Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads, two of the most legendary guitarists in rock history, shared status as guitar gods but Randy Rhoads was not impressed by Eddie’s style. In fact, he openly admitted that playing in a flashy, Van Halen-esque way ‘killed him.’
In a rare 1981 interview, Randy Rhoads said that all of this fast and flashy metal music he was doing, wasn’t exactly his cup of tea and that he had other desires for his own work. He hated that he was mimicking Eddie Van Halen’s techniques, calling it ‘just flash.’
Randy discussed the common way of learning through the “imitation and innovation stage” by learning licks. He explained:
“To be honest, I wish I could agree with you. Even now, everything happens so fast in this band that I haven’t had enough time to really think what I want to do. For instance, I do a solo live, and I do a lot of these things that Eddie Van Halen does, and it kills me that I do that. It’s just flash, and it impresses the kids, and I’m trying to make a name as fast as I can. I wish I could take time and come up with something that nobody has done. But unfortunately, it will take me a few years.”
To understand where this tension came from, we need to look at who these two guitarists were and how they changed the game. Eddie Van Halen burst onto the scene in 1978 with Van Halen’s self-titled debut. His groundbreaking two-hand tapping technique and wild, improvisational solos made him a guitar hero overnight. Every young guitarist wanted to sound like Eddie.”
Meanwhile, Randy Rhoads was making a name for himself in the LA club scene with Quiet Riot. But his real breakthrough came in 1980 when he joined Ozzy Osbourne’s solo band, writing iconic riffs for Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman. Unlike Eddie, Randy was classically trained and had a structured, almost academic approach to guitar.
In 2022, in a new interview with Rolling Stone, Ozzy Osbourne discussed the supposed cross-town rivalry Randy Rhoads, the first guitarist Osbourne worked with after Black Sabbath, had with Eddie Van Halen.
Rhoads’s pre-Ozzy band Quiet Riot had been gigging on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, California at the same time as Van Halen. Eddie found commercial success before Rhoads, due in part to the fact that Van Halen landed a record deal years before Quiet Riot did. Osbourne said:
“I heard recently that Eddie said he taught Randy all his licks … he never. To be honest, Randy didn’t have a nice thing to say about Eddie. Maybe they had a falling out or whatever, but they were rivals.”
