The rise of Eddie Van Halen as a generation’s guitar hero saw thousands running to their local Guitar Center to buy a Superstrat and master tapping licks. As his son, Wolfgang Van Halen, once said, EVH “kind of ruined” the ‘80s guitar scene, as a raft of copyists followed in his wake.
But for other impressionable musicians like Les Claypool, his influence would push them away from the electric guitar while inspiring them to reach new heights on their chosen instrument.
“Everybody wanted to be Eddie Van Halen,” the Primus bass player and frontman tells Rick Beato. So, his looking to the low-end of the scale made perfect sense — all these guitar players would need a bassist for the bands they started. Although it took a little coaxing from his schoolmate, Kirk Hammett, to become embroiled in band life.
“He actually tried to get me to sing for his band,” Claypool reveals. “We had algebra together, and he sat behind me. He would always go, ‘Hey, Claypool. Hey, Claypool, check it out, man.’
“I still, to this day, remember this ad. It was the ad for a Stratocaster where the guy's holding it, and he's going, ‘It's a rock machine,’ and the guy behind him is going, ‘No, it's a country machine.’ And he's [Hammett] like, ‘Here's my guitar, Claypool, man. It’s the one I'm getting.’”
Hammett, who of course would go on to take over the world with Metallica — although a Fernandes was his Strat of choice in the band’s early days — was just one of the players to have been enraptured by EVH’s flair and fretboard pyrotechnics.
“That first Van Halen album blew open everyone’s minds to the potential of electric guitar,” he told the New York Times of his influence in the wake of his passing in 2020. “His right-hand technique, the way he hammered on strings, with super-wide intervals that a person could not humanly stretch. It was an incredible sound. Eddie started this momentum of just getting sounds out of his guitar that no one got.”
The Hammett-Claypool tie-in never happened after he “chickened out” of being Hammett’s frontman. “I was a total Bobby Brady, croaking and cracking,” the bassist admits. But another band soon began their search for a bass player, and Claypool’s fate was sealed.
“There was a guy who had this bass for sale for 15 bucks, some old piece of shit, and — actually it was 30 bucks, and I had 15 — I said, ‘Dad, can I borrow 15 bucks?’ He's like, ‘Is that really what you want to do?’ And I said, ‘Yep.’ He's like, ‘Well, let's go down and talk to Al's Music.’ It was a buddy of his.
“We went down and we got a brand-new P-Bass copy, by Memphis. I got this thing, and I had to pull weeds all summer to pay for it. But then I was instantly in a band, because nobody wanted to play bass back then.”
Claypool and Hammett each fared well in their music careers, but behind the scenes, there was a fallout from their aborted attempts to play in a band together.
“I didn't find out till years later that he was kind of pissed at me for bailing on his thing to go play bass in this other band,” Claypool says.
In 1986, following the passing of Metallica founding bassist Cliff Burton, Claypool auditioned for Metallica. At that time, he'd started laying the foundations for what would become Primus and, with it, his rather atypical slap-and-tap bass style. It was a world away from Burton's approach to the instrument, and that wasn't lost on the band's drummer, Lars Ulrich. He reportedly told Claypool, “You're not really used to this kind of music, are you.”
“I was a carpenter and would have joined any band that paid me,” Claypool told Guitar World. “Kirk called me, but I didn't fit in. I had a blonde Mohawk and baggy skater pants and two different colored tennis shoes — and this was back when they had long hair and tight pants.”
Ultimately, he's glad he never got the gig. In Primus, he ventured into uncharted territory that never would have been explored had he joined a band basking in the success of Master of Puppets.
At the same time, like Van Halen, Claypool set out to do things with his bass guitar that others had not.
“My style in Primus evolved from me consciously trying to play bass and rhythm guitar at the same time,” he explains. “Primus was all about doing something that nobody had ever heard before, and the guitar players I used were textural players. I wasn't really used to playing with regressive players who wanted the bass to stay in the background. I was into Adrian Belew, Robert Fripp, and Andy Summers.”
In related news, Kirk Hammett has given Guitar Player an extensive tour of his gear collection and revealed that he's sat on a mountain of riffs for the follow-up to the band's 2023 album, 72 Seasons.
