Howard Stern was never a man known for tiptoeing around his personal opinions. If he thought that something was absolute garbage, he would probably say that on the air with no remorse, and if he believed a song was great, he could hype it up like it was the greatest work ever made by human hands. Stern could be selective about his favourite musicians from time to time, but he knew that there was a musical demon hidden inside Eddie Van Halen whenever he heard him play.
Then again, Stern tended to cater to the harder side of rock music most of the time. He was never afraid to have harder metal acts on his show from time to time, and when you look at the soundtrack to his film Private Parts, his undying love of AC/DC hasn’t seemed to dull with age, either.
Whereas Eddie may have seen a band like AC/DC as an influence back then, whatever he made seemed to be channelled from the other side of the world. It’s usually easy to see where some guitarists get a bunch of their licks, but while blues guitarists often quote each other, Eddie seemed to have some licks patented to him, from the way that he would use his whammy bar to tapping the neck of the guitar to create a barrage of notes.
Upon hearing about his death, Stern said that Eddie was among the best to pick up the instrument, saying, “I wanna speak a little bit about one of the greatest guitar players that ever lived. When Eddie Van Halen came on the scene, I had never heard guitar playing like that. You knew something superior was happening. When Eddie started playing, you would watch him, and you couldn’t take your eyes off him. That guitar, it’s like it’s part of his body.”
But Eddie’s talents weren’t even limited to just the guitar. If someone conquered one instrument that well, it wouldn’t take them long to move on to something else, and Eddie’s talents as a pianist were criminally underrated. While everyone remembers songs like ‘Jump’ as one of the first major keyboard songs for the group, ‘And the Cradle Will Rock’ is actually the first major keyboard song they did, almost sounding like a guitar because of how distorted it is.
Then again, Stern hit the nail on the head when saying that the guitar was a part of the man’s body. From the minute he started playing any solo, it felt like he was doing something that had to be pulled out of his soul, usually spending a good chunk of the show playing solos without anyone else crowding out the stage.
While that ultimately led to a million different copycats trying to ape his sound, there was no accounting for taste in the competition. For all of the great licks that Eddie played, it was never at the expense of the song, usually never wasting a note if it didn’t have to be used on tracks like ‘Panama’ or ‘Runnin’ With the Devil’.
The guitar virtuoso community would spread out a lot more afterwards, but even legends like Joe Satriani and Steve Vai have marvelled at what Eddie was able to do with the guitar, not even being able to match what he did when studying his techniques for years. Stern’s taste may gravitate towards all flavours of rock, but there’s no real way to ignore this kind of musical talent when you see it for the first time.
