Eddie Van Halen reportedly has been fighting throat cancer recently, but this didn’t stop legendary filmmaker, actor, and producer Ken Burns in Guitar Player magazine. Eddie Van Halen disease ‘concern’ was revealed last week.
Guitar Player asked, “Perhaps the ultimate player quote in Country Music is when John McEuen says, ‘The same thing that Eddie Van Halen brought to rock and roll shredding guitar, Earl Scruggs brought to the banjo. It was so fast that it excited people. He wasn’t the first person to play with a three-finger roll, but he was the first guy that came to Nashville with it.'”
Burns responded, “I don’t like that Van Halen analogy. I’ll refer to the analogy I made earlier, which is that bluegrass is the equivalent of modernist instinct that took swing music and permitted Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie to create bebop. String-band music was too predictable to contain a talent like Bill Monroe, and what he fashions out of it is Bluegrass, which has the same kind of propulsive virtuosic speed.
It takes a certain player to do it. Earl then comes in on the banjo and represents that same impulse. I’m not sure that I respect Eddie Van Halen that much to put him in the same discussion. I’d rather go back and say that what Dizzy Gillespie is doing on the trumpet and Parker on the sax is the better comparison to what Bill Monroe is doing on the mandolin and Earl on the banjo.”
Michael Anthony revealed a ‘welcome back’ photo to Van Halen fans yesterday. EricGTR responded on the VHLinks.com forums, “This is just some guy’s opinion, for all we know he sits around pounding his pud to jazz all day and is offended by the melodic overtones of a distorted guitar. To me, it’s like the RRHOF, in the movie Beyond the Lighted Stage (about Rush) Billy Corgan basically said that in the end those deciding who is in and who is out are just a few people in a room somewhere, that always stuck with me. And he’s right, who are they to tell us who is and isn’t worthy?
Rush had been filling stadiums since the 70s yet a band who wrote a tune about beating off and drinking got inducted first, no slight to The Beastie Boys but come on. In the end it’s all subjective, I dig Ken Burns for his photo effects, not his musical opinions.” Eddie Van Halen’s son recently unloaded on a Van Halen replacement announcement.
