Journalist Told Eddie Van Halen Tapping Was a GIMMICK — Then Eddie Handed Him the Guitar S

Eddie Van Halen sat across from a journalist who had decided before the interview started that tapping was a gimmick. He let the journalist make his case, then he handed him the guitar. What happened next neither of them expected. It was a Tuesday afternoon in March 1979 and the Van Halen debut album had been out for 13 months.

In those 13 months it had sold over 2 million copies, produced a track called Eruption that had caused working guitarists around the world to put down their instruments and reconsider their relationship with the electric guitar, and established Eddie Van Halen as the most discussed and most argued about guitarist in rock music.

The argument was not about whether he was impressive, that was not seriously in dispute among people who had actually listened carefully. The argument was about what the impression meant, what category it belonged to, whether the technique he had developed represented a genuine advance in the vocabulary of the instrument, or whether it was something more limited than that.

A spectacular novelty that would age the way novelties age, quickly and with diminishing returns, leaving behind only the memory of a moment when something unusual had happened before the music returned to its established paths. Paul [snorts] Mercer had a position on this question. He was about to discover that the position had a problem.

The journalist’s name was Paul Mercer. He wrote for Guitar World, had been covering rock music for six years, and had developed over those years a set of strongly held opinions about what constituted serious musicianship and what constituted its opposite. Opinions formed not from ignorance, but from genuine engagement with the instrument and its history.

From 12 years of playing and six years of writing about people who played better than he did. He was not dismissive of Eddie Van Halen’s ability. He had listened to the album carefully, more than once, with the focused attention of someone trying to understand a thing rather than simply react to it.

And he recognized that something genuinely unusual was happening on it. What he was skeptical of was the technique specifically. The two-handed tapping that Eruption had brought to public attention and that had subsequently been analyzed, debated, and in some cases condemned in the pages of every guitar publication that existed.

His position, which he had stated in print twice in the preceding year, was this. Tapping was a speed technique, not a musical technique. It allowed a guitarist to play fast things that could not otherwise be played at that speed, which was impressive in the way that any physical feat performed at speed is impressive.

But it produced a specific kind of note, percussive without the full dynamics of conventionally picked playing, that limited its musical application to a narrow range of contexts. Spectacular in those contexts, unnecessary everywhere else, a trick essentially, however brilliantly executed. He had arrived at the interview with his notes, his recorder, and this position intact.

He was prepared to engage with whatever counter-argument Eddie offered. He did not expect the counter-argument to take the form it took. Eddie Van Halen met him at the door of a rehearsal space in Hollywood that the band used between tours. A low-ceilinged room with carpeted walls and equipment stacked along the back, smelling of cable insulation and old coffee, and the specific warmth of a room that has been playing music for a long time.

He was 23 years old, wearing jeans and a t-shirt, and greeted Paul with the easy openness of someone who approaches conversations with journalists the way he approached most things, without particular anxiety and with genuine curiosity about where it would go. They sat down on opposite sides of a folding table.

Paul set up his recorder. Eddie had a guitar across his knees, not plugged in, just there, the way a guitar is present for Eddie Van Halen in the way that a pen is present for a writer. Paul began where he had planned to begin. He asked about the technique, how it had developed, what the musical intention was, how Eddie thought about it in the context of his overall approach to the instrument.

It was a fair question and Eddie answered it fairly, tracing the development from early experiments in his bedroom in Pasadena through the gradual refinement over years of playing in clubs where nobody was watching closely enough to notice or care what his hands were doing. Then Paul said the thing he had come to say.

“The criticism,” he said, framing it carefully, “is that tapping produces a note that’s different from a picked note, less dynamic range, less tonal variation. That it’s inherently limited as a musical tool because it can only do certain things well. What do you say to that?” “That it depends on what you’re trying to do,” Eddie said.

“But doesn’t that apply to any technique?” Paul said. “The question is whether this particular technique expands what’s possible on the instrument or whether it just does one specific thing faster than it could otherwise be done.” “It expands what’s possible,” Eddie said.

He said it without defensiveness, as a simple statement of a position he had thought about. “Can you demonstrate that?” Paul said. “Not Eruption, I’ve heard Eruption. Something that shows the technique doing something that conventional playing can’t do. Something musical, not just fast.” He said this with the particular confidence of someone who has thought through an argument carefully and believes it is sound.

The request was genuine. He was not [snorts] trying to set a trap. He had simply concluded through analysis and reflection that what he was asking for did not exist. And he was curious whether Eddie would be able to produce it or would instead pivot to a different point. Eddie looked at him for a moment.

“You play guitar?” Eddie said. “I’ve played for 12 years,” Paul said. Eddie held out the guitar. Paul looked at it. This was not what he had expected. “You want me to play?” “I want to show you something,” Eddie said. “It’s easier if you feel it than if I explain it.” Paul took the guitar.

He was a competent player, 12 years of serious study, a working knowledge of theory, a technique that was correct in all the ways that 12 years of lessons and practice produce correctness. He held the guitar with the familiarity of someone who spends time with instruments. “Play a scale,” Eddie said. “Any scale. Just go up and down the neck, whatever position you’re comfortable in.

” Paul played a major scale in second position, slowly, cleanly. Nothing remarkable. He was demonstrating competence, not showing off. “Good,” Eddie said. “Now, without moving your left hand from that position, play the same scale one octave higher.” Paul looked at the neck. He thought about it.

