BLACK and WHITE and ED ALL OVER

EDDIE VAN HALEN WAS DOWN-TO-EARTH AND AS COOL AS F*@K — BUT HE WAS ALSO A GENIUS. THIS IS WHY.

- BRAD TOLINSKI

RARELY HAS THERE been a relationship between an artist and a magazine like the one Guitar World shared with Eddie Van Halen. With more than 20 cover stories and additional pieces published by various GW offshoots like Guitar Aficionado, Guitar Legends and Guitar School, much ink has been spilled by us in the name of Van Halen through the years. Ed’s appeal to our publication was obvious. As one of the greatest electric guitarists of the 20th century, and one of the most important guitar inventors since Les Paul, Leo Fender and Ted McCarty, his work was endlessly fascinating and worth reporting to our readers.

As a personality, he was funny, unvarnished and a surprisingly effective communicator. His interviews were always an appealing combination of “aw, schucks” humility, rowdy fun and straight-shooting insight, and he regularly spoke about his revolutionary playing techniques, such as tapping, as if they were no big deal, often laughing at the absurdity of his own ingenuity as if it was some other “Eddie Van Halen” that made it all up.

“I was just sitting in my room at home, drinkin’ a beer, and I remembered seeing people popping their finger on the fretboard and tapping out one note,” he once told us in his distinctive gravelly voice. “I thought, ‘Well, nobody is really capitalizing on that. Nobody was doing more than just one stretch and one note… real quick.’ So, I started dickin’ around and said, ‘Fuck! This is a technique nobody really does!’”

Let’s unpack that for a second.