Half the time Eddie Van Halen was on the guitar, he didn’t seem like a real person. Even though he possessed every characteristic of an Earthly being, are we certain that he wasn’t some exceptionally talented extraterrestrial who happened to stumble upon our planet, given the extent of what he could achieve with a guitar in just a few minutes of a song? Regardless of his origins, he brought something unprecedented to the rock genre. Sammy Hagar continues to acknowledge that the guitar player on “Mean Street” is completely bonkers.
Eddie’s tapping skill led to composing the intro before he realized its significance. He would have been the first to admit that he wasn’t the one who invented tapping technically. However, you couldn’t see anyone else willing to use tapping to make guitar solos like the incredible solos on “Jump” or “Eruption” into musical compositions.
Eddie always focused more on his rhythm than anything else. Even though he’s recognised as one of the all-time great lead players. Any skilled guitarist will tell you that finding your groove is crucial. Listening to him perform on songs like “Unchained” demonstrated how crucial his right-hand technique was, in addition to the showy parts.
Hagar told Howard Stern that he thought Eddie had come up with something crazy when he first heard the opening to “Mean Street,” saying, “There’s something from the early days where every time Eddie would play it, it’s fu*king nuts.” That is just insane. That seemed to me like Eddie was playing around.
Although Eddie’s playing in the intro is still melodic, it seems like this is the first time that lead guitar and rhythm have ever shared the spotlight. Eddie sounded like he was playing some kind of percussion instrument, pounding the hell out of his guitar neck. Effects and showy playing accounted for half of his guitar breaks.
This seems like it belongs only to Eddie, for someone who already had his own patented licks. Eddie’s internal sense of rhythm, which likely originated from him experimenting with the guitar until something melodic caught his ear, is responsible for this lick, despite the fact that many guitarists have made an effort to mimic his style when they can.
Eddie’s inventiveness was not any different during the Sammy Hagar era. Other hair metal guitarists had already emerged in his wake, but Eddie wasn’t about to slow down. In fact, he was getting more inventive with his guitar playing. He even used power tools to play the opening chord of the song “Poundcake.”
In “Mean Street,” Eddie is portrayed as more of a musical scientist than a guitarist. Despite this portrayal, he would go on to become one of the greatest guitarists in the world. Even though there are a tonne of scales available, the guitar is still a relatively new instrument. It takes someone like Eddie to realize how much potential there is for us to extract sounds from it.