The scale one octave higher from that position was not reachable with the left hand alone. It was up the neck, outside the reach of the current hand position, accessible only by shifting. “I’d have to move my hand,” Paul said. “Right,” Eddie said. “With tapping you don’t.” He took the guitar back. He placed his left hand in the same position Paul had used, second position, C major, the same fingering Paul had demonstrated 30 seconds earlier.

Then his right hand came to the neck and in the next 30 seconds he played both octaves of the scale simultaneously, the left hand covering the lower register and the right hand tapping the higher register, the two voices moving together in parallel with a melodic and harmonic clarity that had nothing to do with speed and everything to do with what two hands operating independently on the same instrument were physically capable of producing.

He played it slowly, deliberately, at the tempo of a demonstration rather than a performance, each note given its full value, the two voices distinct and separable, the relationship between them audible as a relationship rather than a blur. It was not impressive in the way that Eruption was impressive.

It was impressive in a different way, in the way that a proof is impressive when it settles a question you thought was unsettled. It was not fast. It was not spectacular. It was, in a very precise sense, something that could not be done any other way, a simultaneous two-voice melodic statement on a single guitar without any electronic processing or studio trickery, produced by a technique that allowed the instrument to function as two independent melodic instruments at once, operated by a single player. Uh Paul Mercer sat across the folding table and watched this and felt the specific sensation of an argument collapsing, not being defeated by a better argument, but encountering a demonstration that made the argument’s premise incorrect. He had said the technique could only do certain things well. He had not been entirely wrong about that. But he had been wrong about which things those were. And the thing he had been wrong about was the

thing that mattered most to his position. “Do that again,” he said, “slowly.” Eddie did it again, slowly, and then a third time with the two voices moving in contrary motion, one going up while the other went down, which produced a counterpoint that Paul’s 12 years of guitar study told him was not supposed to be achievable on a single instrument with a single player without either a dedicated polyphonic instrument or an electronic effect that processed the signal after the fact.

He was hearing neither. He was hearing two independent melodic lines produced simultaneously by two hands on a single unprocessed guitar in a small rehearsal room in Hollywood at a tempo slow enough to follow every note. “That’s two independent melodic lines,” Paul said. He said it the way you say something when you are confirming an observation for your own benefit rather than communicating it to another person, quietly, more to himself than to the room.

Simultaneously, on one guitar. “Yeah,” [snorts] Eddie said. He set the guitar down on his knee and looked at Paul with the patient expression of someone who has made a point and is waiting for it to land at whatever speed it needs to land. It landed. Paul looked at his recorder, which had been running through all of this.

He looked at his notes, which described an argument he had been planning to make. He looked at the guitar in Eddie’s hands. “I need to rewrite the article,” he said. “What were you going to write?” Eddie said. Paul told him honestly. He described the structure he had built, the skeptic’s framework, the trick argument, the supporting perspective from other working guitarists who had reached the same conclusion through their own analysis.

He had a lead that framed the question. He had a middle section that presented the technical objection with specific reference to the dynamic limitations of the tapped note. He had planned to give Eddie space to respond and had expected the response to be interesting, genuine, and ultimately unable to address the core technical point he was making.

He had not planned to revise his conclusion. He said all of this without embarrassment because Paul Mercer was the kind of person who could admit the shape of a mistake once the mistake had been made clear to him, which is a rarer quality than it sounds. Eddie listened to all of it with the expression of someone who has heard the argument many times in various forms from various people and has arrived at a patient relationship with it.

“The thing is,” Eddie said, “I didn’t develop it to be fast. Speed was a side effect. I developed it to reach notes I couldn’t reach.” He turned the guitar over in his hands the way you handle something familiar that you are looking at from a new angle. Most of the criticism is about the speed, but the speed isn’t the point.

Paul looked at his recorder. He thought about the 12 years he had spent learning to play, the 6 years he had spent writing about people who played, the two times he had put the trick argument in print with the confidence of someone who has worked something out carefully. “No,” he said, “I can see that now.

” Paul Mercer’s article ran 6 weeks later in Guitar World. It was not the article he had planned to write. The structure he had brought to the interview, the skeptic’s framework, the trick argument, the supporting quotes from other guitarists who shared the position, was gone. In its place was something he had not planned and had no template for.

A piece that traced the technical development of two-handed tapping, not as a speed technique, but as a range technique, an extension of what the guitar could physically produce, rather than acceleration of what it could already do. He wrote about the demonstration in the rehearsal room without describing it in detail.

The specifics would not have translated to the page in a way that served the argument. He simply said that he had been shown something he had not expected to see, that it had answered the question he had believed couldn’t be answered, and that his previous position had been based on an accurate understanding of part of the technique and a mistaken understanding of the part that mattered.

It was, by his own account in a later interview, the hardest piece he had ever written, not because the writing was difficult, but because the admission it required was difficult, and because he had committed the position in print twice before and now had to explain publicly why he was revising it.

He wrote it anyway because the demonstration had been convincing and because a position that can’t survive contact with evidence is not a position worth defending. The article was reprinted four times in the following 3 years. Guitar World received more reader letters about it than about any other piece published that decade.

Most of the letters came from guitarists who had read Paul’s original skeptic’s position, accepted it, and then encountered the technique in practice in a lesson, in a rehearsal, in their own bedroom with the guitar across their knees, and found their acceptance complicated. The letters said, in various ways, the same thing Paul Mercer had said sitting across a folding table in a Hollywood rehearsal room in March 1979.

“I need to rewrite what I thought I knew.” What changed your mind about something you were certain of? Tell us in the comments.