BUMBLEFOOT On Hearing EDDIE VAN HALEN For First Time: ‘From That Point On, How I Looked At Guitar Was Completely Different’

In a new interview with Brutal Planet Magazine, former GUNS N’ ROSES guitarist Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal spoke about how Eddie Van Halen influenced an entirely new generation of rock music, especially hard rock that came out in the 1980s. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “Eddie, I was kind of late to the game. I was 12 years old. It was 1982, and that’s when I first heard VAN HALEN. I remember I was at a band practice, and this kid was there and he said, ‘Do you know how to tap?’ I was, like, ‘What’s tapping?’ I had no idea. And he showed me. And he played me ‘Eruption’. I was, like, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t know a guitar could do that.’ And then he played me ‘Mean Street’. And that just warped my brain. It blew my mind. And from that point on, my outlook, or I should just say how I looked at guitar was completely different. And I think it was for a lot of people. It’s almost like there was guitar pre-Eddie and guitar after Eddie, and they were two different things… Suddenly it’s okay to pepper an album with instrumental guitar songs. And tapping on a nylon string and just his rhythm, just his speed shuffle and his rhythm and the dynamics — just listen to any song. It’s like all the flashy soloing and the work with the bar to just pre-bend a bend. But if you just take any riff, just the groove, all the ghost notes. And he was a drummer. I guess living with his brother and growing up with a drummer definitely must have helped because he was so percussive and rhythmic and dynamic and had such a groove and a pocket to his playing. Just phenomenal. And then on top of that just the strength of his fingers, and bending his first finger and just the phrases. He was one of a kind — he was this anomaly that just where we came from, I don’t know, but I’m glad that we were alive at the same time to experience it.”Elaborating on Eddie Van Halen’s influence on 1980s rock acts, Bumblefoot said: “I would say probably hair bands wouldn’t be what they were if not for Eddie Van Halen. Shred guitar and just virtuosity on guitar and just putting guitar in the forefront as guitar music wouldn’t exist the same way. And he altered the course of rock music. He really did.”Thal also acknowledged Eddie Van Halen’s impact on his own playing, saying: “Hearing VAN HALEN was like being given a permission slip that says, ‘Go do whatever the fuck you want.’ And I started experimenting with guitar design and doing all weird things and ripping the frets off of guitars.”Before Eddie, I was very Angus Young-ish [AC/DC], the way I played,” Bumblefoot said. “After Eddie, it was just more about, “Everything that makes a human being an individual, their own identity, let me find that and bring it out and show it.’ It’s not just about serving the song where it’s, like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna play for the song. I’m playing the song. And here’s a guitar solo.’ No. Now the guitar is its own voice more than just something for the song.”Thal previously talked about Eddie Van Halen in October 2021 while discussing one album that had “a huge impact” on his life: VAN HALEN’s fourth LP, 1981’s “Fair Warning”. He told the “Infectious Groove” podcast: “I was 12 years old, and up to this point, I was sort of like an Angus Young kind of guitar player. I remember I was at a band practice, and there was a kid hanging out there who asked me if I heard VAN HALEN. I hadn’t heard them before, so he played me a recording of the intro to ‘Mean Street’ on the just-released ‘Fair Warning’ album. And just like anybody that heard VAN HALEN for the first time, it blew my mind. I never heard that kind of guitar playing before. Still, to this day, I’ve never heard that kind of guitar playing ever again. That intro was just a sound I had never heard before, and it opened my eyes, my ears, my mind, my spirit, my entire being. It just changed the course of everything and how I looked at playing guitar and making music and the role that guitar has in a song and in music. And from there, I became a different kind of player. I started really experimenting and digging deep to find who I was. It will always be one of my favorite albums. And I am so grateful that I got to be on earth at the same time VAN HALEN was.”Thal also spoke about Eddie Van Halen’s influence on his playing in an October 2020 interview with the WDHA radio station. He stated at the time: “I heard ‘Eruption’ and I was just blown away immediately. It changed my life — it really changed my life, that moment, and I remember it vividly. I got a cassette of ‘Eruption’ and I went home and I spent months learning it. Just little by little and just hearing a couple of notes on a cassette, I would find ’em on the guitar, and a few more, and a few more, until I had the whole thing. Then I opened up the cassette, I unscrewed the four little screws on it, and I opened it up and I flipped the reel the other direction and I put it back together, so now everything was backwards, and then I learned it backwards.”He continued: “I had a cover band when I was 13 years old called PARADOX. And we played — half the set was RUSH and the other half was a bunch of VAN HALEN. [I was] the hugest VAN HALEN fan. I subscribed to Guitar World magazine and would read every Eddie Van Halen interview. And I started innovating — I started taking apart my guitar, then doing all the tricks that he was doing, [like] dipping your pickups in wax to change the amount of feedback, and all kinds of crazy stuff. And that’s what made me start to really experiment and dig deep and try and find my own voice. Because nobody had as much of a personality and identity and unique spirit in their playing that they put out as he did as a guitar player. You can argue that, sure, but if you think about it, everything that he brought to the table — the guitar tone, the way he used a Variac to change the voltage and bring a different sound out of a Marshall amp and he created this new kind of tone that was called the ‘brown sound.’ And just the originality of his style — the way he played, the way he phrased everything, just what his fingers did and all the tapping that he did, like the big ending of ‘Eruption’ and then things like the intro to ‘Little Guitars’, quickly picking one string and hitting on notes on another string, like [there were] two people playing one guitar. There was so many things that he did. And also, the guitar’s role in a song was completely different. It used to be, ‘Okay, here’s your rhythm track, and you overdub the leads.’ But he made it this live personality of just this ripping high-energy entity in a song. And on albums too — he changed the way a guitar’s role was on an album, where you would have breaks in between songs with little unique guitar parts and his long guitar intros and things that you just did not hear on rock albums — at least not like that. He absolutely was the number one game changer. And from that point on, after he was on the radar, everything changed.”Thal joined GUNS N’ ROSES in 2006 and appeared on 2008’s “Chinese Democracy”, an effort which contained music that had been written before he came into the group. The disc took 13 years to make and was only a modest seller, moving just around half a million copies.Thal’s new instrumental album, “Bumblefoot …Returns!”, came out on January 24, 2025. “Bumblefoot …Returns!” arrived 30 years after Bumblefoot’s debut solo instrumental album.Rolling Stone magazine ranked Eddie Van Halen No. 8 in its list of the 100 greatest guitarists.VAN HALEN was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2007.[embedded content]