Slash has discussed his love for legendary Van Halen guitarist Eddie Van Halen in the latest episode of the Southern Accents Radio With Dave Cobb podcast on Apple Music Country
Heaping praise upon the late rocker, Slash began: “By and large, I really don’t come from this sort of eighties shredding school of guitar playing at all.
“But when I first heard, along with everybody else, in 1978 and first heard the Van Halen debut record, it really fucked me. That was a heavy fucking record!
Slash continued, “I mean, that was the moment that the Seventies just changed, that particular record. And as a guitar player, I was just a kid, I was just picking up the guitar at that time. I hadn’t even started at that moment.
“I started like the following year, but when I started getting into guitar playing, everybody was trying to emulate Eddie and they were all sort of focusing on the obvious techniques and the fucking finger tapping and the harmonics and the tremolo bar stuff and all these really fucking great techniques that Eddie had,” he explained.
“But the way that he did it was such a part of his personality and it was such a part of his melodic sensibility that it had this real sort of musical fluidity that nobody after that really ever came close to playing that style of guitar playing.
“And so I always loved Eddie. And in between any of his very specific techniques, he also just had great fucking rock and roll lyrics, just really cool, bluesy, fucking rock lyrics. So, yeah, I loved Eddie.”
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of metal, rock, indie, pop, and everything else in between.
It’s not the first time that Slash has spoken of his fondness for Eddie, with the rocker previously telling Consequence of Sound: “The thing about Eddie is that he was such a gifted musician.”
He continued, “Any instrument he had chosen to play would have been phenomenal because he just had that pure musical talent. And he chose guitar, because that’s what turned him on.
“And for somebody with that kind of musical talent to get turned on to rock ‘n’ roll guitar was sort of unique unto itself, because most of us guitar players are a ragged bunch of rock ‘n’ rollers who don’t have too much technical ability or schooling.
“We just sort of go for this raw thing. And he had that, but he also had this musical, sort of classical gift. ”
For more on this topic, head over to the Classic Rock Observer.
Check out The River Is Rising (Behind The Scenes) by Slash ft. Myles Kennedy and The Conspirators:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhfAM700v9w
