Many famous Rock bands were born out of LA, with the likes of The Doors, The Eagles, Van Halen, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Slash’s very own Guns N’ Roses all sharing a doorstep. However, out of all these acts that came out of this music hub, Slash only took a liking to one of his fellow guitar players.
Slash, who is commonly recognised as one of the guitar greats, would have to have learnt from another great, surely? And that guitarist was Eddie Van Halen, someone he has great respect for, and has worshipped his style of playing.
Eddie was a role model for him who was greatly beneficial in his musical development, something the guitarist was not shy to reveal: “I couldn’t afford good enough concert seats to pick up anything from watching guys perform. But for some reason, when I listened, I understood how to go about it. Eddie Van Halen was the only one who might have thrown me for a loop, but I never tried to emulate him, because I always thought that style was his. It really bummed me out when everybody ripped off his whole trip.”
Growing up, as a budding axe enthusiast, Slash experienced the beauty of going to a rock show and watching your idol. “There is an accessibility, a sense that, ‘Hey, I can do that!’, yet a mystery that surrounds it; you can take notes on Eddie, but can you replicate him?”
Slash also expressed his admiration for Eddie’s unique style, noting, “All the great ideas he had that were uniquely his own, all these left-field kind of things, underneath all that was a really tasty blues guitar player.”
This appraisal may come as a shock to many fans that out of all the things he found impressive about Eddie was his ability to pass as a blues player, when the Eddie we all know is one who is the finger-tapping maestro heard on ‘Panama’. Additionally, both Guns N’ Roses and Van Halen don’t exactly scream blues when you hear them; they’re both heavy guitar bands and nowhere close to Muddy Waters.
However, fundamentally, all great guitar players have roots in blues. This is a trait that both Slash and Eddie share, with the former expressing his favourites being Albert King and BB King. Although their playing styles might not reflect these artists, it’s definitely shaped the way they use their six strings.
Slash also highlighted, “He just added all these other ways to branch out his expression on top of that. And that’s why nobody could ever touch him”.
Even though he didn’t explicitly try to rip off Eddie Van Halen, you can definitely hear the influence in his guitar playing, with hits like ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine‘ carrying the piercing, distorted high notes ringing out in the intro and a “shreddy” quality in the solo reminiscent of ‘Eruption’.
No matter how hard you tried to copy Eddie, you couldn’t; he was in a different league than anyone else, and even a die-hard fan and master of the axe himself, Slash, knows that.
