11 Eddie Red Hot Chili Peppers (2022)

Frusciante’s heartfelt tribute to EVH

In the mid-90s, 80s rock was about as cool as illegally parking in a disabled bay. This was a matter of some consternation to Eddie Van Halen, who complained to Guitar World in 1996 that none of the new rockstars would acknowledge Van Halen’s influence. Eddie would be highly vindicated to see the world of today, then: Pearl Jam’s Mike Mccready regularly covering Eruption in concert, Wolfgang performing Van Halen covers with Nirvana’s drummer, and perhaps biggest of all, the

Red Hot Chili Peppers releasing a song called Eddie.

John Frusciante has admitted he struggled to find the right balance between his own sound and Eddie’s. “I was trying for a while, and I wasn’t happy with anything I was doing,” he told Guitar Player last year. “I was either going too far in the Eddie Van Halen direction, to where it was too busy and there was too much two-hand tapping and it didn’t sound like me, or I was just doing it and it only sounded like me… in a song about Eddie Van Halen.” Finding this balance wasn’t helped by the difficulty of inviting comparisons to hard rock’s greatest ever soloist. John told TG: “You’re basically saying to people, ‘Think about Eddie Van Halen.’ And then when it comes to this long guitar solo at the end, you’re going, ‘Now watch this!’ And I did not like that idea.”

Frusciante considered dropping the solo altogether, but the balance he found is perfect. He admitted his favourite parts of Eddie’s style weren’t always the fast licks, but “playing in a way that feels spontaneous, or when you hear feedback because he recorded his parts in the same room as his amplifier. To this day, those things give me chills.” For the first solo in Eddie, John recorded next to his amp, his Strat humming with feedback the whole way. He taps briefly before moving into a pitch-wheel effect similar to Eddie’s lick on Beat It. By using his favourite Strat, though, the vibe remains undeniably Frusciante. One moment there’s an Eddie-esque pinched harmonic, and the next the feedback shrieks out of control in a distinctly RHCP way.

The outro solo sees Frusciante attacking his whammy bar with abandon, along with more sustaining, harmonic feedback. He wisely keeps his use of tapping limited, creating melodic phrases with bends and taps as Eddie did on Panama. As Eddie did on the early VH albums, John delivered the entire solo in one take: “I stopped being self-conscious about the idea that the song was about Eddie and just did what was natural. We were recording, and I took maybe a 15-minute break. And when I came back in, I just did the whole thing.”

The solo is filled with blazing pentatonic licks, but they’re clearly Frusciante’s pentatonic licks. Wisely steering clear of aping Eddie’s ideas, John instead captures the spirit of Van Halen: wild abandon, a dangerously cranked amp, and a deep love of guitar.