, that was a joke all the watching audience understood. Those other players? Yeah, they shred. But Eddie? He’s one step past that.
That much was evident on the debut album by his band, also called Van Halen, released early in 1978. The songs themselves were revolutionary – hard rock, but with a pop edge; a new, sunny, Californian sound that owed little to the bands who had dominated guitar music earlier in the decade – but it was the second track on the album that proclaimed Eddie Van Halen as the heir to Hendrix.
What set Eddie Van Halen apart from the shredders who followed – Yngwie Malmsteen, Joe Satriani and the like – was that he didn’t just play; he could write songs. Huge, glorious, memorable songs. Though he always saw himself as a hard rock player, he also knew how to write pop, and so Van Halen were never just a band for the guitar nerds. Though Van Halen albums always had some showcase for Eddie’s playing – Spanish Fly, Tora! Tora!, the opening of Mean Street, Cathedral – they were usually brief, and his soloing within songs was surprisingly to the point (across the first six VH albums, the ones with David Lee Roth, only three songs last longer than five minutes; this was not a self-indulgent band). His skills were just as often displayed in little flourishes – a guitar equivalent of a drum fill – fitted into the spaces in riffs, or between Roth’s lines. If you can make an impact in a few seconds, why bother wasting more time?”.
To honour the great man – and a hugely sad loss for music -, I have combined some of Eddie Van Helen’s finest work into a playlist that shows why he is so revered and such an influence. It is clear that we will not see anyone like him…
PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
WALK the Earth again.