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«Jump», song and video, you all surely know it, with David Lee Roth jumping in the air, type of split, in slow motion, the power of an MTV still in its infancy but already having annihilated all the radio stars.
Anyway, David immediately made a good impression on me, then a few years later he became my absolute idol because of three deadly Australian rockers who dedicated a terrifying track to him in terms of sound and lyrics, and from there it was just a short step to buying a poster of him to hang in my room. Then I got over it.
However, back then I set out to find something from Van Halen, and so I got their first album recorded on a tape, and I found it quite disgusting because of how Eddie Van Halen played. Obviously, it was still unconscious, as the passion for Johnny Ramone came later, but you could see that I already had inside me that kind of guitarists just wasn't for me.
What type of guitarists? The Van Halens, the Vais, the Malmsteens, basically them, those who in a race for excess and special effect practically suppressed any form of spontaneity and communicativity and made talent something subservient solely and exclusively to technique, or rather technicality: «If someone really wanted to compete with King Eddie, they had to be super fast, have a cool look, and carry with them a guitar never seen before.».
It just wasn't for me, then as now, as the maximum of guitar virtuosity I understand is Fdeniz Tek, and so from Van Halen, I have a sheer nothing from the disco, they've come to terms with it, I too and we all live happily, me, Eddie, and even David.
And yet, in the past ten or so days, my fondness and esteem for Eddie have grown tremendously, even more than for David.
All thanks to this very agile little book in praise and glory of the electric guitar and the small great heroes who made its history and dedicated an entire chapter to Eddie.
The reason is quickly explained in three moves.
So, at some point, Eddie recounts that one night he receives a call at home, the line is disturbed, he doesn't understand much and starts inveighing against the person on the other end of the line, who the hell are you, what the hell do you want, you piece of crap, and hangs up; the next day, another night call, the person on the other end presents himself as the piece of crap from the day before and then gives his name, Quincy Jones who wants to propose to him to play on a piece by Michael Jackson that will later end up on «Thriller»; and from that moment, whenever Quincy deals with Eddie, he will always introduce himself as the piece of crap.
Then, there's the story of the great friendship that developed with Les Paul – and well, a few chapters before Eddie, there's the chapter dedicated to Les and all his brilliant ideas, and to say that for me Les Paul until about fifteen days ago was a type of guitar heard in a Clash song – and Les who unfailingly repeated to Eddie that in the end, the history of the electric guitar was written by three, him in the sense of Les, him in the sense of Eddie, and Leo Fender being the third, and then they would start joking around.
And at the end of the chapter on Eddie, there is a quote from a big shot, the director of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, who begged Eddie to lend him his Frankenstrat for exhibition because «The museum collects multidimensional objects and this guitar symbolizes innovation, talent, and influence», and that crook Eddie refused, offered a duplicate, and insisted on adding that the Frannestrat also symbolizes «... a lot of time spent fooling around.».
Here, this reminded me so much of Franti from the book Cuore, the only thing from that book imposed on me that, I believe for many others, at least for Umberto Eco for sure, really stuck, that rogue who smiled. And that fooling around with the Frankenstrat was the propeller that pushed the fondness for Eddie so high.
Because, behind and far beyond that fooling around, at the bottom, there's the consuming passion of a young Dutch boy who, not even a teenager, lands in the United States and doesn't find it so easy to fit in and then spends his days at home, in the bedroom, tinkering with the guitar gifted by his parents, and then in the shop of another passionate one like him, one Wayne Charvel, and then picking up guitars around, dismantling and reassembling them to his image and likeness, until bringing the Frankenstrat to life.
And then that thing Eddie says at one point: «Certainly, the fact that I never took guitar lessons was important: I didn’t know what was right and what was wrong, I had no idea there were rules. I just knew what I liked, what I wanted to hold in my hand, and what sounds I wanted to hear.».
Beautiful, regardless of any consideration of the music he plays.
Here, you find many stories like that of Eddie Van Halen in the 12 chapters of «Play It Loud. An Epic History of the Style, Sound, and Revolution of the Electric Guitar.», from the less known ones, from George Beauchamp to Charlie Christian, from Les Paul – the one who tied his name to Gibson and the Clash mentioning him in «All the Young Punks» – to Chet Atkins, from George Gruhn to Paul Reed Smith, to the ones that more or less everyone knows in their broad lines, from Jimi Hendrix to Pete Townshend, from Jimmy Page to John Lennon and George Harrison, from Fender to Gibson to Rickenbacker.
And the most beautiful thing about this book is that, behind the story of a guitar, which in essence is just an inanimate object, as much as it may rise to the rank of a work of art, there always comes out the story of one or many people, those who dreamed the guitar and those who built the guitar giving body to the dream; and this, the two authors, Brad Tolinski and Alan Di Perna, make it stand out excellently.
And then it seems right to close with the words of George Gruhn, one who tore the guitar away from a life spent studying reptiles: «I don’t foresee retiring. How can you retire from a hobby?».
Just two things, before finishing it once and for all.
The first is that, when I wrote that it's a “very agile” book, in reality, it’s just under 400 pages, but they literally fly by at the speed of light, and are packed with curiosities and anecdotes, like the surreal discussion between Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend on who should perform first at a certain rock festival.
The second is that I highly recommend this book to everyone, regardless of knowledge of the matter, whether one vaguely knows what shape an electric guitar is or, like me, is barely able to change a string or like Ingwi Malmstin can play 10,000 scales in 23 seconds flat, because I say and say again that without the electric guitar there is no rock 'n' roll.
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