It’s never good for any artist to feel like they’ve stagnated with their playing. Even if the greatest of all time are still considered musical gods today, no one wants to feel like they have plateaued and have said all they have to say on their instrument. Jeff Beck was chasing that muse all his life, and he had a certain comfort in knowing that Eddie Van Halen was also doing the same thing.
While what Beck did behind the fretboard started off somewhat bluesy, it wasn’t the kind of blues that someone like BB King was used to playing. No, Beck was looking to spread out every time he tried to play, and that involved twisting the guitar into different shapes that only he could work with.
Listening to ‘Beck’s Bolero’ in The Yardbirds, it’s easy to see how much he would be revered years later. There was still a bluesy root to grab onto, but the amount of strange detours he takes with his guitar is so strange that it’s easy to forget about a little guitarist named Jimmy Page, who is also playing on the song.
Whereas Beck saw his guitar innovation as a personal mission, Eddie Van Halen found his calling out of curiosity. When seeing Led Zeppelin play for the first time, Eddie first got the idea of wanting to move beyond the traditional realm of guitar playing, taking his pull-off method and turning that into the tapping technique that would become his signature move throughout his career.
Beck was never one to ape someone else’s style, but he at least knew that Eddie was a true original amongst everyone else, telling Guitar World, “I think it’s the greatest. I’d love to go and see him, but I probably wouldn’t stay for the whole concert: I’d just get a flash of brilliance, and then I’d go, saying to myself, ‘That guy is really great’. He’s got the most amazing technique, and you’ve got to take your hat off to him for that – the speed and the frantic element. I could do well to learn from him some of those tricks he pulls.”
Then again, there’s a good chance that Eddie has pulled his fair share of licks from what Beck has done as well. Regardless of his patented licks that no one can touch, Eddie’s basic blues vocabulary on the guitar stemmed from blues, so Beck would have been an obvious influence alongside players like Eric Clapton.
There are even a handful of songs where Eddie manages to take a few pages out of Beck’s playbook. Despite the massive amount of effects, the twinkling intro of ‘Hear About It Later’ off of Fair Warning is an interesting take on how Beck normally used his volume pedals, with both guitarists being able to sound like a human voice rather than an instrument.
Beck may have appreciated the idea of speed regarding Eddie’s approach, but both understood that it was never playing for the sake of playing. It was how much heart was put into every note and whether it served the song, and even though each of them played a lot of notes, it always made the track better.
