As a Sunset Strip contemporary of Eddie Van Halen, George Lynch witnessed the legend before the innovations — and insists the most fascinating version of Eddie came before the tapping, the whammy bar, and even Van Halen itself.
“To see it up close and personal as it was happening, in Mammoth and also early Van Halen, was mind-bending,” Lynch says. “It was insane. I'd just go to my studio or go home and get on my guitar for eight hours and go, ‘I gotta step up.’”
“I'd seen him when he was playing with a Les Paul through a [Fender] Bandmaster or Bassman… and he was still amazing. He didn't have the tapping. He didn't have the bar. And it's still insane. It wasn’t Van Halen like you think of him now. It was a different thing, ’cause he had more of the Clapton influence.”
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It wasn’t the Eddie Van Halen the guitar world would come to know and be influenced by. No tapping, no dive bombs — just a blues-rooted electric guitar player with a heavy Eric Clapton influence.
“It was a little more meat-and-potatoes,” Lynch adds. “Not very many people have heard that. And that, to me, is even more interesting, from a guitar player's perspective.”
Lynch also points to a largely forgotten figure who may have pushed Eddie in those early days: Terry Kilgore, who was making his mark with Reddi Killowatt. Listen to a track like “Liquid Lady,” and strands of Eddie’s boisterous DNA are already apparent.
“They didn't have [a great frontman like] David Lee Roth, they didn't have the image, they didn't have the looks, they didn't have the songs,” Lynch says. “But they had Terry. And he was ‘fire.’”
“Terry was, I thought, maybe even better than Eddie. I think Eddie took some of the things Terry was doing.”
The two guitarists’ paths continued to cross as their careers took off.
“We used to hang out,” Lynch recalls. “When Valerie Bertinelli wasn’t around, we’d jam. We’d just sit in a hotel room and play guitar all night.”
Lynch also experienced Eddie’s generosity firsthand during the 1988 Monsters of Rock tour, when Dokken supported Van Halen on a massive 23-city North American stadium run. After Lynch began having trouble with his gear, Eddie stepped in without hesitation.
“And he was so sweet, ’cause he was like, ‘Hey, man, take anything you want of mine.’ So I did half that tour with his rig. That’s pretty insane, ’cause headliners usually don’t do stuff like that. They’re just like, ‘That’s your problem. Figure it out,’ which is fair. But he was very sweet: ‘Just take anything you want—heads, cabinets.’ I used his rig for, like, half that tour.”
“He gave my son a guitar lesson,” Lynch adds. “My kid was going to GIT, and he wanted to be a guitar player like his dad. I took him to meet Eddie at a show, and Eddie’s like, ‘You know what? You’re a guitar player? Let me show you…’ So they went back to the warmup room and he gave my son a little lesson. That was pretty cool. Who does that?”
