Summing up the effect that Jimi Hendrix had on the electric guitar is basically impossible.
It wasn’t just that no one had played with his skill or fluidity when he burst onto the British rock scene in the mid-1960s. It was also his fearless sense of invention with the instrument that marked him out as one of a kind. He wasn’t just playing blues licks faster than anyone else; he was unlocking the potential of an instrument that was still only about 30 years old at his prime.
It’s a testament to his atomic bomb-like presence in rock that no matter how many guitarists come after him, none have ever come close to matching his effect. Whether it’s Jimmy Page, Tom Morello, or Jack White, you name them, they fall short. The closest of all of them, though, was another guitarist whose playing was so electrifying that his name also graced the name of his band. Well, the drummer’s name, too. No disrespect, Alex, but we all know we’re here for your brother.
Eddie Van Halen also took his band to the big time off the back of guitar playing that literally no one in the mainstream had ever seen or heard before. However, that was where the similarities began and ended. His supercharged hard rock style sacrificed the looseness and fluidity of previous rock guitar playing for sheer speed and technical excellence. Where Hendrix was still a disciple of the blues, Eddie Van Halen had more in common with classical guitar maestros like Andrés Segovia than anyone or anything else.
There’s also the fact that, for the lack of a more delicate way of putting it, The Jimi Hendrix Experience were artists while Van Halen were entertainers. To be 100% clear, that’s not a value judgement on either band. Just a statement of how Hendrix, Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell were pushing the boundaries of rock music in their time, to the point that Hendrix may have been a microcosm of the star he could have been with more savviness. In that, Van Halen had David Lee Roth up front. Go figure.
So, what could Van Halen have stolen from Jimi Hendrix?
However, when you look at the small print of Van Halen’s history, there’s a major part of the band’s identity that they wholesale nicked off Jimi Hendrix. One that comes from a story told in the unputdownable rock biography Runnin’ With the Devil: A Backstage Pass Into the Wild Times, Loud Rock and the Down and Dirty Truth Behind the Making of Van Halen by Noel E Monk. The author is no hack, either; he started as the band’s tour manager in 1978 before graduating to their manager in 1985.
If anyone has the inside scoop on Van Halen, it’s him. His story begins with the band’s original manager, Marshall Berle, getting the boot from the group on the grounds of misusing their money. This being the late 1970s, the band weren’t content with simply firing him, so they also found his office and destroyed the place, nicking everything that wasn’t nailed down and taking a Louisville Slugger to the rest.
Monk ended up with a cardboard box full of the leftover items from Berle’s office, which promptly went into his closet and began gathering dust. When looking through said box for material to write about, Monk found an old concert poster from Berle’s time managing bands in the 1960s rock scene. Monk saw what he thought was Van Halen’s iconic winged “VH” logo, then looked again. That “V” was in fact a “J”, and the name emblazoned across it was none other than Jimi Hendrix.
Typically, the Van Halen logo is credited to the graphic designer Dave Bhang. However, what if his most iconic creation was lifted from someone else? It might just be that, despite being polar opposites in terms of guitar playing, there may be one vital thing that Van Halen copied from Jimi Hendrix.
